Population Growth

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Monday 13th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, I rather like these short debates, particularly when the charming mother hen on the Front Bench tells me not to crow for too long. I was always told to do everything in threes: Tripos, Church, law and Parliament and Father, Son and Holy Ghost. In this case, it is land, air and sea.

I will adopt a slightly different approach. I regard human beings as an asset, not a liability, and I regard a population as an opportunity, not something to fear. For example, as was mentioned just now, we have two great economies in fast growth in the world: India and China, who, together, have 37 per cent of the world's population and large amounts of high productivity. How and why? It is a question of what you get people to do and how you turn them into a benefit.

I turn to my favourite subject: the Commonwealth, which, as your Lordships know, accounts for 25 per cent of the world population. If we look at our bailiwicks, our overseas and dependent territories, we cover a large part of the globe. We have to ask: why did we ever develop a Commonwealth or an empire? It was because of the added value that we could create in various countries. Most of that added value was, surprisingly enough, related to the resources of the land—its minerals and raw materials. As we look at that development, we find to our amazement that, suddenly, the world is saying that we are overpopulated. We may look back at large chunks of Africa, where I have worked—in particular, somewhere such as the Sudan, which was to be the bread basket of the Middle East, where any amount of grain could be grown to feed the populations. As you look at a map from space, or whatever, you will find that the productivity of all those countries is roughly the same. The weather pattern may have changed, but the opportunity to produce food, which people need, is very significant.

I have even thought that in the past, when people were short of labour, the slave trade took place; now, when they are short of labour, migration takes place. That is what has been happening in this country. We need to look at the opportunities that can be created in those Commonwealth countries for the regeneration of food and products that we have long forgotten about.