Amazon Deforestation

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Monday 7th October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

It is always a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mrs Moon. I do not think it will surprise anyone that I am not going to adopt the same conciliatory tone as the hon. Member for Fylde (Mark Menzies). The situation we face is far too serious to adopt such an approach. As we heard, the Amazon is being wilfully destroyed. It remains the biggest rainforest in the world and a vital check on climate change. The seriousness of the situation cannot be overestimated and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) said, there are people gathered outside this building who want us to take it seriously.

I make no apologies for referring to a debate I led in this Chamber in March 2009 about the impact of livestock on the environment. I read my speech back and I actually think it was rather good, but the Minister’s response was appalling; she went on at some length about how she really liked her mum’s shepherd’s pie. I would like to think we have made progress since then, but although we are talking about the issue more, we certainly have not made as much progress as I hoped we would back then.

Extensive cattle ranching is the primary culprit for deforestation in virtually every Amazon country. It accounts for 80% of current deforestation and is responsible for the release of 340 million tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere every year. That is equivalent to 3.4% of current global emissions. The Brazilian Amazon is home to approximately 200 million head of cattle and is the largest exporter in the world, supplying around a quarter of the global market.

The impact of cattle ranching and deforestation was first publicised by conservationists in the early 1980s—they coined the phrase “the hamburger connection”—but it was fairly small business back then. Government incentives, and improvements in the road and electricity networks and in meat processing facilities, spurred the industry on. Then, with the devaluation of the currency and much of Brazil’s herd being declared free of foot and mouth disease, exports exploded, which led to the current deforestation situation.

Typically, deforestation starts not with animal agriculture but when roads are cut through the forest to open it up for logging and mining. Once the forest along the road has been cleared, commercial or subsistence farmers move in and start growing crops. However, forest soils are too nutrient-poor and fragile to sustain crops for long, so after two or three years, when the soil is depleted, crop yields fall and farmers let the grass grow and move on. That is when the ranchers move in. Little investment is needed to start raising cattle on cheap or abandoned land where grass is already growing, and the returns can be high, at least for a while. However, after five to 10 years, over-grazing and nutrient loss turn rainforest land that was once filled with biodiversity into an eroded wasteland, so ranchers have to look for somewhere else to move on to.

As we heard, deforestation causes irreversible environmental damage if it is not checked in time. The clearing and burning of forests releases billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Scientists estimate that deforestation causes roughly a quarter of all human-induced carbon emissions, and then there is the loss of biodiversity. I have not been to Brazil, but I have been to countries such as Belize; the extent to which the rainforest remains undiscovered and unexplored is amazing. There is so much more to be discovered. Forests are home to more than 13 million distinct species, representing more than two thirds of the world’s plants and animals. Obviously, if their habitats are destroyed, many will be at risk of extinction. When the trees are gone, the soil becomes depleted, which often leads to water pollution as the soil gets washed away. That is something for which we in this country must accept responsibility.

[James Gray]

The hon. Lady is making an extremely powerful speech, with which I entirely agree. What she says about the catastrophe in the rainforest, which I have visited many times, is absolutely true. Surely, however, the point of the debate is not so much to say how awful it all is but to ask what we can do about it. The petitioners request trade sanctions against Brazil. The question is how efficacious that would be in persuading the current Government of Brazil to go back to what the Government there were doing only a year ago.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I will get to what I think needs to be done. Sanctions could play a part, but change in consumption habits could play a much bigger part, and that is something we each have some control over.

In their recent “Risky Business” report, WWF and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds estimate that more than 40% of the UK’s overseas land footprint—nearly 6 million hectares—is in countries that are at high or very high risk of deforestation and of having weak governance and poor labour standards. The more I read about it, the more I see the links between this trade and modern slavery and human rights abuses, with people being displaced from their land, and so on; they are all part and parcel of the same thing.

WWF and the RSPB looked at seven key agricultural commodities imported into the UK: beef and leather, cocoa, palm oil, pulp and paper, rubber, soy, and timber. Of those, beef and leather account for by far the largest proportion of our land footprint overseas, despite the fact that we produce almost 80% of our own beef in the UK and import a lot from Ireland. However, the actual picture is much worse, because we must look at animal feed, too. In the EU, around 90% of soy imports are for livestock feed, so it is not just a case of beef from Argentina or Brazil being bad and British beef being fine, as I often hear people try to argue. Yes, there is a case for pasture-fed livestock—I chair the all-party parliamentary group on agroecology for sustainable food and farming, of which the Pasture-Fed Livestock Association is an active member—but that is not what we are talking about.

