UN: Sustainable Development Goals

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, for giving us the opportunity to discuss these draft development goals.

The objective of these new goals is, of course, to prioritise spending across all donors and recipients, with the notable difference from the MDGs in that this time around the recipient nations were actually given a say in what the priorities should be. However, to my way of thinking—I know I am not the only one who thinks this—having 17 goals and 169 targets is not really prioritising or focusing. To my mind, there is a risk that, in trying to do everything, we will achieve little or nothing.

I also hold to the view that the long-term aim of any aid programme should be to do itself out of a job. The long-term game must be to help the recipient people to stand on their own feet and help themselves with their own efforts and not have their countries constantly dependent on outside aid for their education, health or, worse still, food and nutrition, although clearly in emergencies we must all rally round and do what we can. So, taking a long-term view—and every country will be different—we, along with other donor countries, must try to analyse what is the best springboard or platform in that developing country which will in the long run best enable its people to help themselves.

At the risk of being repetitive on a theme I have mentioned in this House before, there is no doubt in my mind that, in sub-Saharan Africa at any rate, focusing on improved and profitable agriculture, mostly smallholder agriculture, is undoubtedly the best springboard to help the people help themselves. Nations such as China have already gone through their agricultural revolution, and in so doing helped more than 400 million people out of extreme poverty. However, most of Africa has yet to achieve that breakthrough, and they themselves recognise that. In the 2003 Maputo agreement, the African Union agreed to put 10% of its national budgets into agriculture. At least it understood its importance. This was reconfirmed in the Year of Agriculture 2014 and again in 2015 in the Year of Soils, which is not unrelated to agriculture. But of course, the gap between commitment and practice has always been an African problem, and so far only seven or eight countries have fulfilled their Maputo commitment. This is a great pity because, if they could, they would transform both the health and wealth of their people.

If we are looking to focus harder on what really matters, I maintain that improved agriculture could well be the best route to fulfilling a lot of the sustainable development goals. Running through them quickly, the first goal is to end poverty everywhere. Well, if 70% to 90% of your population are farmers, what is the best way of helping them put money in their pockets? Incidentally, what is the best way of preventing their children running off to add to the urban slums? The answer, of course, is to promote entrepreneurial agriculture.

The second goal is nutrition and sustainable agriculture. That speaks for itself, although I admit that the connection between agriculture and nutrition is not always as simple as it might first appear, but it can be made to work. The third goal is health and well-being. Again, if a variety of local food products can be maintained and supplied, particularly to kids, that is one of the best ways to achieve improved health and resistance to diseases. School feeding programmes, which are now becoming more common, based on local production, are an excellent way of achieving this not only for the kids but also for the surrounding community, which benefits from the new variety of crops being grown.

The fourth goal is education. If you ask any lady farmer what she is going to do now that she has learnt to make money from her farming, I can guarantee 100%, as the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, said, that the answer will be, “I am going to educate my children”—and she does. The noble Lord told a story about this and I will do the same. A couple of years ago, I met a granny who had educated her children from the proceeds of farming four acres in Kenya. I asked her, “Did it work? What are they doing now?”. She replied, “Yes, my son is an airline pilot and my daughter is teaching IT in India”. That was achieved from farming four acres but with assistance given in the form of training and a water pump. That is very important.

The fifth goal is empowering women. Some 70% of farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are women and, if they can become the successful breadwinners, it is more likely that they will earn the respect of their families and their communities. Improved agriculture is the key. The sixth goal is all about water. Very often the economic justification of a good clean supply of water is that it enables the farmers to double the yield of their crops. Africa has the lowest percentage of irrigated crops in the world and the smallest amount of water-related infrastructure, although often there are very good supplies of water underground if they had the money and the tradition to tap into them. This is an important goal and, again, agriculture is inherently involved.

The eighth and ninth goals are all about promoting sustained and inclusive economic growth, which to me are in grave danger of meaning all things to all men and probably therefore likely to produce low amounts of focus and activity. But if they were focused on developing food production and food processing and entrepreneurial activity right down the food chain, that effort could reach out to over 80% of the population and actually achieve some sort of inclusive economic growth. Like in China, if you can kick-start the rural economy in that way, who knows where it will lead?

The 10th goal—and I will make this my last point because my message is probably getting a bit boring—is about reducing inequality. Many farmers in Africa are the poorest of the poor in their country. But if we teach them to thrive, with new seeds and simple agricultural and basic business knowledge, we could end the intergenerational poverty that has long been the blight of Africa.

I will stop there but I hope that your Lordships have got my drift. As to how we actually promote improved and profitable agriculture in Africa, that is a whole different subject, which I will have to leave to another day. But these SDGs are a very good start, albeit to my mind not quite focused enough.