Yemen

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Thursday 30th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

It is an honour to follow the Chairman of the International Development Committee, the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), who has spoken powerfully on this matter not only today, but on several previous occasions. His commitment is wholehearted, as is that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), whom I congratulate on securing this debate today and who I know takes a huge personal interest in the matter. I also thank my right hon. Friend the Minister, because I know just how hard he works on this issue, and how close it is to his heart. He brings to his work a passion, which, if not unique, is certainly hugely important in Government.

I wish to use the words of other people in my speech, as I do not know a huge amount about the area. International development is something of great concern to me, as is foreign affairs. I thought that I would write to somebody I know who has much more experience of the situation in Yemen and who has been working with the World Food Programme. He has sent me a couple of emails this week, and I will quote from them and from a couple of other things that he has sent me. He writes:

“From a food perspective, the situation is ‘beyond bleak’. It is a catastrophe beyond anything that I have ever seen before. We are talking of 17 million food insecure people. The World Food Programme is giving food and vouchers to around 6.5 million people across most of the country. Obviously this has been hampered over the last three weeks due to the blockade. Thankfully, that horror is now over and ships are docking. Remember that even pre-crisis Yemen was almost entirely dependent on food imports.”

He goes on:

“The blockade only served to make food a weapon of war. The World Food Programme expects that 3 million of the 17 million will be pushed into a deeper level of food insecurity as a result of the blockade. Market availability is acceptable but remains inaccessible due to inflation”—

hence the high prices.

He goes on:

“Cholera I believe is stabilising but still at around 800,000 people. It is the largest outbreak in modern history and utterly shameful.”

I will not go into the statistics, because the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby has done so already.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Like the hon. Gentleman, I have had letters from constituents voicing grave concerns about the situation in Yemen, particularly the blockade, food shortages and lack of medical supplies, so I agree wholeheartedly that something has to be done.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. There is a huge lack of critical medical supplies, including vaccines and treatments to control the spread of cholera, and now of course that deadly disease, diphtheria.

I come to the second of my quotations from an eyewitness—Mark Lowcock, the emergency relief co-ordinator, whom the Chairman of the International Development Committee, I and several other colleagues met a couple of weeks ago. After a visit earlier this month, he said:

“Everywhere I went, I saw roads, bridges, factories, hotels, and houses that had been destroyed by bombing or shelling… I visited hospitals… Both had barely any electricity or water… I met seven-year-old Nora. She weighs 11 kg – the average weight for a two-year-old, not a seven-year-old. Dr. Khaled, the manager of Al Thawra hospital, where she is being treated, said staff there regularly turn away gravely ill malnourished children because they cannot accommodate them.”

There is, of course, a solution. I believe that a political solution is the only way forward: a lifting of the blockade, a cessation of hostilities. Without that, we will indeed face the worst humanitarian disaster in decades. The numbers sometimes seem almost too vast. There are other consequences as well.

I will quote again, finally, from the OCHA report, about a widow and mother of six—five daughters and a son—who

“had to abandon her home in….At Taiziah district in Taizz governorate, fleeing airstrikes and fighting in the area. The family left their village with only the clothes they were wearing, and settled in a nearby, somewhat more peaceful village. Uloom rented a small shop, but the business is struggling and cannot sustain the family’s basic needs such as food, water and medicines. To ease the burden, Uloom decided to marry off her three young daughters. ‘I didn’t have money and couldn’t feed all of the children’, she said. ‘I didn’t want to marry off my daughters so young, but I couldn’t stand them crying and starving. I regret what I did very much’”.

That is one of the desperate individual human consequences of what we are seeing now.

Yesterday, I had the honour of chairing in Speaker’s House a meeting at which we discussed the tremendous progress made on countering malaria over the last 17 years. Millions of lives, including children’s lives, have been saved. Here we have an entirely preventable disaster looming. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives, perhaps even more, mainly of children and women, are at risk. We have the opportunity to act globally. I ask that the coalition, the Government of Saudi Arabia and their allies lift the blockade immediately to ensure that those lives can be saved. I thank the Prime Minister for what she said yesterday and today, and I urge the Government to continue in their efforts, day in, day out, until the crisis is resolved.