Tokyo Nutrition for Growth Summit

Yasmin Qureshi Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2021 Westminster Hall

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. I thank the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) for securing this timely debate, and my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott) for all the work that she does in her APPG. I also thank the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady), my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma), and the hon. Member for Dundee West (Chris Law), who is the Front-Bench spokesperson for his party.

I will perhaps repeat some of the points that my colleagues have made, but this issue is so important that they need to be repeated again and again. As has been said, hunger and malnutrition are one of the world’s most serious but least addressed development challenges. Although the proportion and absolute number of chronically undernourished people has declined worldwide, the progress has been uneven among developing countries. The challenge we face in the international community is to build on that progress and accelerate the processes to improve nutrition.

Malnutrition affects lifelong development and contributes to half of all child deaths. Millions of children around the world are affected by the life-limiting outcomes of poor nutrition. In many developing countries, only one third of children under two are fed what they need for healthy growth; no progress has been made on improving their nutrition over the past decade.

A recent UNICEF report found that a combination of crises, from covid-19 to conflict and climate breakdown, had stunted progress on children’s nutrition in 91 countries. The report sets out that half of children aged from six to 23 months across a range of developing countries were not fed the minimum number of daily meals, and even fewer had a diverse diet that met minimum requirements.

Until recently, the Government regularly reminded us of their objective to ensure

“12 years of quality education for all girls”

—a very noble aim. However, such objectives cannot be met unless we also support nutrition. Nutrition has implications for a child’s employment prospects and therefore the economic success of their country. Good nutrition relies on food and agricultural systems that deliver healthy and diverse diets at a cost that people can afford.

It is estimated that undernutrition in childhood reduces an individual’s earning potential by 10% and has the same impact on GDP rates, with a total global economic cost of $3.5 trillion. Progress can only be made through joint global action to build, strengthen and transform food systems, so that children can get the nutrition they need to survive and then thrive. This underlines exactly why we need our Government to tackle this problem and invest in more nutrition.

However, the Government seem to be considering doing the opposite. Earlier this year we discovered that they are planning to spend 70% less on vital nutrition services, by cutting £100 million from the aid budget. They are aware that such a move would leave tens of thousands of children hungry and even at risk of starvation. Is that what we are now coming to? Are we now looking at the near collapse of British help for hungry children in some of the world’s poorest and most dangerous countries, including Yemen, Somalia and Sudan?

Ending preventable child deaths will never be achieved if we ignore the role that prolonged malnutrition plays in a child’s development and future quality of life. It is simply not credible for the Government to claim global leadership in tackling hunger while slashing aid. That amounts to nothing more than a hollow “global Britain” slogan with nothing tangible behind it.

Perhaps what makes this situation most sad and self-defeating is that Britain has been a genuine global leader in this area for the past decade, saving lives and gaining a huge soft power benefit as a result. I implore the Minister to recommit to reaching out to over 50 million children, women and adolescent girls with nutrition-relevant programmes by 2025. That is a target that the Department for International Development made and even exceeded between 2015 and 2020.

We all know that next week the Tokyo Nutrition for Growth summit will take place. The first Nutrition for Growth summit in 2013 was, of course, hosted by the United Kingdom. It mobilised some £17 billion in new investment, with the UK contributing massively to that sum. Since 2013, the number of children whose physical or cognitive growth has been stunted by malnutrition has been reduced by over 13 million.

Despite the progress that I have just mentioned, nutrition remains one of the most pressing issues in global development. If progress is to continue, we must see the UK leading once again in Tokyo by taking steps to ensure that nutrition is embedded within the UK aid’s portfolio and pledging funds that are at least at the same level as those pledged since 2013. Ideally, of course, it would be great to have an uplift.

When the Minister responds to the debate, can she say whether the Government will commit to making such a pledge at Tokyo? Will they commit to fund nutrition-specific services to a level that is roughly equivalent to that between 2015 and 2020, which was about £120 million per year or roughly 1% of the ODA budget? That small increase would reflect inflation, the UK’s economic growth and the global shortfall in funding for nutrition.

Can the Minister also tell us who will represent the United Kingdom at the Tokyo summit? Ensuring that there is high-level ministerial attendance at the summit, drafting ambitious policy commitments, considering a match funding scheme and co-financing and supporting the implementation of countries’ national nutrition plans would all send a strong message that our Government take nutrition seriously.

Nutrition is so paramount in human life that it intersects with almost all aspects of development policy and is therefore fundamental to delivering on our goals. Therefore, I hope that the Minister who attends the Tokyo summit will make a powerful case for the importance of nutrition and address the issues that my parliamentary colleagues and I have raised this afternoon.