It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Bone. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) on securing this debate, which is timely given the summit next week, and because yesterday was World AIDS Day, and nutrition is crucial in helping people infected with HIV/AIDS—as well as those with covid and many other diseases, as we have heard.
I am struck by the link between this debate and one that we had on Tuesday in Westminster Hall on the wellbeing economy approach to measuring success and what matters. That debate was particularly about our response to climate change, but it is at the heart of the issue of nutrition for growth as well.
Katherine Trebeck, a constituent of mine, is a leading thinker on wellbeing economics. She talks about how we can reframe the kind of goals we want to achieve and the measures that we make of society. One of her cornerstone indicators is how many girls in a country cycle to school. That can be applied in the United Kingdom and in sub-Saharan Africa. A range of things have to come together to increase that number, and the benefits of that increase are so important for so many other things across society.
Nutrition is absolutely at the core of that. Any of us who wants to expend energy—in fighting disease, paying attention in class, working in heavy industry or talking in Westminster Hall—has to be adequately fed. We recognise that in our country. One of the biggest political debates during the covid crisis was free school meals. The Government had to respond to the national outcry led by Marcus Rashford, who knows from experience that sustenance and adequate nutrition are the foundation of everything a person might want to do in daily life. The series of Nutrition for Growth summits are recognition of the centrality of good nutrition to human development. The summit in a couple of weeks will build on previous summits. We recognise that they were started under the Conservative Government of David Cameron, but of course that Government reached the 0.7% target and increased the amount of money that the UK was spending on international development. I will come back to that, because sadly that is not what this Conservative Government are doing.
Nutrition is the underlying driver of, and essential to meeting, 12 of the 17 sustainable development goals, and it is absolutely crucial to the second sustainable development goal of ending hunger in all its forms by 2030, which is not very far away at all. Again, I pay tribute to David Cameron’s work to mobilise global opinion behind the SDGs. People questioned whether 17 SDGs was enough or too many. It is the right number, because those were identified as the goals that we need to meet in order to build a more sustainable and just world for everybody.
The fact that the goal on hunger is the second SDG is recognition of how important it is to achieving everything else that we want to achieve. I pay tribute to the work of the University of Nottingham, and particularly Professor Nicola Pitchford; at a recent meeting of all-party parliamentary groups, they gave a presentation on a very impressive study they are doing in Malawi to monitor, prove and demonstrate the significance of nutrition for all the other wellbeing indicators. The right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale is vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Malawi, and we share a deep interest in that country. That study will use big data from across the whole country; 4,500 mother and infant pairs will be studied over the long term to see what difference different kinds of intervention can make. Crucial to that will, of course, be the kind of food and the adequacy of the nutrition that they are able to access.
The latest FCDO annual report states that Malawi is to experience a 50% cut in the aid it receives from the United Kingdom. This has to be addressed. I know it is uncomfortable. Ministers do not like it, and Conservative Back Benchers do not like it very much either, but the reality is that the United Kingdom is set to make one of the biggest cuts to its overseas nutrition work in history. The aid budget as a whole faces a cut of roughly a third, and aid for nutrition is set to be slashed by 70%. That is the finding of the International Coalition for Advocacy on Nutrition, which produced a through report with some important recommendations, some of which the right hon. Gentleman echoed.
The difficulty, which we were warned of when the cuts came forward, is that they are not being applied equally across the board. It is almost impossible to apply them equally across the board, so the Government are having to pick and choose between priorities, whether that is priority issues or priority countries. As soon as they do that, other projects and programmes that have been supported by the Department for International Development and the FCDO suffer disproportionately.
The reality of the cuts is that the money will not turn back on like a tap in a couple of years’ time when the Chancellor says, “We’re going to get back to 0.7%.” That will be of no use to programmes that are closing now, for experience that is being lost now, to staff who are moving to other projects or moving elsewhere, and for the progress that has been made with cohorts who are not receiving inputs now. That will have a long-term consequence, even if the budget is brought back up to 0.7% in a couple of years’ time—and we will wait to see whether that is what happens. I have to contrast that with what the Scottish Government are doing. They have increased their international development fund, despite the pressures on their budget as a whole. When Scotland becomes an independent country, we absolutely
want to meet 0.7%. We have recently offered £250,000 to help with the hunger crisis in Sudan, and another £250,000 to Afghanistan because of the approaching catastrophic winter famine.
As the hon. Member for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott) said, this issue affects countries all around the world. We are particularly focused, in the summit and in the debate, on Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and developing countries in the least developed category, but the issue affects so many people. As I said at the start, it affects us here at home as well. That is why I warmly welcome the Scottish Government’s commitments on free school meals. Over many years now, that has been rolled out to increasing numbers of primary school children. The Scottish Government are going further, faster, because they recognise the difference that it makes to the wellbeing of children, their educational opportunities and closing the attainment gap. If it is good enough for us here in Scotland and the United Kingdom, it should be good enough for all the countries that we work with around the world.
I hope that the Minister will recognise the foundational importance of nutrition for all the other development goals that we aspire to reach, and that the UK Government will find a way to show leadership when it comes to requests made by stakeholder groups and by the Members in today’s debate. If we do not do that, it will put all the other goals at risk, because of the foundational nature of this topic.
I know things are difficult for the Minister; first of all, half the ministerial team are off because of various commitments and self-isolation. They have been working very hard this week, between Westminster Hall and the Chamber. Also, it is difficult because it is an uncomfortable decision that has been made. However, we have to be honest about the reality of the impact of the cuts. We need to work together in order to find the best way to act to make the best of the situation, and to use the resources as effectively as possible, so that they make as big a difference as possible.
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