Brexit: United Kingdom-Africa Trade and Development

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

I do not think that we see investment in Africa by any country as a problem. We see a significant gap in finance and investment, which Africa needs. The gap to meet the global goals is some $2.5 trillion per year whereas aid flows amount to only some $150 billion. The gap has to be filled by private investors. We welcome them from wherever they come. As the right reverend Prelate will know, we are certainly playing our part in Zimbabwe to encourage investment and to identify investment opportunities in both directions.

[Lord Chidgey (LD)]

My Lords, in January this year, Dr Rob Davies, the South Africa Minister of Trade and Industry, reminded the Government that the United Kingdom is the major destination among EU nations for South African investment. It invests more here than in any other EU country. The UK also accounts for 20% of South Africa’s wine exports and 30% of its fruit exports under the current EU economic partnership agreements. What specific actions are the Government taking to allay South African concerns and to maintain the strength of what is a key strategic market post Brexit, when the UK will be excluded from some of those treaties?

[Lord Bates]

That conversation happened when Liam Fox, the Secretary of State for International Trade, was in South Africa talking about how we could enhance trade co-operation between our two countries. It is important that we do that. We also need to see Africa as a tremendous opportunity—I know that the noble Lord shares my view on this. Africa will be a market of some $30 trillion by 2050 and will have a middle class the size of Europe. It is in our enlightened self-interest to build those strong links and maintain free trade.

South Sudan: Famine

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

Thursday 23rd February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

The noble Lord is absolutely right and I appreciate his remarks. On the specific points that he mentions, we have supported and encouraged the work of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development—IGAD—which has led a lot of this work, and have worked through the UN Security Council on that. We have worked with international partners. We are part of the troika with Norway and the United States, which is key in intervening in this area. My noble friend Lady Anelay is looking at the work we are doing across the border, because, although some 3 million people are internally displaced, increasingly, as refugees flow across the border in search of support, that is destabilising other countries in the region. My noble friend Lady Anelay was in Uganda visiting one of the refugee camps. We have committed another £50 million of support in that regard. A huge amount has been done, but the UK cannot do this alone; the international community must step up to the plate. We need to see more action there.

[Lord Chidgey (LD)]

My Lords, Radio Tamazuj in Juba reported on Tuesday that up to 5.5 million people are expected to be in food crisis in South Sudan by July. That is more than half the population. Pete Walsh, Save the Children’s country director in South Sudan, says:

“While the threat of a famine … has been looming for months, the worst-case scenario has … become a devastating reality”.


While the Government lead the response to Save the Children’s campaign in many other ways, can the Minister tell the House that we consider that the lives of a million children facing death by starvation must be a priority? Will we invest particularly in nutrition centres and in improving farming methods to make sure that food with nutritious value saves them from severe malnutrition?

[Lord Bates]

The noble Lord, who knows a great deal about the African continent and has focused on this area, rightly puts his finger on the importance of nutrition. We had a very useful debate on that subject yesterday evening, in which we looked at the importance of that area. It is an area on which we are focusing our efforts and where we want to see further action. However, one of the great problems that we know of is that when there is a conflict situation, invariably it is in rural areas. People then leave those areas and go to urban areas, leaving the agricultural land untended and uncultivated. We are now coming to the peak growing season for food crops. Therefore, that movement of people has a double effect, which we must respond to.

Africa: European Union Economic Partnership Agreements

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Chidgey]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the impact of Economic Partnership Agreements negotiated between the European Commission and economic regions of Africa on the agricultural economies of the African countries concerned.

[Lord Chidgey (LD)]

My Lords, the events leading to the development of the economic partnership agreements—the EPAs—go back to the 1960s, with the signing of a series of co-operation agreements to give ACP exports preferential access to European markets as part of a broader development strategy. These had to be replaced by a GATT-compatible trading system by the end of 2007, and the Cotonou agreement provided for the EU to open negotiations with six regional groups, four being in Africa, with the objective of agreeing a series of economic partnership agreements before the end of 2007. That may have been the grand plan but, while all the African regional agreements have been made and provisionally applied, as of October 2016 the ratification process for individual countries was still ongoing.