Every year, the UK consumes around 3.3 million tonnes of soy, more than 75% of which is related to meat consumption, either as imported animal feed or as soy embedded in imported meat products. We must also consider the feed for chickens that lay eggs, and the feed for dairy herds, as well as soya bean oil, which is the second most widely used vegetable oil after palm oil. This has happened to me many times, but I remember the former farming Minister, Jim Paice, trying to tell me that that was all down to more people eating veggie burgers. I assure people that is not the case. That figure may have gone up in recent years, but I think it is still well below 5%—but yes, it is all the vegetarians’ and vegans’ fault, as usual.

It is interesting to compare what has happened with soy bean oil and palm oil. We import nearly three times as much soy bean oil as palm oil, yet it is palm oil that has tended to receive the attention of environmentalists, probably because of the orangutans. Some 21% of global palm oil production is now certified, whereas soy certified by the Round Table on Responsible Soy or ProTerra accounts for only about 2% of global production.

[Wera Hobhouse]

It is true that we cannot be sanctimonious or hypocritical and tell developing countries what to do, given that we deforested our country in the past, but we now know a lot more about the consequences. The hon. Lady makes a powerful point. Should not we all adopt a responsible, conscious approach to consumption, and promote that politically, rather than saying, “We don’t really need to do anything about it, and it’s not about sanctions”? We must all understand that we are responsible, too.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I think so. There have been some interesting global initiatives or attempts at global initiatives. When I was a shadow Minister in the foreign affairs team, I remember meeting representatives from Ecuador. Yasuni national park in Ecuador is almost as biologically diverse and as amazing as the Galapagos Islands, but oil has been discovered there. The representatives wanted to raise funds from across the world by saying to people, “We are a poor country. We need to exploit our natural resources. We need to get the finances in. If you don’t want us to do that and you think that is appalling, then give us some money not to do it.” I understand that was not a successful approach; they did not raise any money and they ended up having to exploit the natural resources.

The Seychelles issued an ocean bond, saying it would protect its marine areas and not overfish if people gave it money to do that. Although there are wealthy people in the Seychelles, there is a lot of poverty too. That blue bond was successful; we need to look at such initiatives, because it is not just about sanctions, but about working together. As the hon. Lady mentioned, I think it is the wrong approach for us to say, “You cannot exploit what you have got,” when we have exploited everything we have got, and we have been to many other countries and exploited what they have as well, over the centuries.”

Some 77% of UK soy imports come from the high-risk countries of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. In its recent report “Money to Burn”, the NGO Global Witness identified the financial institutions behind six key agribusiness companies involved in deforesting climate-critical forests in Brazil, the Congo basin and New Guinea. It revealed that UK-based financial institutions were the second biggest source of financing, providing $6.5 billion, so the UK has a huge responsibility to take action to tackle the source of financing for deforestation. I urge Members to read the report, which is powerful. We must have due diligence regulation across sectors and throughout the supply chain, so people know what their money is being invested in. That would send an important message to businesses, and companies would change the way they operate.

In 2009 I held a debate in this Chamber that was prompted in part by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s report “Livestock’s Long Shadow”, which was released in 2006. It made a compelling case for action to tackle the consequences for the climate and for our natural environment of the ever more industrialised and intensive livestock industry. As I said in that debate, growing animal feed is a supremely inefficient use of land; it takes around 8 kg of grain to produce 1 kg of beef, and there is a huge water footprint, too. It takes almost 21 square metres of land to produce 1 kg of beef, compared with 0.3 square metres to produce 1 kg of vegetables.

Since then, numerous other highly authoritative reports have made the same arguments. They make the headlines and most people agree that something needs to be done, and yet we seem to be no closer to action, apart from people making their own decisions about what they consume.

I finish by expressing my disappointment at the recent report from the Committee on Climate Change on how we reach net zero; it was, frankly, pathetic. At the launch, the chair of the committee said in his opening speech that his least favourite environmentalists were those who expected people to be cold in their homes or to eat disgusting food. I wondered what he meant by disgusting food, but I can guess. This was from the man who fed his daughter, Cordelia, a hamburger at the height of the BSE crisis; I think we know where he is coming from. We were then told that because people could not be expected to eat disgusting food, the recommendation of the Committee on Climate Change was for only a 20% reduction in red meat consumption, which was to be replaced primarily with pork, bacon and poultry rather than plant-based meals.

