It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Nuttall. I thank the hon. Member for Hertsmere (Oliver Dowden) for introducing this debate. I am also pleased to see the Foreign Office Minister and the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West), in their places.
I was the shadow Foreign Office Minister covering this part of the world for four years, until about a year ago. I also had the human rights brief. The ongoing frustration is that it is always so difficult to get people to listen to arguments about human rights issues in our relationships with other countries, let alone get them to consider the animal welfare issues. I was rather disappointed when I asked a question last Thursday of the new Secretary of State for International Trade and President of the Board of Trade, the right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox), about the Government’s action plan on business and human rights that was launched with much fanfare three years ago. I asked where the action plan fits into the new Department for International Trade—when going out to other countries to negotiate trade agreements, will we be aware of the attempt by the former Foreign Secretary, William Hague, to meld the desire to trade with companies and to talk about human rights? The answer I got was pretty much, “That’s a completely separate issue. It’s something for the Foreign Office and nothing to do with us.”
If we cannot even persuade that Department that human rights should be on the agenda when we are negotiating trade agreements, we will have difficulty making the argument that animal welfare should be on there too. I hope that the Foreign Office Minister takes that back to his colleagues and starts talking to the new Ministers in the Department for International Trade about the importance of this issue and the strength of feeling about it.
I had the pleasure of visiting South Korea a few years ago with the UK-Korea Forum for the Future. Every two years, some UK parliamentarians go out to South Korea, and every other year, people from the South Korean Parliament come over here. South Korea is not only a major trading ally of the UK; it is also our friend, but that should not stop us at times being a critical friend. It is interesting to note in the Library briefing that the consumption of dog meat in South Korea did not become commonplace until the Korean war in the 1950s. It is easy to forget what an incredibly poor country South Korea was back then, lagging well behind its neighbour to the north. Of course, now the situation has been reversed, and we hear reports that Kim Jong-un’s people are on the verge of starvation. Obviously, the human rights situation is dreadful there too.
One of the fascinating things about my visit to South Korea was seeing how the country had transformed itself from abject post-war poverty into an economic export-led powerhouse, albeit not always under the most democratic leadership. Seoul now presents as a very modern, high-tech city, with gleaming skyscrapers
and excellent transport, but as we have heard, some of the old ways remain, including the dog meat trade. As my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Sir Alan Meale) mentioned, 5 million dogs are involved in the trade every year. I have seen figures that show that more than 2 million dogs are factory farmed in South Korea for human consumption. They are kept in terrible conditions in tiny cages, exposed to extreme heat and cold, before being cruelly killed, often via electrocution.