In 2014, the EU Directorate-General for External Policies reported that the EPAs, while supposedly intended to promote trade and development, regional integration, sustainable growth and poverty reduction, remained deeply controversial. He said:

“There are fears they may be actually undermining the sustainable and long-term development of ACP countries and their regional integration processes”.

This was underlined by Dr Carlos Lopes, UN Under-Secretary-General and executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa, at meetings in Addis Ababa and London, and by a recent fact-finding delegation to South Africa and Namibia by the Africa APPG, of which I am a co-chair.

The EPA negotiations continued to drag on and the EU allegedly began to bully African countries by deciding to remove unilateral trade preferences by 1 October 2014 for countries that had not signed or ratified the EPAs. This created tremendous pressure and tension in various countries and regions. Meetings at a Finance Ministers’ conference in Addis Ababa, with Ministers from Namibia, Tanzania and Uganda, confirmed that African countries were—and some still are—caught in a dilemma of losing preferential market access for the few products they export to the EU if they did not sign the EPAs versus losing long-term development prospects. Many countries were threatened with significant tariff revenue losses, serious disruption of existing or planned customs unions, disruption of regional trade and regional production capacities, and unemployment.

The directorate-general’s study concluded that major changes would be needed before the EPAs could be a development model suitable for Africa. The EPAs called for sweeping liberation of African markets, and that was seen as reminiscent of the discredited World Bank and IMF neoliberal structural adjustment programmes that were so destructive in the 1980s.

Under the EPAs, to maintain duty-free access to Europe, African countries had to remove tariffs from at least 80% of imports from the EU—in some cases removing trade barriers from as much as 96% of imports. This left local producers and manufacturers with no buffer against cheaper and often subsidised European economies during their industrialisation process.

Despite misgivings from African policymakers, the EU Trade Commissioner resolved to force through as many EPAs as possible before the Africa-EU summit in April 2014. A sustainability impact assessment, however, begun in late 2002 by PricewaterhouseCoopers and completed in 2006, produced a series of conclusions and recommendations to help ensure that EPAs promoted development and supported economic, social and environmental sustainability. In particular, it was recommended that all ACP countries should retain duty-free and quota-free access to the EU market and that access to the EU should be improved for the few products not yet fully liberalised.

In 2015, Sir Ronald Sanders, the ambassador of Antigua and Barbuda to the USA, and formerly to the EU, presented a paper to an EU ECOWAS conference in Abuja assessing EPAs in the context of the African Union. He emphasised that an EPA is not an agreement between the 28 nations of the EU collectively and Africa as a whole but a legally binding bilateral contract between the 28 nations of the EU collective1y and each country in Africa individually. In the event of a dispute arising from the terms of the EPA, individual African countries, most with very scarce resources, would have to contest against the combined capability of the 28 nation states of the EU collectively. The inequality that arises in any dispute is stark, and any mechanism for dispute resolution would have little value.

That brings me to the key question: do EPAs allow Africa to conduct policies for its own development or for the development of Europe? African countries should be able to ensure that the EU provides sufficient aid and trade development assistance to implement these agreements with robust monitoring procedures for their delivery and effectiveness.

It is not surprising that the European Commission has recognised that the moves to set up the series of regional EPAs have faltered. A senior European ambassador to the EU reported as recently as last month that the EPA negotiations started late and were prolonged, controversial and marked by ill feeling. Bitter accusations were made by some ACP negotiators and European development organisations about the objectives and negotiating style of the EU.