The Committee on Climate Change was meant to be looking at how deliverable net zero was, primarily from an economic point of view; for example, it was looking at whether we could afford to make the transition to electric vehicles. It also looked at behavioural change and how palatable that would be to the general public. I gather that the behavioural scientist on the committee specialises in shifts in transport, rather than diet, but it took his word on what people would tolerate.

I refer again to the people outside the building today, to people I know and to the people who have contacted me, particularly younger people. I think people are willing to play their part and want to know about the damage their consumption habits cause. It is not just a question of them being able to exercise a choice; the market needs to respond. We need more transparency, so people are educated to make choices, and we need the Government to step in to ensure people are in a position to make those choices.

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[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

It is very nice to see you in the Chair, Sir Roger. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) on his excellent and comprehensive introduction to the debate.

I am grateful to everyone who initiated and signed the petition, because it relates to a crucial problem for us all. As colleagues have said, it is appropriate that we are debating it while Extinction Rebellion is demonstrating outside. I find it incredible that some people seem to think that the big problem is that Westminster bridge is blocked. The big problem is that the Amazon has been on fire! We need to get these things in proportion.

The Amazon fires over the summer were not accidental or natural. They were lit deliberately, and they destroyed 7,000 square miles of forest. The situation is particularly worrying because once a large amount of forest is destroyed, we will get feedback mechanisms and we will not be able to control what goes on. Avoiding such a feedback mechanism here is one of the most important things that we must do, because every year the Amazon rainforest absorbs a quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted across the whole world. That tells us that fires in the Amazon are not a Brazilian problem or a Latin American problem; they are our problem and everybody’s problem, and we need to own the problem and tackle it in that spirit.

I am disappointed with the Government’s tip-toeing approach, which suggests to me that they do not really understand the seriousness of the problem. I do not know why Government Ministers do not understand it; my constituents do. Di Murphy, who has set up Bishop Auckland Climate Action, understands it. Even 10-year-old Meredith Lambert Sams, who invited me to her primary school last week, understands it.

I went to Cotherstone Primary School on Friday and I was asked a lot of questions by the extremely well-informed children. The most worrying question came from a boy who said to me, “What I don’t understand is why proper action hasn’t been taken already.” I have to say that I was quite stumped by that, because it is not as if we have not known about this situation for 10 years, 20 years or 50 years. How bad does it have to get before we take proper action? There is absolutely no longer any room for complacency whatsoever. We only have 12 years now, and we have to sort this out.

We are really concerned about the Amazon because of the impact it has on the climate, and that is the priority. However, I will just remind people of the Amazon’s biodiversity, because we do not inhabit this globe alone; we do so alongside other species. The Amazon is one of the Earth’s last refuges for jaguars, harpy eagles, pink dolphins, two-toed sloths, pygmy marmosets, saddleback and emperor tamarins, and Goeldi’s monkeys. There are also thousands of birds, butterflies and other insects there. When we think about looking after the planet, we have to do so not only for ourselves, but for all the marvellous range of biodiversity that currently exists.

I am disappointed that the hon. Member for Fylde (Mark Menzies) has left the Chamber. He said that he was very concerned and that we should not implement trade sanctions, because we should have a more collaborative approach with the indigenous people. I think he has not read the petition, which says:

“Indigenous people have called for the EU to impose trade sanctions on Brazil to halt the deforestation because they fear genocide.”

The indigenous people of the Amazon have been living there in a sustainable way for generations. the hon. Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) is right that with modern science we can use the resources of the Amazon in new and creative ways, particularly in medicine. However, we need to be very careful about behaving as if we are the experts and the indigenous people do not know what they are doing, because it is clear that their way of life does not destroy the Amazon in the way that ours does.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) made an excellent speech about the exploitation of forests and the urgent need for us to cut our meat consumption. When she and I first discussed the issue three years ago, I thought she was being a bit zany, but I have been totally persuaded that she has a strong case and that we need to think about this issue and act on it, both as individuals and as a nation. We need to move from talking about the situation to taking action, and some actions are particularly pertinent in this context.

The petition calls for trade sanctions, and we have had quite a lot of debate about whether we need to collaborate or have trade sanctions. I am not sure that that is necessarily a choice. Let us look at a connected area of public policy. Of course we put money into universities to finance research and development, but we also have laws to protect people’s intellectual property. We can have a “both/and” approach. We can collaborate, but we need to have sanctions for when things go wrong.

