Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what projects in Africa with an agro-ecological component have been funded by her Department (a) directly and (b) indirectly in the last three years; and what criteria her Department uses for deciding which projects to fund under the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition.

DFID is directly and indirectly supporting a wide range of work that has an agro-ecological component, from soil and water conservation and land use management to climate resilience and conservation agriculture. We are working in a number of African countries, supporting programmes like the Community Land Use Fund in Mozambique and programmes for soil and water conservation such as the Karamoja Resilience programme in Uganda. DFID’s global climate change and agriculture food security research programme is building the evidence base for how better to deliver agro-ecological approaches, while the Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme supports farmers to adapt agricultural systems to be climate resilient. The full range of our programmes can be found on the Development Tracker.

The UK has committed £600m to the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. Of this £480m is for pre-existing programmes in the six DFID partner countries participating in the New Alliance, and £75m is a contribution to the Global Agriculture and Food Security Programme. These pre-existing programmes satisfied the following criteria: (i) they occur in one of the DFID partner countries participating in the New Alliance (Ethiopia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Ghana, Malawi and Nigeria); and (ii) they include components on food security, agriculture and nutrition. The UK’s new financial support to the New Alliance of £45m has focused on “enabling actions” that support agriculture, food security and nutrition – specifically, the development of policy instruments, technology and innovation, and risk management.