They alleged that the EU used the negotiations to pursue its commercial advantages, which in some cases conflicted with the development strategies of the ACP countries. They alleged that the EU put ACP countries under heavy pressure to accept negotiations on a much wider agenda, such as trade in services, public procurement and competition policy—the so-called Singapore issues. They alleged that the EU’s approach did not take sufficiently into consideration the regional integration objective, and in some cases even threatened it. EU negotiators were accused of using divide-and-rule tactics and being more concerned with big company interests than with the needs of their EPA partners. Their style was overaggressive, putting ACP countries under heavy pressure to sign up to EPAs before the 2007 deadline, preventing consultation with their parliaments and stakeholders because of the time constraints.

At present, there is little, if any, consideration of civil society and the role of parliaments in the EU-SADC EPA. That is incomprehensible given the increased political importance of the trade agreements in Europe. That brings me to my final point: Brexit and its implications for the ACP EPAs. The UK is currently a major contributor to the EC trade and development fund. If the UK leaves the EU, the market access provision will no longer apply to the UK. In the absence of any specific action to establish alternative trade regimes, the UK could have no alternative but to impose the most favoured nation—or MFN—duties on imports from ACP countries. This will have the greatest impact on agro-food products, since this is the sphere in which the UK’s inherited EU MFN duties are likely to be highest.

The prospect of establishing new trade agreements with the UK is, of course, hampered by the fact that the UK cannot enter into any new trade deal agreements until it leaves the EU. The ACP countries therefore face the prospect of being at the back of a long queue of countries trying to conclude alternative trade agreements with the UK, while facing crippling most favoured nation duties on exports to the UK, on a daily basis.

Perhaps the challenge is for the UK initially to prioritise its future conduct of bilateral negotiations. Will the Minister agree that that could allow the internalisation of ACP concerns within these policy discussions? Will the Minister also agree that every opportunity must be taken to allow current market access arrangements to continue from day one of the UK’s departure from the EU? Does the Minister accept that part of the plan should be to engage through an alliance of the Commonwealth ACP countries, since within the UK body politic, the ACP as a group tends to be seen as an EU construct? This would suggest that there will be a crucial role for Commonwealth ACP high commissioners to the Court of St James. For example, exploiting opportunities presented in a range of UK parliamentary hearings and inquiries in hand into the impact of Brexit on the UK’s external relations could prove highly effective.

United Nations World Humanitarian Summit

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

Tuesday 12th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, as I have already mentioned, there will be high-level representation at the summit.

[Lord Chidgey (LD)]

My Lords, UN member states have agreed that the summit in Istanbul must reinforce the outcomes of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris agreement on climate change. Therefore, will the Government be ready at the summit to commit to action, subject to mutual parliamentary scrutiny and accountability, in what will be the first major opportunity to give meaning to the principle of “Leave no one behind”?

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, the noble Lord is absolutely right. This is a very important summit. It will tackle a lot of issues, including the agreements that were reached at Sendai and Paris, to ensure that those strong linkages between the disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation agendas continue. On the wider point, it is about making sure that the reforms that are required to ensure preparedness for future crises are also part of the bigger reform agenda. As I said, we also need to encourage other partners and donors and the private sector to step up to the mark.

Health: Ebola

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Chidgey]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the principal lessons that can be learned from communities affected by the Ebola epidemic in preparedness for future health crises.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for International Development (Baroness Verma) (Con)]

My Lords, the UK’s £427 million response was fundamental to combating Ebola and saving countless lives. We are committed to learning lessons and responding effectively to future crises, and made a critical contribution to better understanding community engagement. Many UK nationals worked bravely alongside Sierra Leonean communities and health workers, and I pay tribute to their phenomenal work. Part of our £240 million economic recovery programme will help strengthen local health systems, and help communities to hold government to account.

[Lord Chidgey (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her reply and for her consideration of the report of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Africa on lessons to be learned from the Ebola crisis, which will be launched publicly later today. Can she confirm that the Government accept the key finding of this far-reaching study: that, in order to ensure preparedness for future health crises in Africa, health systems should be developed horizontally, local leadership prioritised and investment concentrated at community level? Will the Government regularly monitor DfID’s health development programmes to ensure that they recognise and respond to these findings?

