Africa (Famine)

HC Deb 22 March 1985 vol 75 cc1089-153 9.35 am

Mr. Bowen Wells (Hertford and Stortford)

I beg to move, That this House recognises that death and suffering from starvation and diseases related to malnutrition of millions of Africans are capable of being prevented by mankind working together; notes that prevention of famine also promotes international trade and thereby the reduction of unemployment in richer countries; congratulates the people of Britain on the generosity of their contributions to the voluntary relief agencies; and calls upon Her Majesty's Government to respond with equal generosity and wisdom. It is a happy coincidence that we should be considering the subject of the African famine in the week that has been dominated by consideration in the Budget debate of our own domestic economic problems. I hope that this debate will set Britain's economic position in its rightful international context, for we are a nation that depends on international trade to a greater degree than most other countries. We export 33 per cent. of our gross domestic product compared with 12 per cent. in Japan and less than 8 per cent. in the United States. For our prosperity and, therefore, the employment of our people we depend upon the health of the world trading community. Countries that cannot repay the capital we have lent them or the interest on it, that cannot buy the spare parts from our factories to maintain their pumps to irrigate their fields and their trucks and vehicles, that cannot produce or purchase fertilisers or seed or even simple agricultural implements, clothes and blankets are a real concern to us economically and, of course, from the simple human standpoint of human compassion for starving and dying fellow human beings.

One of my other reasons for selecting this subject for debate is to pay tribute to the generosity of our people. Since seeing the harrowing films in October of the desperate condition of people in Ethiopia, they have contributed well over £50 million to the principal charities engaged in relief work in Africa—the Save the Children Fund, Oxfam, Christian Aid, the British Red Cross, the International Red Cross and War on Want. In paying that tribute, I should like to express my admiration for those who are working for those charities in Africa, for their devotion to their work and for the effective, vigorous and cheerful manner in which they carry out their tasks, sometimes in the face of daunting physical and bureaucratic obstacles. In saying that, we should not forget the importance of the work carried out by charities in this country, without which nothing could be achieved on the ground.

It fills me with pride to belong to a country full of such generosity and compassion, but I hope that this debate will help to deepen the understanding of the problems that must be faced by the people of Africa so that the people of Britain will not be disappointed to find that the problems of the poor—malnutrition, disease, high infant mortality and starvation—cannot be cured in a short time. When the rains come, that will not be the end of starvation. I hope that this debate will help to deepen understanding so that the people's generosity of spirit will not turn to cynicism and indifference when they learn of poor administration of food aid, bureaucratic muddle, even corruption, and the failure to feed some of the starving.

To correct what has gone wrong in Africa will take perseverance in the face of difficulties and the continued determination of our people and those of other countries to wipe the evils of starvation and malnutrition from the face of the earth. There is no doubt that mankind is capable of achieving this, but can we muster the political will, the willingness to make sacrifices ourselves, the patience and the determination to achieve our goal? My answer to that question is that we can and we must, and Ethiopia and the famine of 1984–85 must be the starting point of our crusade against famine and disease.

When the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs visited camps in the Sudan and saw, even in the camps where feeding and medical treatment had been established, the total destitution of the refugees and Sudanese alike, the little children desperately thin, coughing and wheezing, and on their deathbeds, tended by their desperate mothers in the ramshackle structure that had been established as a hospital, two overwhelming thoughts came to me. Here was a massive failure of mankind of terrible proportions. But in the same camp were dedicated Sudanese officials, American, Swiss, Swedish and British doctors, nurses, engineers, vets, administrators, diplomats, civil servants and even politicians, trying, in spite of the difficulties, to re-establish life and hope for those unfortunate people, regardless of the cost to themselves. Hope and despair existed side by side in the camps.

There were other camps that were not so fortunate, where the drinking water had been polluted and then exhausted, and it had not proved possible to get food into the camps or establish medical treatment. But even in those conditions there were people who cared and were trying to get the camps moved, including the Sudanese official responsible for refugees, the British ambassador's staff, the leader of the United Nations development programme, the International Red Cross, and the representative of the European Economic Community. Therefore, help and hope were round the corner, even for those people.

