Food Security and Famine Prevention (Africa)

Tony Baldry Excerpts

Thursday 15th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

I spent time with Oxfam in Ethiopia during the famine of 1984. It is difficult to describe the horror of famine—its scale, one’s helplessness, the Martian-headed skeletons of marasmus, the swollen bellies of kwashiorkor, and the glassy eyes of children one knows, notwithstanding all efforts, will be dead by tomorrow. Then and now, these famines of biblical proportions kill fellow human beings slowly, painfully, and desperately. It is the death of their humanity and a collective test of ours.

I want to make three points in the short time available to me. First, we need to do more to enhance and improve food and crop production in the horn of Africa and elsewhere in Africa. It is not sustainable to seek to keep alive millions of people in the horn of Africa in the hope of yearly grain surpluses from Nebraska, Australia or elsewhere. The UN estimates that $2.4 billion is required to meet immediate humanitarian needs until this December. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson) observed, there is a funding gap of $1 billion, and no funding for ongoing needs and recovery. This is simply not sustainable. We need to enhance agricultural production in Africa and the horn of Africa.

Secondly, we have to face up to the reality of population growth as a development issue. If a country’s economy is growing each year by 3% and its population is growing each year by 7%, then each year its sustainability is going steadily backwards. For example, the population of Ethiopia is now twice what it was at the time of the 1984 famine. Here is the wake-up call: in Ethiopia, even in a good harvest year, aid agencies are still feeding the same number of people as the number who received food aid in 1984. It is difficult to cultivate large parts of Ethiopia because of endemic malaria. Elsewhere, land is exhausted by over-use. Up in the Simien mountains, I have seen farmers with oxen and ploughs seeking to cultivate ever more marginal rocky outcrops, desperate for any extra land. The situation is unsustainable. Along with Lynda Chalker, I represented the UK Government at the UN population conference in Cairo in 1994. That conference, held over 15 years ago, was the last attempt by the international community to address the issue of population growth, and it needs addressing again.

Thirdly, the deliverers of the apocalypse ride together: hunger, illness, death and conflict. As the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) made clear in her very welcome contribution, Somalia is a failed state—a basket case. It is a liability to itself and to its neighbours, viz the recent murder and kidnapping in Kenya: a personal tragedy and a broader tragedy for the Kenyans’ tourism industry and economy. Al-Shabaab has brought chaos to Mogadishu and terror to the rest of the region. The African Union deserves our support in seeking to bring stability to Somalia, but that process needs focus, concentration and consistency. For far too long, so-called Somali warlords have been ripping off the west in phoney peace talks in the luxury of Nairobi resort hotels, running their businesses from the comfort of Kenya while pretending to try to find peaceful solutions for Somalia.

Nor should we forget that the one part of Somalia that is stable, peaceful and potentially productive is what was once the British Somaliland Protectorate and is now Somaliland. For 20 years, Somaliland has had repeated democratic elections, a functioning presidency, a functioning Parliament and defined borders, and it has been wishing for and wanting de jure recognition by the international community. At the first consultative meeting on ending the transition, which was held recently in Mogadishu, I observed that it had delegates from all sorts of places, including the EU and the UN, but, as far as I am aware, no invitation had been sent to Somaliland for observer status or to take part in those discussions. Of course we need stability in Somalia, but the international community also needs to resolve the legal status of Somaliland. Unless we resolve the conflict in Somalia, we will never have peace in the horn of Africa, and until we have peace in the horn of Africa, we will continue to have famine.