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The UK and Africa

Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con): The hon. Member for Putney (Mr. Colman) was kind enough to make reference to my chairmanship of the International Development Committee, and I would like to take the opportunity to thank him, the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Tony Worthington), my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow), the hon. Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) and the other six members of the Committee for all their phenomenally hard work during this Parliament. I hope that we have done our duty by the House and produced reports of some intellectual rigour. I warn the Minister that our report on Darfur—a unanimous report—will be published this Wednesday and that it will make sobering reading.

Today, like yesterday and tomorrow, 8,000 people in Africa will die from HIV/AIDS, 7,000 people in Africa will die of hunger, and 6,000 children will die from water-borne diseases. Their lives will be lost today, and similar lives will be lost tomorrow. Our television and newspapers try to report the immediacy of big events, but it is far harder to describe and communicate the persistent, unremitting daily grind of the raw, chronic poverty that one sees in Africa.

Some 20 years ago, shortly after being elected to the House, I went to Ethiopia, along with the hon. Members for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Bennett) and for Roxburgh and Berwickshire (Sir Archy Kirkwood). We were a small all-party team that was got together by Oxfam, concerned that the world was not taking sufficiently seriously the famine of biblical proportions that was then raging in northern Ethiopia.

In this Parliament, 20 years later, I returned to Ethiopia twice—once with the International Development Committee and once with the British Red Cross on a trek across the Simian mountains to raise money for the Ethiopian Red Cross and to help fund water-borne projects for schools. In some ways the country has greatly improved. Mengistu and his thugs have gone and Prime Minister Meles is trying hard to deliver. However, there are still the same grinding poverty, huge numbers of children not in school, rapidly increasing infection rates of HIV/AIDS—thins disease—and farmers desperately trying to eke a living from ever-poorer soil and coffee prices that are decimated.

The original Commission for Africa report is a somewhat shiny book. I submit that it is our collective responsibility to seek to translate its conclusions into a glowing reality. At the core of the report is the concept of "obuntu"—of our interconnectedness each with each other and nation with nation. In response to the tsunami disaster, the people of Britain clearly demonstrated their sense of that interconnectedness. Every year, the thousands who help organise events for Comic Relief, which this year raised some £70 million, show their commitment to others.

Following the commission's report, no one can feign ignorance of the full facts. The analysis, statistics, shortcomings and needs are all there. There is page after page of analysis. Africa does not need any more analysis; it needs action. To act is our clear moral duty, and not to act would be intolerable. For far too long the symbol of Africa has been an African child dying on our television screens. The needs are undisputed. As the report says:

"What Africa requires is clear. It needs better governance and the building of the capacity of African states to deliver. It needs peace. It needs political and economic stability to create a climate for growth—and a growth in which poor people can participate. It needs investment in infrastructure and in the health and education systems which will produce a healthy and skilled workforce as well as a happy and fulfilled people. It needs to trade more, and on fairer terms than the rich world has allowed to date. It needs more debt-relief. It needs aid of a better quality than at present. And it needs a doubling of aid to pay for this."

The report also makes it clear that there can be no more piecemeal approaches to Africa. It is clear that Africa needs the lot now—on debt, trade and aid. If it does not get that, it will be a disaster. The report puts it rather more elegantly:

"The actions proposed by the Commission constitute a coherent package for Africa. The problems they address are interlocking. They are vicious circles which reinforce one another. They must be tackled together. To do that Africa requires a comprehensive 'big push' on many fronts at once. Partners must work together to implement this package with commitment, perseverance and speed, each focusing on how they can make the most effective contribution."

How can people born in debt die owing more than on the day that they were born? For poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the objective must be 100 per cent. debt cancellation as soon as possible. A pathetic 2 per cent. of world trade emerges from Africa. What Africans need is the power to decide and an end to dumping. They need an end to export subsidies by 2010 to be agreed by the WTO at the meeting in Hong Kong later this year and an immediate end to cotton and sugar export subsidies. We need common agricultural policy reform in all that is just. The Commission for Africa observes:

"Agriculture is the activity from which the vast majority of the poorest Africans make their living; by contrast agriculture is not of great economic importance to most developed countries, accounting for a few per cent of national incomes, or less. Yet the agricultural sectors of many G8 and EU countries are the most heavily subsidised and protected in the economies of the industrialised world. Rich countries spend around US$350 billion a year on agricultural protection and subsidies—which is 16 times their aid to Africa. The European Union is responsible for 35 per cent of this, the United States for 27 per cent. and Japan for 22 per cent.

These policies have a harmful effect in both the poor and rich worlds. Taxpayers and consumers pay heavily to support their farmers—though, ironically, it is not small farmers in the EU and US who benefit: they get only four per cent of the subsidy, with more than 70 per cent going to the 25 per cent richest farmers, landowners and agribusiness companies. The result is that the EU subsidises sugar beet at such high levels that it is grown in Europe in places where it is economically irrational and inefficient to do so. And in the US subsidies to just 25,000 US farmers, who are paid twice the world market price for cotton, threaten the livelihoods of more than 10 million people in West Africa who produce the crop for a third of the price."

Can that situation be right?

We should extend the "everything but arms"-type access to all low-income African countries, and there should be greater regional integration. Europe should take the lead on that. I am glad to say that, at a conference held in the Guildhall last week, the Trade Commissioner, Peter Mandelson, said that Europe should start taking the lead. On the international finance facility, he said:

"If the United States, Japan and others do not want to take part in the International Finance Facility, I hope Europe will take a lead".

I also hope that Europe will take a lead, but I also hope that Europe will take a lead in trade reform.

That leads on to volumes of aid. The reality is that the most vulnerable and poorest receive the least help on the planet: $25 million, which is the proposed increase in aid from the world's seven richest countries, equates to 0.01 per cent. of our GDP. For any citizen of the G7, that is the equivalent of paying for half a stick of chewing gum a day. That is hardly a great sacrifice, particularly when we remember that every cow in Europe receives twice as much in daily subsidies as the overwhelming majority of people in Africa live on each day.

Of course improving governance and enhancing capacity is crucial. As the report observes:

"The issue of good governance and capacity-building is what we believe lies at the core of all of Africa's problems. Until that is in place Africa will be doomed to continue its economic stagnation."

The report has to be translated into action at the G8, however. It will be no good if we just receive a motherhood and apple pie communiqué from the G8 at Gleneagles. Between now and then, it behoves us all to use whatever contacts we have with other G8 countries to generate momentum behind the will to put the commission's proposals into action.

I make my final point, so that the hon. Member for City of York has ample time to get in. What we have seen from the US recently, with its proposal for the World Bank, does not encourage me. I draw hon. Members' attention to an answer that the Committee received from DFID last November:

"The UK considers it important that any new World Bank President should have a strong background in development issues and command respect and support from the membership. The UK favours a more open and consultative process than has occurred in the past for the selection of the President, whereby Bank membership are consulted on possible candidates with the Board the making final decision."

We would all say hallelujah to that. It behoves the US and other G8 members to see that they too enjoy some interconnectedness with the rest of the world. We should all play as one team, rather than having one country seeking to impose its agenda on the rest.