As my hon. Friend did, I will refer to a debate that I initiated a few years ago and a speech that I made at that time. We had a debate before the Paris summit; it was a Backbench Business Committee debate in the main Chamber. Everybody was saying, “Oh, it’s all going to be absolutely marvellous, because everybody’s going to turn up and they will volunteer their contributions, and that’s the way to get everybody on board, and it will all be absolutely marvellous.” I stood up and said—I am afraid that people thought I was zany then—“This is no good, because these commitments are not legally binding, and if they’re not legally binding how can we be confident that we are going to meet the targets that we have to meet? The science is not going to change, and we know how much carbon we must not burn. Therefore, we need to make commitments that will achieve the scientific objective, and they need to be legally binding.” Legally binding commitments mean that there is a penalty for countries that do not abide by them.

We should think about other areas of international law where there are penalties for countries that do not fulfil their obligations, and we should borrow our experience from other areas of international law and—“adapt” is not the right word—use them in the area of the environment. I will give an example. When Russia invaded Ukraine, we imposed sanctions. We were appalled by that invasion, and we thought it was absolutely dreadful. However, when Canada left Kyoto, we took no action whatsoever. Now Bolsonaro is behaving in an utterly irresponsible way, as hon. Members have set out, but we are proposing to take no action. That is not serious, and we need to get serious about this issue. We need to have legally binding international agreements.

One of my asks of the Minister today is this: before Ministers go to Chile for the next round of international negotiations, and while they are considering what the format and structure should be, we need to have a proper and clear legal base. We need to move away from voluntaryism and towards legally binding treaties.

As colleagues have already said, the danger in the Mercosur deal is that if we cut tariffs on beef, we incentivise the destruction of the rainforest by Brazil and the other Latin American countries, so that we become complicit in that destruction. I raised this issue with the Minister in the main Chamber at Foreign Office questions. He said that he did not think I was right about this issue, because he thought that cutting tariffs was good for the poorest people, including farmers on the lowest incomes, in Brazil. I am afraid I do not believe that argument, because we see in this petition that the indigenous people—they are the poorest people in Brazil—want tougher action. We have also seen that with large-scale ranching, large agribusinesses and multinational companies make the profits. The Minister really needs to rethink that argument. We need to line up with France, Ireland and other countries, and say no. A trade deal must be done on the basis that it is consistent with Brazil’s—

[Kerry McCarthy]

My hon. Friend is making a great and passionate speech. According to figures I have seen from the International Labour Organisation, some 62% of slave labour in Brazil is employed in livestock farming-related businesses. As she says, it is not the indigenous people who are benefiting from the trade, and people are being grossly exploited at its heart.

[Helen Goodman]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and she brings me on to my next action. The fact of the matter is—we see this all over the world—that environmental destruction and human rights abuses are often going on in the same places at the same time, all jumbled up. We are seeing that here, too. That is one reason why I hope the Government will take a more sympathetic view than they do currently to the ongoing negotiations in Geneva on the UN binding treaty on transnational corporations and human rights. That treaty would put obligations on transnational corporations to respect human rights, and we could extend that to respecting environmental rights, too.

The No. 1 priority is not to sign a trade deal that will incentivise further destruction of the rainforest, but there are a range of things that the Minister could do. We are discussing the issue here, and the Pope is holding an Amazon synod in Rome. I was struck by what he said in opening the meeting on Saturday; it was appropriate and it set the problem in its context. In Rome, he has groups representing 400 indigenous communities alongside him. He said that we have to stop

“the greed of new forms of colonialism.”

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[Christopher Pincher]

I do not doubt for a moment the sincerity of the people out on the streets of London campaigning about the impact of climate change, but it is better for us to work with economies such as Brazil’s, the ninth largest economy in the world, than to work against them in order to achieve the objectives that we all want, which is to see carbon emissions reduced, the rainforest restored and the poorest people get richer.

