Middle East and North Africa

Lord Stone of Blackheath Excerpts

Friday 11th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stone of Blackheath]

My Lords, it is a privilege to be able to listen to the variety of wisdoms in this House. I do not speak very often, so in my 10 minutes, I intend to offer the House some positive solutions to the situation in the Middle East, the world food shortage, health inequalities, universal education and global climate change.

I should declare five interests in Egypt, the West Bank and Jerusalem. In doing so, I can show how British universities, businesses, social enterprises and health services are already making positive contributions in the region and should be aided to increase the scale and scope of what they are doing. That will make a real difference to development in the region. Now is the time for action backed with resources, not just wise words.

First, I am the founding governor of the British University in Egypt, which was opened in 2005 by Their Royal Highnesses the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. It is part-managed by Loughborough University and is already making a significant contribution to the region. It turns out thousands of high-quality graduates each year in Cairo, many of them women, who are enlightened, connected, concerned and caring and beginning to take an active interest in developing and modernising their country and their region. Secondly, I am the unpaid chair of a health charity Healthtalkonline. The University of Oxford is working with Ben-Gurion University to make patient experience of illness available online for free in Arabic, Hebrew and English to all communities in the region. By sharing experience of their conditions across all divides, it helps them to live better lives and increases understanding and empathy. Thirdly, I chair, also unpaid, the Sindicatum Climate Change Foundation and will explain later what it is doing in the region. Fourthly, I own a small apartment in Jerusalem, because I have to be there 10 times a year, and, finally, I am an unpaid director of Moon Valley Enterprises Ltd, a social enterprise working in the West Bank. It is the main project I want to put before the House today.

We started Moon Valley two years ago, on a trip to Ramallah with my noble friend Lord Desai, at the request of Salem Fayed from the West Bank, Gordon Brown from the UK and Tony Blair from the quartet. They agreed that peace and stability in the region could be viable and sustainable only when people are offered an alternative to the current situation, can feel secure because they can apply for jobs and can choose a normal life. We agreed that Governments, including our own, need to take practical measures to those ends and to invest in peace as it if were a business. They need to think differently about aid and the culture of aid; they need to do things differently, taking practical steps to create sustainable jobs and make them accessible to the poorest and most disfranchised in the community.

We agreed to tie ourselves together—that is, the Palestinians, the UK and Europe, the USA, business, NGOs and the Government—to get the West Bank working. We planned to facilitate small-scale farmers, traders and marketeers to be able to compete on the world stage so that they can see that a different kind of future is available where wealth, aspiration and peace can flourish. A few of us were asked to help the Palestinian farmers to get their production and quality up to the standard required for world export, and to get access to the high-quality UK retailers and perhaps later to Europe and the USA.

How can that be possible out of the West Bank? The West Bank is 250 metres below sea level. Between October and March, when the temperature is 6 degrees in Jerusalem, it is 27 degrees at the West Bank. Therefore, one can grow and pick salads, herbs, tomatoes and peppers when hitherto one could get them from only southern Spain or California.

Two years on, we are delivering fresh herbs and sweet peppers to Sainsbury’s, Marks and Spencer and the Co-operative Group. These British retailers are very supportive and patient. The quality of the Palestinian products and its service is improving. The Israelis allow us ease of access through the checkpoints. Jordan flies goods from Amman. We have been able to persuade the EU to drop its tariff, which until this year was 12.8 per cent on some of the goods that we were trying to import. If noble Lords want to know more about Moon Valley, Romeo films has generously made a seven-minute DVD in which Justin King, the CEO of Sainsbury’s, Sir Stuart Rose from Marks and Spencer, and Tony Blair speak on camera. I have arranged for the Library to make that DVD available for people to watch.

Let me explain what this project means to the farmers. Currently, if a small farmer with, say, three dunam of land—a dunam is about 1,000 square metres—grows poor- quality produce inefficiently for the local market, the best that he can get is about $8,000 to $10,000 for his year’s work. When I say “his”, I also mean “hers” because 40 per cent of the farmers are women. If Moon Valley helps the same farm to grow on three dunam high-quality goods for Sainsbury’s, we can pay them up to $20,000. What is more, during the rest of the year, they can make efficiently, and at a lower price, goods for the local market. We started with just herbs—rosemary, thyme, chives, sweet parsley and coriander. Now we produce sweet peppers and soon we will produce Medjool dates.