No one can turn his face away from the tragic plight of once fiercely proud, independent, loyal and thoroughly admirable people. The British Government are playing their part, and I should like to congratulate my right hon. Friend the Minister for Overseas Development and his Department on the early and quick response that they have made to the crisis. No doubt my right hon. Friend will detail for the benefit of the House the help that he has given on our behalf. However, I hope that in his recent visit to the EEC Commissioner, Mr. Natali, who is responsible for EEC aid, he told him that we must make certain that the deliveries of EEC food to the feeding centres and the villages take place before the rains come.

I ask my right hon. Friend to appoint an official in his Department to report to him daily on the progress that the EEC is making in conveying food from storage to the docks and on to the ships, the whereabouts of those ships on the high seas, their arrival time in ports, and the unloading, delivery and distribution of the cereal and other vital foodstuffs such as milk, pulses and vegetable oils. The food must be stockpiled in the feeding centres and the villages before the rains come, which make it impossible to make deliveries by truck across the roadless deserts.

Because Britain's main efforts to bring food to those starving people is through the EEC programme, if that programme fails to deliver, Britain fails to deliver. The fact that the Americans have delivered food well ahead of the EEC is a fact for which we should thank the Americans, but we should be ashamed that we cannot act so quickly and effectively ourselves. The EEC must become a more effective deliverer of assistance, and we must insist upon it. No doubt our Prime Minister will help us to achieve that objective as I understand that it was on her insistence that the Dublin EEC summit committed itself to provide 1.2 million tonnes of food to Africa in the emergency.

Let us hope that, by the combined effort of the countries that are afflicted by famine, and with the help of the international community, we succeed in saving millions of starving people from death this year. However, are we to leave them to die from starvation next year or when drought affects them again? Drought is endemic in those areas, as we read in the Bible. How will we achieve sustained development in those areas so that famine does not stalk those countries again? It can be done. It has been done in India, where I first saw the degradation of mankind that starvation and poverty bring. It has become a net cereal exporter over the past 15 or 20 years.

When the rains come, starvation and poverty will not stop unless, first, the process and the will to overcome those difficulties is borne in the hearts and minds of the people and governments of the countries whose citizens are so afflicted. Do not let us mince words: much of the cause of the nightmare that we are witnessing has its roots in the mistaken policies of those Governments. Unless they are prepared to change and to learn, nothing can be achieved. There are governments in Africa characterised by neglect, indifference and corruption, who are so dedicated to an ideology or religion that is counter-productive that no one can help them. Most outright starvation takes place in countries in which savage military and guerrilla activities are taking place — such as Ethiopia, the south of Sudan, Chad, Somalia, Mozambique and Angola. Such fighting must stop and a return to the negotiating table must be insisted upon by the Organisation of African States, the Soviet Union, the United States and South Africa as well as the EEC, in accordance with the United Nations charter to which we all belong.

We must have the courage to stand up to such Governments and tell them that unless their economic strategies change there is no way that we can help them. However, we must be willing to help them change through programmes agreed with the International Monetary Fund to relieve the short-term chronic indebtedness, and, through the World Bank, to aid them in longer-term financing. The conditionality of the IMF and the World Bank must be carefully and sensibly worked out with them and then insisted upon, with flexibility. Such programmes must not be undermined by bilateral aid donors encouraging countries to evade the necessary financial disciplines.

We in Britain acknowledge a need for aid coordination, but I am puzzled, as are The Economist, The Times and other observers, by the behaviour of the British Government in recent months in failing to join the special fund for Africa established by the World Bank and to contibute directly to the recently held United Nations conference on the African emergency.