The United Kingdom is leading the world in the fight against rising temperatures, reducing our emissions by over 40% since 1990 and legislating for net zero emissions by 2050. We were one of the first major economies to do so. Since 1990, our economy has grown by 66%, so I disagree with those who suggest that there is a conflict between better trade, growth in economies and environmental concerns and calls for action.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Can I ask the Minister how this works in terms of co-operation between Government Departments? The other day in the Chamber, I asked the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy about the things I highlighted in my speech today and she basically said it was an issue for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and not anything to do with her. I said, “It is because it is about climate change and that is your brief.” We also hear reports of Ministers in the Department for International Trade lobbying on behalf of BP at meetings in Brazil. On the other hand, we talk about reducing our fossil fuel use in this country, so there does not seem to be much joined-up working.

[Christopher Pincher]

That charge can be levelled at Governments of all stripes down the ages. Government Departments work together to try to achieve the right result in this arena. For example, BEIS officials are embedded in the COP 25 plan, and in that meeting, to ensure that it is handed over to us smoothly at COP 26, with objectives that can be taken up in the Italian-British conference of the parties.

As we have all alluded to, we cannot tackle this threat to our very existence on our own. Only through international co-operation can we protect our precious planet, and protecting forests is essential if we are to meet our global climate change goals. The Inter- governmental Panel on Climate Change special report on global warming makes it clear that the preservation, restoration and sustainable management of forests is critical for limiting global temperature rises to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.

Our global leadership on climate change helped us to win our bid to host COP 26 next year. We will make telling progress towards carbon-neutral global growth only if we act together as a global community. That means that we need to have all the countries in the Amazon onside. Brazil is particularly important on climate change and deforestation, and has a critical role to play as a partner. We must work together to find solutions, which is why we have an ongoing dialogue with Brazil on these issues at ministerial and official level.

The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs met last week with Brazil’s Environment Minister, Ricardo Salles, and she stressed the importance of efforts to halt deforestation. The Foreign Secretary has spoken to the Brazilian Foreign Minister, and I have met the Brazilian ambassador, Mr Arruda. We are committed to working with Brazil and other Amazon countries to tackle climate change and deforestation.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Zac Goldsmith]

I thank my hon. Friend for his kind words. He is exactly right to say that we will have no hope at all of tackling poverty globally if we do not take a bigger interest in preventing climate change and the annihilation of the natural world that we have seen in recent decades. The people on the frontline in relation to nature destruction are the world’s poorest people. They are the people who depend most directly on the natural world, so he is absolutely right.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

10. I welcome the Minister to his post. I am sure he will agree that the food and farming system has a major impact on climate change in developing countries, from deforestation to water use and mountains of food waste, but that is not really talked about in DFID terms except for some small livestock programmes. Can he assure me that it will be at the top of his agenda as a Minister in this Department?

[Zac Goldsmith]

As we heard from the Secretary of State in his first answer, we have committed serious sums of money to enabling smallholders around the world to adapt to climate change. We have also launched an initiative at the UN called the Just Rural Transition, which is about shifting the way subsidies are spent around the world on land use, away from unsustainable use towards sustainable use, just as we are doing in this country. The OECD tells us that the 50 top food-producing nations spend €700 billion a year subsidising land use, on the whole very badly. If we can shift even a fraction of that, it will have a much bigger impact than all the world’s aid departments put together.

Cyclone Idai

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Wednesday 20th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Harriett Baldwin]

This allows me to pay tribute to the Scotland-Malawi partnership, demonstrated by the statistic that 43% of people in Scotland know someone who is, or are themselves, part of links between Scotland and Malawi. I know that civil society across Scotland will be engaging both with these local partnerships but also more widely through the appeal. I thank everyone in Scotland for their generosity towards this cause.

The hon. Gentleman asked specifically about the work that we will be doing on resilience, which is also for the United Nations. Resilience takes many forms, but one of the most important is the crops that are sown, the ways in which they are sown and the way that the land is used. That is an important part of the work that we are doing—helping farmers to make use of the land in a way that gives them the best resilience to these kinds of climate shocks.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

As has been mentioned, Bristol’s links with the fellow port city of Beira go back a long way—in fact, back to the days of anti-apartheid campaigning when we were officially twinned. There is already a fundraising effort going on in Bristol to try to support people in Beira, but how can we best work with DFID to make sure that we can constructively share information and get the help to the people who most need it?

[Harriett Baldwin]

I thank the people of Bristol. When I was in Beira recently, I met its mayor, who personally asked me to thank everyone in Bristol for all that they do through that very strong partnership between two world-class port cities. I mentioned the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal. I also mentioned, in my response to the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), that I thought it would be constructive to hold a meeting for colleagues to update them. I will take forward that suggestion and invite the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) to join us.

