Cyclone Idai

Patrick Grady Excerpts

Wednesday 20th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Harriett Baldwin]

The hon. Lady, who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on Zimbabwe, will want to know that we have been at the forefront of trying to work with our partners to assess the scale of the need. The port of Beira is not just the port for a large part of Mozambique but also the port that is most used by Zimbabwe and Malawi for food imports and exports, so that is, in addition, a particular vulnerability. I understand from the early assessments that reports from eastern Zimbabwe suggest that there has been a severe degradation of the infrastructure as well, and it is very difficult to access all the afflicted populations. We cannot over-emphasise how difficult it is for us to be able to reach people. The pre-deployed kits have reached the airport at Beira, but at the moment many roads out of Beira are closed, and that will also affect eastern Zimbabwe’s response. We are at the forefront of working with partners—for example, UNICEF—in eastern Zimbabwe, and that will need to inform, after the rain has stopped, our ability to respond to some of the lasting damage there.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

It is World Water Day on Friday, but for people in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, there is water everywhere but not a drop to drink. In the all-party parliamentary group on Malawi, which I chair, we have been following the effect of devastating floods that had already been hitting the country before the cyclone. The Minister might be aware that the Scottish Government have already made a donation to provide support for that, and civic society is responding as well. Specifically, what steps will her Department take to improve resilience in these countries? Because of climate change, such extreme weather events are becoming more common, so how can countries be supported before a disaster hits to ensure that there is resilience in the infrastructure?

[Harriett Baldwin]

This allows me to pay tribute to the Scotland-Malawi partnership, demonstrated by the statistic that 43% of people in Scotland know someone who is, or are themselves, part of links between Scotland and Malawi. I know that civil society across Scotland will be engaging both with these local partnerships but also more widely through the appeal. I thank everyone in Scotland for their generosity towards this cause.

The hon. Gentleman asked specifically about the work that we will be doing on resilience, which is also for the United Nations. Resilience takes many forms, but one of the most important is the crops that are sown, the ways in which they are sown and the way that the land is used. That is an important part of the work that we are doing—helping farmers to make use of the land in a way that gives them the best resilience to these kinds of climate shocks.