G8 Summit

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I, too, am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, for securing this important and timely debate. I will concentrate on the opportunities that the G8 summit offers for increased transparency through taxation and other means. Our chairmanship of the G8 is an opportunity to look at land rights, particularly for smallholders. I have been grateful for briefing meetings from the IF campaign, which has consistently raised these issues. I begin by praising the Government for the example they have set to the leaders of the developed world in their commitment to funding international development aid amounting to 0.7% of annual national income. Their example at a time of global recession must be a powerful factor in sustaining efforts which have proved so successful in saving the lives of children in the developing world.

The importance of strengthening transparency was brought home to me by visits to a sub-Saharan state made with other parliamentarians and funded by UNICEF, Save the Children and Tearfund. Our first two visits were made during the civil war of that nation. The country was blessed, or cursed, with plentiful supplies of diamonds and oil. We saw a nation where an elite of 100 families benefited from much of the vast mineral wealth while the multitude lived in squalor. The charity Transparency International drew attention in particular to the way that the Government of that country failed to share details of the deals they made with oil companies for extraction payments. British Petroleum decided to take a principled position and to make public information about payments, at some cost to its own business. My noble friend Lord Browne of Madingley was chief executive of BP at the time.

The wealth of the country went towards the healthcare of the 100 families, the education of their children in the United States and the United Kingdom, arms for the civil war, and other such areas. Meanwhile, in a large internally displaced people’s camp in the capital of that country, families had no water source and had to pay for the privilege of using tankers. This camp had been in existence for several years and simply been ignored by the authorities.

We saw homes built among giant dumps of rubbish and children playing among the refuse. We spoke to AIDS patients with no prospect of treatment. We heard of people being arbitrarily displaced from one area of the capital to make way for new, profitable developments. We also met the Minister for Health, a Mr De Almeida, a member of the 100 families, who had initiated the first national immunisation programme for children—no mean feat, given the continuing war and the lack of electricity and apparatus to chill the vaccines. So there were members of the Government who cared for the people.

We learnt that this nation was just one of many developing nations in which oil and diamond wealth allowed elites not to consult the people or even bother with their interests because they had no need of the taxes that their people might provide—no need for your taxes, no need for your votes.

I hope that I may encourage the Minister and his colleagues to push hard on the matter of tax reform and to improve transparency. Robust international agreement on these matters would reduce the power of political elites to drain the wealth of the nation for themselves, strengthen the arms of those politicians who wish to act in the interests of the people and do much to address poverty and hunger in the developing world.

We also met a women’s co-operative operating in the capital. The women had joined together to purchase food at better prices for themselves and their families. Through the work of the IF campaign, we have learnt of the importance of smallholders in the developing world in feeding the people, and I understand that most of those smallholders will be women.

I hope that the Government will also be looking for international agreements to strengthen the land rights of smallholders, thereby addressing the continuing scourge of hunger and malnutrition. In our briefings, we heard from Ricardo, a young man from a remote region of Tanzania. He was raised, as best she could, by his grandmother. He experienced malnutrition and there were no hospitals or services nearby to help to remedy the undernourishment. He suffered from kwashiorkor and other diseases related to malnourishment. Starved children suffer impairments that hinder their learning and, later, limit their capacity to work. We really need to do more to prevent hunger, and international treaties on land rights would be a good step in this direction.

I look forward to the Minister’s response. I ask him in particular how the Government will use their presidency of the G8 to push for greater transparency in land acquisitions, to ensure that corrupt deals are stopped and that people have the information that they need to hold Governments and companies to account. I also ask him whether the Government will be supporting greater transparency from Governments in developing nations so that citizens in those countries can hold their Governments to account for the money that they spend. I apologise for not giving him notice of those questions, and if he would write to me and put a copy in the Library, that would be very helpful.