Food Security and Famine Prevention (Africa)

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Thursday 15th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mitchell]

I can vigorously reassure the right hon. Lady that that is the case. One cannot begin to understand development unless one realises the importance of putting children and women right at the centre of everything one does.

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

The population of Ethiopia has grown fourfold in the past 50 years. The populations of Somalia and Kenya have grown threefold and fivefold respectively. Between one quarter and one third of the married women in that region would like to avoid or delay pregnancy. I understand that there are an estimated 76 million unwanted births a year. Will access to modern contraception be part of the Government’s plan?

[Mr Mitchell]

It absolutely is. I wrote to the hon. Lady about that in June. She is entirely right: it is outrageous that less than 25% of women in sub-Saharan Africa have access to contraception. A prime part of the Government’s development policy is to try to ensure that up to 10 million couples who currently do not have access to contraception get it.

I was talking about the importance of food security and of people being able to feed themselves. At the end of last week, I visited an extremely important project, run by Britain and the World Food Programme, that seeks to build food security in Karamoja in northern Uganda. It encapsulates the old proverb, “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach him to fish and he will be able to feed himself.” We are engaged in a project that hitherto has spent £28 per person on securing food aid. Over the next three years we will spend £33 per person. As I saw for myself, that food security is developing well. In 2009 more than 1 million people in Karamoja were receiving food aid and the region was suffering from deep food insecurity, but by the end of this year we believe the figure will be below 140,000.

In looking at that programme we saw all the things that need to happen, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon knows so well. We saw effective irrigation, the harvesting of water through reservoirs, families growing food for themselves and market traders turning up on the sites where that food is being grown and buying the surplus. We saw feeder roads developing and warehouses springing up, which is very important. That is the way ahead to ensure that deep food insecurity is tackled. That is what we have been doing in Ethiopia, and the approach has helped to ensure that Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda are not now experiencing famine.