The Modern Commonwealth: Opportunities and Challenges

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I want to focus today on a matter that has already been mentioned: the adoption at CHOGM last year of the Commonwealth blue charter. Some Commonwealth countries are among those most affected by our failure to tackle what we should now call the climate emergency. We have heard of droughts in the Caribbean, Australia and many parts of Africa, sea level rises in Bangladesh causing flooding, loss of livelihoods, and what could become the climate migration of more than 20 million displaced people.

In 2013 it was reported that in Tanzania, Mount Kilimanjaro’s shrinking northern glaciers, which are thought to be 10,000 years old, could disappear by 2030. In fact forecasts show that both Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro could be without ice within a decade. But I want to talk today mostly about the Commonwealth’s small island states, many of which are already vulnerable on a number of fronts—their size, their remoteness, and their narrow resource and export base. They are now increasingly being affected by climate change and extreme weather events.

In the Caribbean, islands are experiencing more intense hurricanes, coastal erosion and rising sea levels, and their fisheries are also highly vulnerable to climate change. In Kiribati in the Pacific the shorelines are being pounded away by high tides: whole villages are having to be relocated, food crops are being destroyed, and freshwater supplies are contaminated by sea water.

In the Indian ocean, around the Seychelles and Mauritius much of the coral reef has been lost to bleaching. If sea levels rise by 1 metre, the Maldives, which was in the Commonwealth until a few years ago and may yet return, will disappear entirely.

Climate change is not the only environmental threat. There has been a very welcome rise in public and political awareness of plastic pollution in recent years. Richard Branson recently led a dive expedition to the bottom of the beautiful Blue Hole in Belize, which is 400 feet deep, and found plastic bottles. In his blog he wrote that

“the real monsters facing the ocean are climate change—and plastic. Sadly, we saw plastic bottles at the bottom of the hole, which is a real scourge of the ocean. We’ve all got to get rid of single-use plastic.”

I have dived in Belize and it remains the most beautiful place that I have dived. I have not been to the bottom of the Blue Hole but I can pay testament to just how upsetting it is to see man-made pollution wrecking the marine environment.

Other threats the oceans face include ocean acidification, which has been described as the “evil twin” of global warming, and unsustainable fishing, whether over-fishing or environmentally damaging pulse fishing and bottom trawling. There is also a real issue with waste disposal in small island states. They do not have space for landfill, so where do they put the rubbish? With the ban from China, and with Malaysia now refusing to take waste, including that from the UK, that issue has become an ever more pressing problem.

For many of these small island states, there is a conflict between immediate economic needs and environmental protection. In the Seychelles, for example, the fisheries sector is the second largest industry after tourism, and 95% of its exports are fish products such as canned tuna. The Seychelles also have amazing biodiversity, especially round Aldabra, the world’s second largest coral atoll. Six plant studies students from Oxford University have just gone out there, along with six Seychellois students, to do a three to five-week plastic clean-up project, and I am looking forward to hearing what they report back.

In a recent debt-for-nature deal with a US conservation group, $21 million of Seychelles debt was written off in return for the island nation committing to designating 30% of its waters as marine protected areas. That sounds like a great initiative. With the help of the World Bank, the Seychelles have also raised $15 million through the world’s first sovereign blue bond, which is designed to support sustainable marine and fisheries initiatives. Again, these are examples of the positive things that are happening to help the small island states, but we need to move faster.

It is quite depressing to look back at past efforts to address these issues. In 1994, the first meeting of the small island developing states on sustainable development was held in Barbados, and it resulted in a 14-point programme of action. The first listed priority area was climate change and sea level rise, followed by natural and environmental disasters, management of waste, coastal and marine resources, freshwater resources and more, but that was 25 years ago, and it does not feel as though much progress has been made since then—certainly not enough.

It was 10 years ago, before the Copenhagen climate summit, that the then President of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, held an underwater Cabinet meeting to highlight the impact of rising sea levels. He warned that with a 2° rise in temperatures, his country would be “on death row”, yet it is only in the past year or so that it is becoming accepted that limiting temperature rises to 2° would not be sufficient to address the climate emergency, and that 1.5° should be the target.

