Climate Change

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, for initiating this debate, but, even more, for inviting me to speak. He knows what my passion is, and he still invited me. I thank him for that. I am very pleased that not only he, but the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool, touched on the population issue. I had the privilege of hearing the right reverend Prelate give a lecture at St George’s House on this very issue—not on population, but on climate change and so on. It was an extremely good lecture and I, too, thank him for speaking today. Nice things have been said about India, and as I am Indian, I have appreciated them. But I remind the noble Lords who have said nice things about India that it has more malnourished people than any other part of the world. Let us not get carried away by the progress and the things that we see happening, including the increase in business and in India’s capacity to buy companies abroad and so on, because the poorest people have not been touched. In fact, if anything, they have become poorer. As I have always said, the poorest of the poor are women. Women in the Indian subcontinent and Africa are the poorest; their lives are not much different to those of slaves. They are very disposable, too; if a woman dies or becomes sick, it does not matter—you get another one. So I will speak more about that issue, because it is very much connected with population. I remind the noble Lord, Lord Soley, that he chaired a committee which produced a report on the role of intergovernmental organisations. It stated very clearly that population increase was one of the major reasons for a rise in the prevalence of some devastating diseases, such as HIV, TB and malaria, and the possibility of an influenza pandemic. We should bear in mind that that increase is connected not only to climate change and greenhouse gases but to the devastation, to which my noble friend Lord Tanlaw referred, caused by burning whatever is available in order to cook food. The noble Lord, Lord Browne, when chairman of BP, arranged for some scientists to produce a cooking stove that would take any kind of material. It was sold, at a very low price, to women in India because, like me, the noble Lord believed that charity does not work. You have to make people give something for something. When you give something for an item, you use it; otherwise, you get it but do not use it. I am concerned that I have not heard what happened to that stove. We need far more of that type of thing in developing countries to help women, in particular, to save the environment. Women are in many ways the key players in this matter in poor countries. They are closest to the environment, they carry the water and they rear the children. We also have to recognise how many women die in childbirth: one every minute. Also, 6 million children die every year from malnutrition, yet population has not become a major issue in discussions around the globe. We marvel at the progress that China has made and how it has changed, but do noble Lords believe that China could have done that without its one-child policy? I do not. Some 400 million children have not been born in China as a result of that policy. Mao’s attitude to population was that China’s strength lay in people. Six, seven or eight children were being born in each family. If China had not taken that drastic step, it would not have made such big leaps so quickly. The two other areas where large population increases are possible are Africa and the subcontinent of India. The noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, referred to aiming for a negative target by 2050, when there will be more than 8 billion people on this planet. One hundred years earlier, in 1950, there were 2.6 billion people. If we just keep that figure in mind, it will remind us of the extent to which climate change is caused by the number of people on the planet, yet that argument is not brought forward as a central issue. I realise that not every country has a dictatorship in the way that China has, and not every country can say, "You will not have any children". There are numerous countries in Africa, where the population is likely to increase by 1.3 billion by 2050—the largest increase in the world. The people there are already malnourished and the children are already dying of hunger. When the population reaches that figure, how many more people, including children and mothers, will die? It is all very well for me to spell out all the negatives to noble Lords, but I do so because they are not becoming central points for people to think and talk about. I know that a great deal of our aid goes towards family planning but, overall, the amount given for family planning through aid agencies has reduced. It is most appalling that it is reducing and not increasing. I have to say a word about the Catholic Church. It is doing something which should be considered a breach of all our human rights—particularly of women’s human rights. I should very much like someone to tell me exactly where the Bible says that you cannot use any kind of family planning. I have not found it but I would like to know how and where this notion started. When the churches came into existence, there were very few people. Muslims are quite open about having large families: they do so because they want more Muslims in the world. However, if that is also Catholic ideology, the Catholic Church should tell us. It should say that it wants Catholics to have more children because it wants more Catholics. However, it does not say that; it just says that family planning is a sin. That is a terrible problem for women, in particular, who are concerned about their faith, and it also has an impact in places where there are not just Catholics but where much of the education and welfare is carried out through Catholic churches and sits alongside the anti-family planning dogma. I repeat that I find that very worrying. I should like to touch on the millennium development goals, which were signed up to by 189 countries in 2000. We are now nine years on and the goals are supposed to be met by 2015. I do not know whoever thought for a moment that they could be met, or even that we could have made a move towards them, by then. We have not moved towards achieving any of the millennium development goals. The only figure that I have been able to find is that 4 million children have received primary education. That has happened in nine years but there must already be an extra 4 million children by now. Therefore, we will always be chasing our tails if we do not do something about population. One of the goals is about hunger and poverty, which concerns agriculture. Eighty per cent of the agriculture in Africa is looked after by women, who do not receive any payment or economic reward for it. It is agriculture carried out at subsistence level. If we started to work with those women and got co-operatives going, they could feed half of Africa’s population, but we do not do that. As my time is running out, I turn to my final point. Having painted this dire picture, I want to put forward a solution. If we help poor women in Africa and the subcontinent to earn a small amount of money—to become employees and not just work from morning till night for nothing—they will change and begin to feel that they are worth something. They will look after their health and send their children to school. They will not drink or gamble and nor will they collect men off the streets. This is where the answer lies: we should concentrate on helping poor women to earn money. We have been talking about education, but education cannot come to them. That is not possible; it is a pipe dream. Children can be educated but, at that stage of their lives, mothers cannot. If we help mothers to earn money, they will educate their children and they will also start to think about family planning. This is the only solution for our planet—to try to halt the huge increase in population. We should work with the women and help them to earn money. All businesses should start to think of employing at least a few women. Only in India and Africa are poor women not in the workforce, whereas in Burma and elsewhere, they are. In Burma, of course, it is a different story, but all the other countries have improved their economies and their earning capacity by having women are in the workforce. It is not a western idea.