Climate Change and Biodiversity: Food Security

Lord Oates Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in sending our best wishes and prayers to Her Majesty the Queen and the Royal Family.

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, on securing this debate and on her very powerful introduction. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, for her maiden speech, and what an excellent maiden speech it was. I am not sure it was only the Lord Convener who needed her previous title to be explained, but thank you for that. The noble Baroness’s expertise will be hugely appreciated in this House.

I want to focus on the impact on developing countries, and I declare my interest as co-chair of APPGs on Africa, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Some 38 years ago, aged 14, I sat down and watched the famous broadcast by Michael Buerk from northern Ethiopia which brought the world’s attention to the catastrophe that was going on in that region. As many noble Lords know, that inspired many people; it created Band Aid and Live Aid, and a whole movement to try to change things.

As a precocious 14 year-old, at the time of EU intervention in stocks and the grain mountains, butter mountains and wine lakes, I felt, along with many others, the outrage that people were starving in parts of Africa when we were awash with plenty. Perhaps unlike most other 14 year-olds, I decided that I was the only person who could solve this, and for complicated reasons—I will not go into them now; I do not have the time—I ran away from home to Ethiopia. I arrived in Addis Ababa, and I quickly discovered, as your Lordships may not be surprised to hear, that the demand for totally unskilled 14-year-old English kids was zero, and that Ethiopia at that time, under a Marxist military dictatorship, was a pretty scary place to be.

Thankfully, I was rescued from that situation by an Anglican clergyman. He gave me some very good advice: first, to go home, although he was kind enough to let me stay there for a little while. He also told me, “Do not lose interest in these issues, because they will be ongoing, but go and get yourself some skills”. I took his advice and subsequently worked as a teacher in Zimbabwe, and in the first democratic Parliament in South Africa.

One of the tragedies is that, today, we are again facing a perilous situation in Ethiopia and the Horn, which is driven by climate factors but exacerbated by conflict. Large parts of the world are facing acute food insecurity. The World Food Programme tells us that it is delivering more food aid at present than it has in the whole of its 60-year history. A study published earlier this year in the Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism on tackling protein-calorie malnutrition during world crises highlights the fact that 54% of children are malnourished, while 1.9 billion people are overweight or obese. The statistics around malnutrition show that 462 million people are underweight. In the most vulnerable population, that of children under five, 45 million are wasted and 149 million stunted. We know that that point in life, between ages one and five in particular, is crucial to the future life chances of those children and the all impacts this has on future economic development in those societies.

The acute crisis in food security, driven by climate and biodiversity loss but exacerbated by the Covid pandemic and Russian aggression against Ukraine, is creating a terrifying situation in the world. I was in Sudan a couple of months ago, and the fear of what is coming is palpable. I spoke to the new South African high commissioner in London yesterday, and the impact that the situation is having on household budgets here is of course terrifying, but in places with much more vulnerable populations and economies, it is absolutely terrifying. We have sadly chosen this time to cut our aid budget massively, slashing the nutrition budget by 80%. That is a tragedy to me, because one thing I learned when I was in Ethiopia is that however precocious or determined you are, you cannot change the world on your own. But you can change it if you stand with other people and campaign with them.

One of the things I did when I came back from Ethiopia was to get involved with many other people—across all parties and none, from the faith communities, et cetera—in arguing for us to play our part in sharing some of our wealth with other parts of the world. I was delighted that, during the coalition Government, we reached that 0.7% target. We did much good, not just with the money but with the expertise that DfID developed in issues such as nutrition and food security. Sadly, we are losing that, and that is a tragedy.

It sometimes seems like we have just noticed climate change, because we had temperatures of 43 degrees and there were wildfires in California, and realised that something is happening to the climate. Something has been happening to the climate for a long time. Talk to people in the climate-vulnerable countries—Zimbabwe is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries on earth—which have suffered over many years some devastating impacts, such as waters drying up. Rivers in the rural area where I used to teach were no longer functioning. There was also a terrible cyclone in east of the country driven by climate change. This is not something new; it is something that has been happening for a while and we have to get a grip on it.

We have had much focus on climate, rightly, but it is very important that we also focus on biodiversity. As the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and others have said, they are intrinsically linked and we cannot tackle one without the other. Indeed, all three issues are intrinsically linked.

The noble Baroness, Lady Willis, made an important point, which I hope I have got right: nine out of 400 vascular plants are responsible for the majority of the staple foods that we rely on and, in the face of climate change and the need to build resilience, we have to develop the genetic diversity of crops. It is critical.

The noble Baroness, Lady Mobarik, made a very powerful point about the situation in Pakistan, where flooding has been going on since August, if not before, and noted its impacts on people and food security.

We face many challenges. What can we do? The noble Earl, Lord Caithness, gave us some hope about approaches to farming which can help deliver food security and restore biodiversity. There are many initiatives. The Food and Land Use Coalition has put out a 10-point transition plan about how we need to deal with these things holistically. The most important thing we have to do is act on the things we know how to do. The Climate Change Committee has told us many of the things we need to do in the UK and we know many of the things we have to do in the world.

We also all know that story about the frog which, if put in a pan of cold water that is heated up to boiling point, allegedly will not jump out. We probably also know that frogs are not that stupid and they will jump out. However, that story still appears to be true; it is just that it is about humans. We have been watching what has been going on with the climate and biodiversity and we have just sat in the pan and let it get hotter and hotter. We have to jump out now and start to act seriously, in line with the crisis that we face.