I hope that the discussions at CHOGM 2018 will represent a much greater step forward. It was acknowledged at CHOGM that temperature and sea level rises, and other aspects of climate change, posed a significant risk to many of the Commonwealth’s most vulnerable member countries, and that climate change could push an additional 100 million people into poverty by 2030. There was renewed support for a target well below 2°, along with support for innovative financing solutions including disaster risk insurance, which is important for farmers affected by climate change. It was agreed to establish action groups on ocean issues led by Commonwealth member countries, and for the secretariat to take forward the Commonwealth blue charter. The UK is the chair of CHOGM until Rwanda takes over in two years’ time, and I really hope that we will be in the forefront of pushing this forward.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Tuesday 26th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)]

10. What steps he is taking to promote human rights globally.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

17. What diplomatic steps his Department is taking to promote and support human rights internationally.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Field]

The hon. Lady is right to point out that the situation is absolutely heartbreaking. I am the father of an 11-year-old son, and boys of roughly that age are fighting in parts of the world such as Yemen. I reassure her that my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary will raise the matter when he is in Saudi Arabia in the days ahead.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Human rights defenders around the world are under attack. They are censored, imprisoned and sometimes even murdered for speaking out, and women who speak out in countries such as Saudi Arabia are particularly vulnerable. Does the Minister agree that we need to do more to support the women around the world who are brave enough to stand up for what they believe in?

[Mark Field]

The hon. Lady is right that that is a major issue. My right hon. Friend the Minister for the Middle East raised the matter when he was in the region last week and will continue to do so.

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Monday 4th June 2018 Ministerial Corrections

The following is an extract from an Urgent Question on Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe on 22 May 2018.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Last year, I met Redress, which has been mentioned already, to discuss not just this case but that of Andy Tsege. It published a report in January saying that more than 100 British citizens a year were reporting being mistreated in jails abroad and not being provided with the humanitarian or consular assistance that the British Government should be giving them. It also says that there is inconsistency in the support provided, particularly for dual nationals. What can the Minister do to assure us that any British national, whether a dual national or not, will receive the same consular support if they find themselves in that position?

[Alistair Burt]

They are certainly offered all the same support, but the blunt fact is that not all states treat dual nationals the same: some recognise dual nationality and allow access to the UK authorities, others do not accept it and treat the dual national solely as a national of their own state. In those circumstances, they do not believe they are required to give access. I can assure the hon. Lady, however, that in each and every case the UK Government make exactly the same representations seeking access, because we believe that dual nationality means what it says: dual nationality, not sole nationality.

[Official Report, 22 May 2018, Vol. 641, c. 732.]

Letter of correction from Alistair Burt.

An error has been identified in the response I gave to the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) during the Urgent Question on Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

The correct response should have been:

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Alistair Burt]

Yes, I can assure the hon. Lady, whose own tenacity in other respects also deserves commendation, that the issues affecting the BBC Persian service have been raised directly both by the Foreign Secretary and me. We are conscious of the pressures under which they work and the diligence with which they go about their duties, and I can assure her that those matters are indeed raised.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Last year, I met Redress, which has been mentioned already, to discuss not just this case but that of Andy Tsege. It published a report in January saying that more than 100 British citizens a year were reporting being mistreated in jails abroad and not being provided with the humanitarian or consular assistance that the British Government should be giving them. It also says that there is inconsistency in the support provided, particularly for dual nationals. What can the Minister do to assure us that any British national, whether a dual national or not, will receive the same consular support if they find themselves in that position?

[Alistair Burt]

They are certainly offered all the same support, but the blunt fact is that not all states treat dual nationals the same: some recognise dual nationality and allow access to the UK authorities, others do not accept it and treat the dual national solely as a national of their own state. In those circumstances, they do not believe they are required to give access. I can assure the hon. Lady, however, that in each and every case the UK Government make exactly the same representations seeking access, because we believe that dual nationality means what it says: dual nationality, not sole nationality.[Official Report, 4 June 2018, Vol. 642, c. 1MC.]

Oral Answers to Questions

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Tuesday 9th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Boris Johnson]

I congratulate my hon. Friend, an eponymous Member, on that important question on what we are doing to protect whales—although they are, of course, mammals rather than fish, as he knows. The UK has been in the lead over many decades in calling for an end to illegal whaling. We condone whaling only when it is clearly and demonstrably necessary for subsistence.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Reports from the UN and others have shown links between not just the illegal wildlife trade but the illegal timber trade and the financing of terrorist groups such as al-Shabaab and the Lord’s Resistance Army. Is that on the Minister’s radar, and what will he be doing to ensure that the links between terrorism and those trades are broken?

