Latin America

: It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mrs. Humble. I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Mr. Blizzard) on securing this valuable debate. In the almost three years in which I have been in the Department for International Development, I have had the privilege of visiting Peru, Nicaragua and, more recently, Brazil, so I, too, welcome the opportunity to discuss our strategy for Latin America with Members of the House. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend's passion for Latin America and to the way in which he campaigns on the issue in the House. Also, I pay tribute—as the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Mark Simmonds) did—to the way in which my hon. Friend has chaired the all-party group on Latin America. My hon. Friend paid tribute to a number of non-governmental organisations; the Vine Trust is just one with which he has had contact. I join him in paying tribute to it and to several other NGOs that DFID funds in the region and I hope that there will be more shortly. My hon. Friends the Members for Waveney and for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) rightly drew attention to the continuing poverty and inequality in Latin America. As we know, 57 million people live on less than $1 a day in Latin America and the Caribbean, but the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean has gone beyond those statistics to bring home the scale of the poverty and inequality. It estimates that 43 per cent. of Latin America's population, or 222 million people, are poor and that about 19 per cent., or 96 million people, are extremely poor. The poorest countries in the region are Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Paraguay, although only Nicaragua is officially classified as a low-income country. As all hon. Members said, however, substantial numbers of poor people also live in the large middle-income countries, such as Brazil and Mexico. The UK Government and the Department for International Development, in particular, must continue to help tackle those issues. My hon. Friend the Member for Waveney rightly said that Latin America will be crucial to international efforts to meet the millennium development goals. So far, as the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer) said, there has been pretty disappointing performance on the environmental indicators. More positively, good progress is being made on under-five mortality, access to safe water, gender equality and universal primary enrolment. Although things are moving in the right direction, hon. Members are right to stress that the international community must not allow its attention to wander from the other issues that need to be tackled. Our approach to Latin America must be considered in the context of what other multilateral agencies and bilateral donors are doing in the region. The Inter-American Development Bank is the region's largest development partner, providing $6.8 billion in 2003. It is followed by the World Bank, which provided $5.8 billion in 2002–03. The European Commission is also a substantial donor, providing $375 million in 2004, and the UK contributes to such funds. There are also significant bilateral donors, including the US, Japan and the Spanish. It is important to recognise the scale of development assistance to the region. It is right that we prioritise our development assistance to low-income countries. That is why Africa and Asia are also a focus for the Department and why the UK's main financial contribution is made through multilateral channels. My hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North asked me to announce some good news. Given his extra-curricular interests and his excellent judgment on such issues, I shall try to offer him some comfort. The present prioritisation sees 90 per cent. of funding go to low-income countries and 10 per cent. to middle-income countries. In addition, we have made a commitment to achieve the 0.7 per cent. goal by 2013. That means a rising budget not only for low-income countries, but for middle-income countries. As part of the discussions that we will inevitably have with the House and the Treasury about the comprehensive spending review, we shall have to make a judgment about where those increased resources for middle-income countries should go.