World Food Prices

My Lords, my noble friend has reminded us that this is obviously a critical global issue that involves us all. Perhaps a billion people are now threatened by hunger, and there have been food riots across the world. The millennium development goals, especially the one on poverty reduction, will have been set back several years. I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, for introducing this debate and drawing Africa to our attention. Speaking in the debate we are mainly Peers interested in international development and agriculture, and the Minister speaks mainly for the Department for International Development, but this is a much wider issue, and it seems that we shall not cover adequately the important subjects of trade, economics, finance and foreign policy. Many Peers with expertise in those areas may, I fear, have been frightened off by the sheer magnitude of the problem, and that is to be regretted. However, we have expert Peers contributing to the debate, and I look forward in particular to the speech of my noble friend Lord Haskins in a moment. We who are concerned with developing countries have to look at the price rises through the eyes of the very poorest, who are hardest hit, but we also have to ask what a crisis is. Every year there is a crisis in countries such as Mali and Burkina Faso, and this year is no exception; the price rises we are discussing are additional problems. In spite of the FAO’s excellent early-warning systems, we do not hear very much about these crises until famine is well under way. There are, for instance, acute food shortages right now after two years of drought in Karamoja, in northern Uganda, with the risk of another famine. Will the Government respond promptly to the increased humanitarian needs arising from the increase in food prices and drought, especially in west Africa and Ethiopia? To mention just one organisation in this country, Save the Children is appealing for $20 million to help around 900,000 people, including 325,000 children, who are victims of the current food crisis in Ethiopia. We hear constantly of the war in Afghanistan and the Taliban, but we do not hear the complaints of the poorest, the malnourished and the smaller farmers suffering from drought. Only this week I have read reports of drastic falls in fruit production in Balkh province and of poor harvests in Gorh, Badakshan and elsewhere in the north. It is essential that post-conflict countries are enabled to rebuild their infrastructure and agricultural capacity. I believe that this is slowly happening even in Afghanistan, but I would like to hear that the Government are doing more for Afghan agriculture, because we are sending billions there for defence purposes. The story is not as good in Africa, where despite our efforts through the Africa Commission and the Commonwealth, there is far too little expenditure on transport to allow goods to be transported, even within countries with huge agricultural potential such as Mozambique and Uganda, a subject mentioned yesterday by the noble Baroness, Lady Rawlings. The immediate concern is about food prices and shortages, and one of the obstacles is the tendency of Governments in this crisis to place a ban on their exports. This is quite understandable and normally unstoppable. The FAO recently published forecast import bills for the least developed and low-income countries—the very poorest countries—showing that their annual food imports by the end of this year could be quadruple the price they paid in 2000. The developing countries food bill rose from $190 billion to $253 billion last year. Much of this comes from regional surpluses and may be needed urgently. A current example is the food shortages in Niger, which could be met from surpluses in Burkina Faso next door. Perhaps I may therefore press the Minister on the point I raised about the World Food Programme during Question Time yesterday: what is the Government’s response to the call from the World Food Programme during the African summit to exempt humanitarian agencies from export restrictions so that states with surplus food could help meet deficits in poorer countries? The noble Lord gave me some encouragement about the European Union yesterday, and I hope he will have a fuller answer today. The world food shortages and price rises inevitably spawn instant solutions, as I well remember from the previous world food crisis, in 1974. The World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, has put forward a 10-point proposal, which I shall summarise: fund the World Food Programme properly; support emergency food for work programmes; bring in more seeds and fertilisers; double the amount of research; invest in agribusiness; support small farmers; ease subsidies on biofuels; remove export bans; support fairer trade through the Doha process; and support more G8 collective action, through the global food crisis response facility, for example. The noble Lord, Lord Taverne, along with others, has revived the idea of reintroducing GM crops against the prevailing trend of sustainable and organic farming. I have no doubt that there is a place for GM crops and for the use of chemicals, but I have strong reservations, along the lines of the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, about their use in the least developed countries. I do not dispute the noble Lord’s claims on behalf of small farmers, but many have to live in environments where there is no water, as the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, has pointed out. I am not thinking only of the flowers and fruit that we get from the vicinity of Nairobi airport, but of vast export-led plantations all over the developing world, all of which require massive irrigation. Large-scale projects in Africa and India have traditionally favoured large farmers and exporters not the malnourished. My own experience of the green revolution in India—I, of course, remember the name of Norman Borlaug—was that many farmers grew wealthy in states such as Punjab while the majority of the poorer farmers in UP and AP were comparatively worse off because, even where they had access to irrigation, they were unable to afford the machinery, fertiliser and the other inputs required. I know that my noble friend Lord Bilimoria will take issue with this—we will resolve the debate within the Cross Benches—but we forget in this country how serious the inequalities are in tropical countries and how hard it is for some farmers in the remoter dry-land farming areas who are dependent on the vagaries of government extension services and the outreach of non-governmental organisations. It is hard for them to pay for the inputs needed, even for drought-resistant crops. I acknowledge the research that is going on into such crops, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Taverne. As he and other noble Lords have said, we forget how little aid and agriculture research reaches these rain-fed areas—Oxfam and FARM-Africa were mentioned, and my noble friend Lord Bilimoria gave prominence to the issue. In fact, funding has recently moved away from, not towards, these areas. Multilateral aid to African agriculture fell from 32 per cent of total aid in 1981 to only 7 per cent in 2001, according to the World Bank’s evaluation unit. Will Her Majesty’s Government make a renewed effort to support this kind of research? I have considerable doubts about the withdrawal of subsidies for biofuels based on research I have seen from north-east Brazil. Brazil is the golden boy of biofuels and ethanol and is undoubtedly an economic and industrial success story, but I do not agree with the assertion made last week by the Economist that it has hardly affected the rainforest. Of course it has. In more human terms, the increase in sugar production, quite apart from the land issue, is achieved literally on the backs of the poorest and most exploited labour force, which is at the mercy of farmers who tie their migrant workers into a feudal contract—a modern form of debt slavery. Whatever we do in Europe and the US with subsidies to help ourselves, we must take an equal interest in what is happening to labour in other countries. The ILO and the churches are doing their utmost to free these workers in Brazil from tyranny. This issue is completely ignored by European negotiators, who are solely concerned with our trading interests and our own production of biofuels. Finally, on the subject of trade, I am sure the Minister will acknowledge the effect of farm subsidies on world food prices, as well as the unexpected purchase of food by Russia and the OPEC countries. He will, I hope, confirm that the European Union is doing very little to reform the CAP at present—perhaps it is diverted by other issues—that the new economic partnership agreements are eating away at the sustainability of the poorest African, Caribbean and Pacific countries, and that the Doha round still shows little sign of life. All these things are having an adverse effect on the ability of developing countries to feed themselves, but, as the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, said, none so much as the lack of water.