It is only by supporting such funds and co-ordinating with them that we can possibly hope to bring about the necessary changes in domestic policy to begin to reconstruct those economies. We cannot do it by ourselves. If the argument is that we shall gain more procurement by keeping the money within our own bilateral programmes, why have we recently agreed to untie the British aid to those programmes? I suspect that the recent announcement that Britain would be able to tender for procurement from the fund itself was connected with that decision. Particularly as, historically, for every £1 that we have put into the World Bank International Development Association we have received orders worth £1.50, why not join the fund wholeheartedly in the first place, as we have always supported IDA and were willing to contribute to a supplementary IDA when the Americans reduced the last IDA by 25 per cent.? It is only by working together, all focused on the same objectives, that we shall achieve the development necessary to prevent starvation. Will the Minister explain the British Government's policy on that matter?

The World Bank, the IMF and the EEC are developing policies that can help impoverished African countries to change economic policies, such as programme aid and policy dialogues—they are called by many other strange names. Many projects have failed in the past because of hostile Government economic policy. For example, if the Government centralise marketing and control the price of agricultural produce, whether food crops or cash crops, at a low price that discourages the farmers from producing, projects in cotton, sugar, coffee, tea and so on, and crops for food in the African countries, will fail. It is only by being hard-hearted and speaking with one voice that donors will get such pricing policy changed.

The same applies to exchange rate policy, which, by over-valuing the currency, can encourage imports and discourage local production. There are policies such as the enforced collectivisation of farming, as in Ethiopia, the enforced social engineering of the Ujemaa village in Tanzania, and the establishment of masses of parastatal corporations that are so inefficient that they discourage production. All these economic policies must be changed to those that will enable the people of the country to help themselves, with outside assistance. If they will not change, we should have the courage to unite the donors and decline to continue assistance, and prepare for the inevitable emergency that will follow. The pump-priming role of aid in those poorest countries is essential if the African economies are once more to expand.

At the moment the position is very serious. Annual per capita grain production in the 24 countries most affected by drought has been falling on average by 2 per cent. a year since 1970. Per capita GDP is estimated to be 4 per cent. below its 1970 level. Part of the reason is that the population has been rising at more than 3 per cent. per annum. The necessary programme is set out in the World Bank's publication, "Towards Sustained Development in Sub Sahara Africa", and was largely agreed with African countries in the Lagos declaration in 1980.

The outline of the programme is as follows. First, there should be health and other programmes to reduce the rate of population growth. Secondly, there should be changes in the structure of education and training to ensure greater relevance to the needs of the African economies. Thirdly, there is a need for budgetary and pricing policies, including the correction of over-valuation of exchange rates, that will switch the internal terms of trade in Africa to agriculture. Fourthly, there is a need for improved financial control, including more realistic interest rates, to improve the efficiency with which investment projects are selected and implemented. Fifthly, there must be greater emphasis on smallholders rather than large mechanised farms, producing their own food crops with a surplus for sale. The sixth point is the stimulation of employment outside the public sector through incentives to the private sector, including foreign direct investment. Seventhly, foreign exchange earnings from both traditional and non-traditional exports must be stimulated. Eighthly, foreign exchange savings should be stimulated through official substitution of domestic for imported supplies to meet energy requirements, consumer demand for food and manufacturers, and the needs of industry for materials and inter-market capital goods. Lastly, we need more economic integration in Africa, particularly to meet food and energy requirements.

If Britain is to play its part in those longer-term plans, we must attempt at least to maintain our aid programmes at the level that they have now reached. We must not accept the reduction through exchange rate fluctuations or domestic or overseas inflation of our programmes, estimated in this year alone to reduce the aid budget by £14.4 million, and, as much aid is denominated in sterling, to reduce the amount of aid to the host country.