That is not all: British retailers are amazing at being able to use indigenous skills around the world in product development. We are planning to do prepared foods. A genius restaurateur in London, Yotam Ottolenghi who writes in the Guardian—some noble Lords might know of him—and his partners, one of whom is Palestinian and the other Israeli, want to help both the situation and us. They are going to lend their expertise to us to make high-margin, creative foods from the region. There will be the traditional dishes of the Bedouins, Druze and Palestinians. The dishes will include freekeh—a roasted green wheat; maftoul—a sort of couscous; za’atar—a wild thyme which can be used to flavour bread and rice; and molasses made from the juice of pomegranates, grapes and carob mixed with tahina to make a most delicious confection. Soap companies are now interested in Nabulsi olive oil soap, which any Arab woman will tell you makes your skin fragrant and soft. A huge tea company is looking at the mint and herb teas from Ramallah. Noble Lords can hear that I am back into my retail state.

What is even more exciting is that last week I went to Paris where I spoke to representatives from Carrefour, which has agreed to join us. Next month, I have a meeting here with Whole Foods USA, which has already indicated that it will be happy to take these goods as well. Therefore, we now need more capacity and need to expand the volume of production in order to serve this wider audience.

Initially, that can be done only with aid. We have recently met with Alistair Burt from the Foreign Office and Alan Duncan and Giles Lever from the Department for International Development. We are seeking funds of £10 million over three years to train groups of small farmers on the West Bank to supply more goods for this project. Our initial target is to engage 3,000 to 5,000 farmers, but eventually we see this spreading to tens of thousands of farmers in the West Bank. I know that DfID is now working with the FCO and the MoD to develop a new “building sustainability overseas” strategy, and we think that Moon Valley is it. We realise that we cannot expect the UK to do all of the funding, so we will be asking for some help from our friends in the Gulf.

We will work with Technoserve, a pragmatic NGO with a high reputation which gets these projects completed in many countries around the world. What is really important is that its specialism is to ensure that the money flows right down to individual small farmers so that they can improve their skills in agronomy and technology, business and finance, sustainability and energy efficiency. Those farmers are then able to grow their individual businesses while collectively they will play their part in the development of their own country, which can flourish. Technoserve is talking with Oxfam in the region, which is sort of leftish and is already on the ground working with the smallest Palestinian co-operatives, and Mazen Sinokrot, a big farmer who is sort of rightish, but who has capital, know-how and nous. Moon Valley will make sure that all sides get along with each other and work together.

While talking of sustainability and ecology, did noble Lords know that 10 per cent to 12 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, and that in this region, farmers just burn their agricultural waste? It could, by means of gasification, be turned into energy. We asked our experts at the Sindicatum Climate Change Foundation to go and see what might be done in the West Bank in terms of green energy. We have found that TMO Renewables, a UK company based in Guildford, is one of only six companies in the world that has a microbe technology which can eat solid municipal waste and turn it into ethanol as a source of affordable green energy. TMO was not really interested in the West Bank because it is making a lot of money in safer parts of the world. But we persuaded the company that if SCCF and Moon Valley were able to raise the funding to set up a $40 million plant outside Hebron and Bethlehem, TMO should give us and the Palestinians the intellectual property rights to clean up Amman, Cairo, Abu Dhabi and so on by creating, within the Palestinian territories, the first high-tech hub of this kind. The company has said yes, and next week I am going to Hebron and Ramallah to see if I can get all this to happen.

These are the types of pragmatic interventions that we in the UK can make in the region. Having proved that it can be done in the West Bank, we can do it again elsewhere in the region, perhaps with the people of southern Jordan who, as has been said, are as angry as the people of Tunisia and Egypt. This kind of thing could also be done in Gaza. This work can be done with these people and for these people. It is absolutely the responsibility of Governments around the world to support and build this sort of capacity. Aid is not aid if it keeps people in the same situation as they are currently in. It must not be a sticking plaster, but a large dose of antibiotics together with rehabilitation, respect, and perhaps even some reiki and some love. The region can modernise, develop and grow. The people there are capable and concerned, and they deserve our help.