Food Security and Famine Prevention (Africa)

Pauline Latham Excerpts

Thursday 15th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Amber Rudd), the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) and all right hon. and hon. Members who have spoken—particularly the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern), who has just spoken—on such a united debate.

As many Members have mentioned, smallholder farmers are one of the keys to food security, and therefore to poverty reduction and creating sustainable livelihoods. That in turn will lead to less aid being required, which must be the goal that we are looking for. However, corruption in many countries in Africa must be tackled, including the secret sales of mines, with the money going to tax havens and no directors’ names being available, which means that it cannot be tracked. Not enough emphasis has been put on agriculture in developing countries, but I believe that the world has woken up to the importance of the agricultural potential there.

A couple of months ago, I along with several colleagues went with the International Development Committee to Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi, three very different countries. Whereas Rwanda is investing in terracing, soil nutrition and irrigation, the DRC is in chaos, spending money on things that will not reduce the poverty of those who live there. Burundi has land that is extremely impoverished. The crops that we saw were extremely poor, and the farmers there need help to use fertilisers to aid crop intensity. The soil is so poor because of erosion and the lack of crop rotation. Each family in the village that we stayed in—or that most of us stayed in—grows its own food, but a more intensive project could help them to move from poverty to a higher standard of living by selling any excess, which unfortunately they currently do not have; indeed, they do not even have enough to feed themselves.

In Uganda, where I have been involved in an agricultural project, farmers are beginning to reap the rewards of working harder and working together. They now need a machine to grind the maize into flour so that the excess can go to the markets. In Kenya, an organisation called Free the Children works with schools and women to encourage them to have a kitchen garden for use in school kitchens and at home. Children are much more likely to attend school when their parents know that they will receive a meal—any meal, never mind a nutritious meal. At home, the parents can also provide a much more varied diet if helped to begin growing a diversity of fruit and vegetables. A well-fed child can learn better and is less likely to succumb to diseases; and if they become ill, they have more reserves to recover than some of the children we see all too frequently on television. Ghana has done well over the past two decades in stimulating its agriculture. We should encourage different countries in the continent of Africa to learn from each other about what works.

In India, the Select Committee saw a farmer who had moved away from the traditional subsistence crops to grow chillies. His income had improved tenfold and he was an extremely happy man because he could afford to send his children to school.

Much of what needs to be done is simple and straightforward—for example, building rural roads, funding agricultural research, ensuring that rural people have access to clean water. Other things, such as finding effective ways to stimulate rural financial systems or to conserve soil and water, require trial and error to find effective solutions in local circumstances. It follows that those efforts need to be sustained, allowing enough time for promising developments to become embedded before switching attention and funding to some other issue.

Women make up the majority of smallholder farmers, on top of all the other jobs they do, and we know that when women earn the money, they spend 90% of it on the family—in comparison with men who spend 40% or less, as they do not see the family as being so important. As in all countries, women are more concerned with the welfare of the family, so they spend on health, education and nutrition.

In order to increase their production and therefore their incomes, smallholder farmers need access to affordable inputs, like seeds and fertilisers, and to technology, credit and advice. With climate change affecting so much of the African continent, they must also have access to drought-resistant varieties and crops with higher nutrition; they need to be shown how drip irrigation goes specifically to the roots of plants so that they do not spray water on to soil that does not need it.

The UK is committed to spending £1.1 billion over the three years since the L’Aquila summit, but we are not delivering, so I call on the Minister with responsibility for Africa to step up the finance in all areas to provide better opportunities for these countries. The Department for International Development has the opportunity massively to increase its funding to food security and agricultural development when it increases its aid budget by £1.3 billion in 2013.

When there is a crisis like the one that we see in east Africa, flying humanitarian aid in in the form of food is so costly that it makes perfect sense to invest in helping people to become self-sufficient before the next drought and famine, but African countries need to do their bit as well. They are committed to spend at least 10% of their budgets on agriculture, but that is happening only in seven countries—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order.