It is no use pretending that our expenditure on emergency food aid and other life-saving projects comes from a contingency reserve kept in readiness for the purpose. That is a shabby deception and unworthy of our Minister. But for the emergency, that money would have been used for other longer-term development purposes. It would not have been returned to the Treasury with thanks. The Overseas Development Administration has estimated that in 1984 expenditure on famine in Africa has been £100 million, compared with £44 million in 1983, an increase of £56 million. If we add to that figure the loss through overseas risen costs of £14 million, an extra £70 million from the Treasury to the ODA budget would be appropriate to meet the exceptional circumstances of the famine. It would match the clear wishes of the British public and would not affect the medium term financial strategy.

I appeal to the Government to make this gesture. It would be a gesture by Britain of enormous benefit to the African countries concerned, and would also benefit British exporters, enabling them to take on more staff, thus reducing our unemployment. Britain could supply consulting services and technical assistance of great value in railways rehabilitation schemes, road building, well-boring, water storage and delivery, and plant and machinery to process cotton, sugar, tea, cocoa, palm oil, millet, and so on. We could also assist with power supplies, port facilities, roads to transport agricultural products, trucks, vehicles and spare parts.

Britain and the EEC should throw down their tariff barriers against imports from such countries, such as textiles, by abandoning the multi-fibre arrangement. We should be willing to accept more of the products of such poorer countries, as we have done under the Lomé agreement. Britain and the EEC should improve the financing of exports through the export credit guarantee system and more generous insurance of overseas private investors against political risks, so encouraging inward private investment. It is in Britain's interests, as well as those of Africa, to maintain and increase our expenditure on aid, and it is in line with the Government's economic policy.

The Cancun conference, held to take action on the recommendations of the Brandt report, was described to me by a distinguished observer from an African country as the most expensive adult education course ever organised. It taught the President of the United States that aid is not only about giving food to starving people as handouts or charity. It is about stretching out a hand to help people help themselves by giving them seeds to plant and simple instruments to cultivate the land, or a fishing rod with which to fish, to enable them to sustain themselves and their families and to recover their dignity and self-respect. By offering a helping hand, we benefit our own people, providing them with extra work and with cheaper goods imported from developing countries.

There are some developing countries whose policies are such that we cannot help them, no matter how poor they may be. We should not be afraid, in co-operation with the worldwide organisations to which we belong, to bring every pressure to bear — including stopping financial assistance — to get such countries to change their destructive policies. If that is called neo-colonialism, so be it. We are interested in helping other people to help themselves. If we cannot help them, those independent sovereign nations must go their own way, but we must stand ready to help the people who will starve in the next emergency — it will inevitably come — through our admirable voluntary agencies which manage to work in such countries, whatever the nature of the Government, in most cases.

To follow this policy we must at least maintain our aid budget in real terms and replenish it to take account of the emergencies that it has to reach. The whole House applauds the Minister's drive for aid effectiveness, but no amount of increased efficiency will make good the shortfall in funds of £70 million to which I have referred.

I call upon the Government to stick to their principle of helping people to help themselves, and to keep faith with our people by joining them in giving money to the starving of Africa.

9.57 am

Mr. Eric Deakins (Walthamstow)

First of all, I congratulate the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) not on his luck — luck should not be a matter for congratulation — but on his wisdom and humanity in choosing this subject for debate. We do not often debate these matters at length in the House and am grateful to the hon. Gentleman—I am sure that other hon. Members will be too — for giving us the opportunity of joining in on the basis of the excellent start that he has given us.

I wish to concentrate on two issues that are relevant to Africa—population and food supply, both of which lie at the root of the current crisis of sub-Saharan Africa and threaten many other parts of Africa too.

The bare statistics are almost frightening. The current population of the whole continent, from north to south, is 450 million. By the end of the century, regardless of anything that we or any Government can do, that population will have risen to 850 million. Another 400 million people will be requiring food, education, health facilities, water supplies, accommodation and, above all, jobs. That will be a very big burden indeed on perhaps the least prosperous continent in the world.

