Food Security and Famine Prevention (Africa)

Eilidh Whiteford Excerpts

Thursday 15th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

I congratulate the hon. Members for Hastings and Rye (Amber Rudd) and for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) on securing the debate, and add my tribute to those who have given so generously to the appeal. Over the past few months, dramatic events at home and in other parts of the world have diverted attention away from the huge and ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in east Africa. We have an important opportunity today to highlight what is going on in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya.

The fact that people have been so generous to the DEC appeal and to the appeals of other agencies shows that there is public concern about this issue. It is sad that the response of citizens stands in such sharp contrast to the response from parts of the international community. Oxfam estimates that there is a shortfall of $1 billion in the funding needed to meet the immediate humanitarian needs in this year alone. I am glad that the UK Government have done their bit and I wish the Secretary of State every success in his efforts to persuade people in other donor countries that they need to do likewise.

Perhaps the most galling aspect of the crisis is the fact that the famine was preventable. As other speakers have said this afternoon, early warning systems were in place that worked and were effective, but we collectively ignored those warning signals. It is always easy to be wise after the event, but there is no reason why a potentially manageable crisis in east Africa was allowed to become a catastrophe on such a monumental scale. Although the short-term focus has to be on humanitarian relief—keeping people alive through health interventions and the provision of food, sanitation and water—we also need to look at the underlying causes of the crisis and ensure that the UK’s longer-term development work invests heavily in preventive initiatives that reduce vulnerability to famine in east Africa and other parts of the world.

Other hon. Members have mentioned the very complex political situation in east Africa, which has led to long-standing problems of conflict, political instability and weak governance. I will use the short time available to me this afternoon to focus on two other aspects of the crisis, the first of which is the impact of climate change.

A key factor in the crisis is the changing weather patterns in the region, which has always been prone to drought. In recent years, the frequency of drought has been increasing and there have been long and repeated periods of unpredictable weather. Over the past few years, those changes have been wearing down people’s resilience and changing the way they live, as they find that traditional farming methods no longer work. As has been mentioned, life for the pastoralists has become extraordinarily difficult. Without enough water, their livestock die and they lose not only their economic livelihood but their only assets. I know that some aid agencies, including the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund, have been buying up livestock before they die from pastoralists in northern Kenya and other parts of east Africa, so that they can give people money to keep themselves alive through the crisis. In the longer term, however, at the global level, we need to invest in the climate fund set up at Cancun and persuade other donors to honour their commitments and put money into the mechanisms that have been established to pre-empt and prevent such crises.

The second aspect I want to discuss has already been raised by others in the context of food security and economic development. Despite the importance that we all attach to agriculture, it has been very unfashionable in development terms for a number of years and now represents a very small part of development aid budgets. An awful lot more emphasis is needed on supporting smallholders and investing in technical support for them. Since the L’Aquila summit in 2009, there have been commitments to boost agriculture spending, which has put those issues back on the agenda, but we are still looking for clarity on what that is achieving. I make a plea to the Government not to consign those commitments to the collective recycling bin, but to hold donor countries accountable for the commitments they have made.

Let me briefly draw particular attention to the role of women in agriculture. Although they form the majority of smallholder agricultural workers in Africa, they rarely own their land and they have very poor market access; in addition, they rarely have access to the kind of credit facilities that farmers in all parts of the world need to sustain themselves. Given the imbalance of power, we must not reinforce those inequalities. I think we all recognise the importance of putting women and girls at the heart of efforts in health and education, but when we talk about business and climate change, we become a lot more gender blind and start talking in more general terms. We have to understand that if we reinforce existing inequalities, we will entrench poverty even deeper in those communities.

My time is running out, so I shall conclude. We are responding to an immediate crisis, as we have to, but let us learn the lessons and try to look ahead, on a multilateral and international level, at how we can reduce the vulnerability of people economically to these shocks and put them in a better position to withstand the crises they face as a result of climate disasters and erratic weather.