International Aid

Countess of Mar Excerpts

Monday 29th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, what my noble friend refers to is an agreement with the previous Government under the Lisbon treaty. We did not agree with that, but unfortunately it is now in place and we will need to make it work. We will need to make sure that controls are in place. However, spending through the EU has its own management systems—the Internal Audit Service, the European Court of Auditors and the independent European Anti-Fraud Office.

[The Countess of Mar]

My Lords, does the noble Baroness agree that in African countries and other third-world countries agriculture is the primary source of income for a vast majority of their populations? What proportion of DfID’s spending goes directly on agricultural projects?

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, the noble Countess is right. Some 75 per cent of the developing world’s poor—2 billion people—live in rural areas. The majority depend on agriculture to provide jobs and incomes. Agriculture has a key role to play in helping to meet the millennium development goal of halving the proportion of people in the world suffering from extreme poverty and hunger. Further allocations to agricultural programmes in each country will be determined after the bilateral reviews.