Rio+20 Summit

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I thank the hon. Lady for her recognition of what I think is our shared commitment to the agenda discussed at Rio. I totally share her support for the zero hunger initiative; I attended a session in Rio at which the initiative was discussed. She asked about the hunger summit that will be held this summer. I do not know the precise agenda, but she referred to the importance of legal rights to property and land, which are crucial to dealing with hunger sustainably.

The hon. Lady asked about the interaction between sustainable development goals, ill-defined though they were at the Rio summit, and the work on the post-2015 agenda. The Government’s strong view is that the sustainable development goals as defined by the group of 30 representatives, which will be established in September, must feed into the wider review of the millennium development goals through the high-level panel that has been established by the Secretary-General.

I will not disguise from the hon. Lady the fact that within that procedural complexity, there are a lot of sensitivities. Candidly, some developing countries have hitherto felt that their voice is not strongly enough heard in some UN processes. The Prime Minister and his co-chairs will work hard to ensure that the voices of the developing world are properly listened to in the review of the MDGs to allay the concern that precisely the part of the world that will benefit most from the process is shut out from it. We need to do quite of lot of work to ensure that the different acronyms and processes do not start becoming rival acronyms and process—that is a danger.

The hon. Lady mentioned the sustainable energy for all initiative, which I am glad she supports; it is an outstanding initiative. I hosted a preparatory meeting of the group on the initiative in London some months ago. We had hoped that the Rio declaration would adopt the initiative as a core conclusion. In the event, because of the nervousness of some participants on what the initiative means and its implications, it was “recognised” in the declaration. We would have inserted a stronger verb, but none the less, as with all those initiatives, we now need to exploit that recognition and work on it.

The hon. Lady complained that the proposal on greenhouse gas emissions reporting does not go far enough. We have to start somewhere. We are the only country doing this. Some people complain that we have already gone too far and are imposing too many burdens on business. Other business groups, such as the CBI, have welcomed the proposal. I think we are breaking new ground, and I hope she will welcome that rather than cast aspersions on it.

The hon. Lady will know that the Darwin initiative is a robust initiative that we are using to monitor the plight of endangered species. Finally, she rightly said that these summits make sense only if one acts consistently with them at home. We are rightly proud of our record: we are the first country to establish a green investment bank; the green deal, which will be up and running in the coming six to eight months or so, will be the largest initiative of its kind for installing energy efficiency measures and bringing down energy bills in homes up and down the country; and the green sector, the green economy, is growing by about 5% a year, employs close to 1 million people in this country and actually runs a trade surplus. That is something we should cherish and celebrate. The carbon floor price is another major innovation of the Government, while the electricity market reform, which is one of the most ambitious legislative and regulatory overhauls of an electricity market I am aware of anywhere in the developed world, is explicitly designed to ensure that we have a sustainable energy mix for future generations.

[Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

I congratulate everyone involved on what was a genuine team effort. Will the Deputy Prime Minister assure the House that one of Rio’s lasting legacies will be the agreement to reaffirm a universal, open, non-discriminatory and equitable multilateral trading system for food and agricultural products? Will he give an undertaking that we will really push for Doha to deliver this through the World Trade Organisation?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

No one is in any doubt that one of the greatest boosts to prosperity across the world would be a successful completion of the very, very, very, very long-awaited Doha development round. It is immensely frustrating that getting agreement on it has proved so elusive. Many have written it off altogether, and it is difficult not to be pessimistic about it, but that does not mean that we should not continue to pursue the cause of multilateral trade liberalisation.