[Boris Johnson]

The hon. Lady asks an excellent question, because, of course, the illegal wildlife trade is intimately connected not just with the illegal timber trade, but with drug running, gun trafficking and the trafficking in human beings, so if we tackle the illegal wildlife trade, we drive down those phenomena as well.

Blue Belt Programme: Marine Protected Areas

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Sir Alan Duncan]

Air access to Ascension Island resumed on 18 November, and a monthly air service has begun to and from neighbouring St Helena. Most workers on Ascension are from St Helena; as a Minister for the Department for International Development, I was largely responsible for building the airport there, which I am pleased to say now works. Employers on Ascension confirm that the monthly air service meets their current needs.

To return to “Blue Planet”—I risk being pressed for time if I do not get through what I need to tell the House—the series highlighted the many pressures that we are putting on our oceans, including the scourge of plastic waste, the unpredictable effects of global warming and atmospheric pollution and the danger of overfishing. Many of those challenges—perhaps most of them—must be addressed at the global level, and the UK will play a full and active leadership role in that work. Yet there is also good evidence that establishing well designed, effectively managed and properly enforced marine protection measures can help parts of the ocean withstand some of those pressures.

Our Blue Belt initiative is committed to doing just that. We have already declared large-scale marine protected areas in five of our overseas territories—St Helena, Pitcairn, the British Indian Ocean Territory, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands and the British Antarctic Territory, representing a total of 2.9 million sq km, or more than 40% of British waters. Of this, 1.5 million sq km, or more than 20% of our waters, are now designated as highly protected and closed to all commercial fishing.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

At this point I feel obliged, as I always do when “Blue Planet” is mentioned, to say that the BBC natural history unit is based in Bristol and does tremendous work. The Minister touched on the issue of plastic pollution. Is he aware of the recent study by the University of Hull and the British Antarctic Survey, which found that plastic pollution in the Antarctic was five times as bad as predicted? To deal with the problem, it is not enough to create marine protected areas; we must do much more to tackle the problem of microplastics at source.

[Sir Alan Duncan]

I fully accept what the hon. Lady says. We are focusing primarily on fishing in this debate, but the issue of plastics is of growing significance, and I hope that tackling it can be a cross-party endeavour. It is not a party political issue; we all want the same objectives, and the more that we work together across the party divide with one loud voice for the United Kingdom, the better we can make improvements for the world.

To return to what I was saying, we are not stopping with the efforts that I just described. Two further overseas territories, Tristan da Cunha and Ascension, have committed to declaring marine protection measures across their waters by 2020. Working with our two main Blue Belt delivery partners, the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science and the Marine Management Organisation, we have been supporting those territories to ensure that each marine protection regime is well designed, managed, monitored and enforced. Each territory has its own unique environment and particular needs, so there is certainly no one-size-fits-all solution. Each territory must feel a sense of involvement and ownership if we want the Blue Belt to be a lasting legacy.

The Blue Belt is already delivering results: for example, real-time analysis of satellite data has helped build intelligence on illegal fishing and inform long-term enforcement solutions. Overseas territory Governments have received advice and support to strengthen fisheries legislation and licensing and enforcement regimes. Targeted scientific cruises have been undertaken or are planned to assess biodiversity and analyse fish stocks. Also, links between the territories and appropriate regional fisheries management organisations have been strengthened.

Israel: US Embassy

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Alistair Burt]

The United Kingdom will restate tomorrow our determination to see a final settlement with peace between the nations—two viable states—and our determination that the statehood we wish to see in Palestine is agreed. Our position is that we will recognise when it is the right time in relation to peace. We will make that decision.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

It is 12 years since I visited Ma’ale Adumim, a huge settlement just outside Jerusalem that is now home to 41,000 people. Emboldened by Trump’s decision, the Israeli Parliament is for the first time introducing a law to annex that settlement. Does the Minister agree that the legitimisation of a settlement built illegally on Palestinian land is a very dangerous move? Will he join me in condemning it?

[Alistair Burt]

The hon. Lady raises again the difficult issue of legality in relation to settlements. There is evidence that the Israeli Government have been influenced by the United States and others in some of their decisions, including legal decisions, in relation to Jerusalem. Our position remains clear: the settlements are illegal and must be dealt with as part of an overall settlement. We support challenges to the legality of the settlements, when it is legitimate and right to do so, by those who might be affected by them or by demolitions. That will remain the policy.

Royal Assent