Sudan

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

Monday 29th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, although we welcome the role that UN sanctions can play in the right circumstances and support the recent renewal of the sanctions around Darfur, each situation is different. We judge that at present the best way to promote moves towards lasting peace in the Two Areas is to support the peace process negotiations being led by former President Mbeki and his AU High-level Implementation Panel.

[Lord Chidgey (LD)]

My Lords, in January Sudanese armed forces destroyed more than 20 villages in Jebel Marra during a major offensive, leaving literally thousands of people in hiding without food, shelter or assistance. Will the Government condemn these atrocities and challenge President al-Bashir’s claims to have ended the rebellion, as he calls it, in early February while his warplanes continue to bomb and murder helpless civilians in Darfur on a daily basis?

Female Genital Mutilation: International Action

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

Thursday 4th February 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Chidgey]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the effectiveness of current campaigns and programmes sponsored and executed by western governments and international non-governmental organisations aimed at eliminating female genital mutilation and cutting practices in African countries.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for International Development (Baroness Verma) (Con)]

My Lords, since 2008, the UN estimates that 13,000 communities representing 10 million people have declared that they will abandon FGM. DfID is the largest ever donor on FGM, investing £35 million over five years, and that support is accelerating the progress we have seen since the PM co-hosted the Girl Summit. Across Africa, women, politicians, young people and religious leaders are campaigning for a change, and we stand strong in our support.

[Lord Chidgey (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply. Since 1965, 24 of the 29 countries in which FGM practices are concentrated have enacted decrees or legislation related to outlawing them. Yet nearly 50 years later in Guinea, for example, 96% of girls and women between the ages of 15 and 49 are still suffering FGM, while 80% are victims in a further eight countries. In all, some 125 million girls and women born since 1965 have been abused in this manner. Given the overwhelming case for the abandonment of these practices at all levels and recognising the legal, social and moral norms that control them, what specific action are the Government taking to support UNICEF and other in-country programmes with human and financial resources?

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, the noble Lord will be aware that in 2014 we co-hosted the Girl Summit with UNICEF. At that summit we secured 500 signatories to a charter and more than 170 commitments from Governments, civil society and individuals. We are putting £35 million in place over the next five years, but this is a deeply bedded social norm. It has been there a long time. It will take time for people to come to terms with removing it. We have seen progress. Since our summit, there have been summits in Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Uganda, and last year there was an African Union-led summit in Zambia.

Sustainable Development Goals: HIV

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, my noble friend raises a really important point. Stigma and discrimination drive key affected populations underground. At the recent CHOGM talks in Malta, we very much had that conversation. I reassure my noble friend that we spend £6 million a year on research programmes–including understanding how social drivers increase HIV infection—and on supporting people in those countries.

[Lord Chidgey (LD)]

My Lords, 35 out of 121 low-income and middle-income countries have increased their spend on AIDS by more than 100%, with all domestic spending on AIDS amounting to some 60% of the total. Does the Minister agree that this confirms the long-standing role of communities in addressing the epidemic in the years ahead, and the critical importance of investing in a strong community health presence to broaden the reach of their services? Can she assure us that these vital services will not be threatened by DfID’s planned withdrawal of budget support?

[Baroness Verma]

I need to reassure noble Lords that there is no withdrawal of budget support. However, we do need to ensure that the support we are giving is to those people who are in most need and are unable to self-finance. The low-income, high-burden countries need our support the most but we continue to work in middle-income countries. So there is no withdrawal—just smarter, more focused delivery of services.

International Development Policies

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

Thursday 19th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Chidgey (LD)]

My Lords, visiting developing countries with long and not necessarily benign relationships with the UK and working with their parliamentarians often brings a reassuring aspect: the receipt of sometimes lavish praise from counterparts for UK policies and activities in the arena of ODA—recognition that the UK is a world leader in international development policy.

So it is a pleasure to acknowledge that this debate starts from a high point. Nevertheless, we and the Government can always aspire to do better: first, on the UK’s role in establishing the global or sustainable development goals; secondly, on the importance of engaging Parliaments in the process, as alluded to in SDG 16; and finally, from my point of view, on the critical assessment of DfID’s approach to delivering development impact, fundamental to making policies more effective.

Much of 2015 has, in international development terms, been taken up with establishing universal agreement on what has become the 17 sustainable development goals. The APPG for Sustainable Development, of which I am a vice-chair, with the support of the NGO, Bond, stresses that we need our Government to push for strong, ambitious, integrated outcomes, with firm commitments to tackling inequalities and environmental sustainability. We need strong mechanisms to implement and monitor the new goals and targets at national and international levels, including for financing and implementation. To quote Hillary Clinton:

“What gets measured gets done”.

We need a commitment to a cross-party approach to implementing the SDG framework in the United Kingdom and internationally. In this regard, we need to ensure that both civil society and Parliament remain closely engaged in implementation of the framework at all levels, nationally, regionally and globally.

The UK Parliament’s commitment to allocate 0.7% of GNI to ODA sets an example that others are urged to follow. Nevertheless, Parliaments have too often been sidelined in discussions on ODA, resulting in low accountability for aid budgeting and delivery. Parliaments must become leaders in accountability at all levels to ensure that Governments continue to push to meet future objectives and international commitments, including international human rights standards. Development partners must be prepared to support into the future the role of Parliament in the law-making and oversight functions of parliamentarians and staff. Projects need to be developed to ensure Parliament’s key components have the capacity to deliver on the SDG objectives.

This brings me to the last of the three aspects I want to touch on: DfID’s approach to delivering development impact. In this regard, I refer again to the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, in this case its Report 45, which proves to be an invaluable guide. It concluded that there are core elements for achieving a more consistent, deeper and sustainable impact—for example, the importance of investing in long-term impact rather than short-term results. There is a need to recognise that, with an average programme length of three years, transformational impact may be possible only over several programme cycles. Here I echo and support the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich. This needs to be recognised explicitly in programme design. With three-quarters of DfID’s priority countries being conflict and fragile states, more modest objectives and longer-term programmes are needed to establish pathways out of fragility.

There is a strong argument that development programmes are most effective and deliver greatest impact where they adopt a flexible approach to delivery. A fundamental truth in effective development policy is that programme designs are best guesses and most effective when they take a problem-solving approach. These are only a few points drawn from a comprehensive study, which I nevertheless hope the Minister will reflect on in her reply.

Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting: Human Rights

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

Tuesday 17th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, the answer to my noble friend’s question is yes. I am pleased to confirm that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is making contributions from programme funds to allow the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission to take on its role as chair of the Commonwealth Forum of National Human Rights Institutions with an agreed fund.

[Lord Chidgey (LD)]

My Lords, in December 2012, the Commonwealth charter was adopted. Under the heading “Human Rights”, it states:

“We are implacably opposed to all forms of discrimination, whether rooted in gender, race, colour, creed, political belief or other grounds”.

Yet almost three years later, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative report, Civil Society and the Commonwealth, found that the Commonwealth is not living up to its core values and is losing relevance to the international community. Will the Government therefore press at the Malta CHOGM for a Commonwealth ministerial action group on human rights abuses, particularly the use of obsolete 19th-century laws to prosecute homosexuality and other gender issues in this, the 21st century?

[Baroness Verma]

The noble Lord is absolutely right in highlighting the charter. We agree with him that we must push hard for the Commonwealth to meet those commitments under the charter. All forms of discrimination are unacceptable and we will do our bit at CHOGM to raise those questions with the countries that continue to abuse the charter.