The growth rate of population in Africa is 2.9 per cent. a year. That does not sound much, but it means that the population doubles in 20 to 25 years—using the figure as a compound growth rate. The world figure is 1.7 per cent. Generally speaking, many nations are aware of the population problem and have taken steps to reduce the rate of fertility increase. However, the situation in Africa is extraordinarily bad. Not merely does Africa have some of the highest reproduction rates in the world, but it has the youngest age structure. No less than 45 per cent. of the total population are aged under 15. That means that 45 per cent. of a total population of 450 million are children who have not yet reached child-bearing age. Africa also suffers from very high fertility rates—much higher than in the rest of the world.

We know all these facts because last year saw the conclusion of the greatest and most important social survey that has perhaps ever been mounted—the world fertility survey. I should like to refer to a few of its findings, which have not received much currency in Britain or other advanced countries.

In Africa, current fertility levels range between six children per woman in Sudan and eight children per woman in Kenya. During the recent past, when fertility rates have been declining in every other continent in the world, in Africa there has been no change. The percentage of women who want no more children than those that they already have is lower in Africa—only 16 per cent. — than in any other region of the world.

Sir John Osborn (Sheffield, Hallam)

I had several conversations with African chiefs and I found that the real problem is that Africans all over Africa regard children as the best form of social security for their old age.

Mr. Deakins

I agree that that is what many men in Africa wish. However, when women were questioned in their own language, 16 per cent. of them said that they wanted no more children. That emerged from what is a marvellous social survey which cannot be criticised on any of the usual grounds. One of the problems in Africa is that it is not merely the men but also the women who want more children. The average desired family size was highest in Africa. On average, men and women wanted seven children. We must face that problem in the future.

Countries in sub-Saharan Africa such as Benin, Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan and what used to be called Upper Volta but which is now called Burkina Fasu have populations which range from 300,000 in Djibouti to 35.6 million in Ethiopia. There are wide differences. But the number of children born per woman in all those countries ranges from a low —if that is the right expression—of 5.9 children per woman in Chad to 8.1 children per woman in Kenya. When we look at the percentage of the population aged under 15—in other words, children—in each of those countries which are the particular subject of today's debate, we find that the lowest percentage, 42 per cent., is in Chad, and the highest, 51.8 per cent., is in Kenya. I know from going to the first African population conference of parliamentarians in Nairobi in 1981 on behalf of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, United Kingdom branch, that a quarter of the population of Kenya is aged under five. That will impose tremendous strains on the education and health budgets of that prosperous country.

The population growth rates in the countries that I have mentioned also range fairly widely. Chad, at 2.1 per cent., is almost good, but it goes right up to 4.1 per cent., in Kenya. The average is probably somewhere between 3.5 and 3.75 per cent. Therefore, all those countries in the region that we are particularly concerned with which have problems of famine, under-development and drought have populations which are likely to double by the end of this century. That poses a problem not only for us and other bilateral aid donors, but for the United Nations organisations and the World Bank.

The World Bank has a special programme to take account of the problems in the area. I think that I have every justification in hoping that the World Bank, which is now fully conscious of the need to take appropriate action, with the co-operation of most Governments, to try to reduce population pressures and growth rates, will also take account of the second African population conference in Kilimanjaro in January 1984, which issued a wonderful declaration full of good words. I hope that they will be followed up by appropriate Government actions. It is important that the African Governments should recognise the problems, and it is fair to say that they do now.

The first principle that that conference put forward was: Population should be considered as a central issue in development strategies and plans. One of the major recommendations at the end of that conference was number 90: Governments and donor agencies are urged to provide more resources to UNFPA"— the United Nations fund for population activities— to enable it to provide increased support to national governments and to organisations of the United Nations system working in the field of population in Africa. I hope that I have said enough to illustrate that the population increases in prospect in Africa, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, of the magnitude that I have described, will impose almost impossible strains on food and water supplies and land resources, quite apart from imposing strains on the social infrastructure of those countries in terms of the extra education and health facilities that will be needed.

We, as a good bilateral aid donor, will need to take action in co-operation with Governments, especially on issues such as mother and child health care facilities and the availability of family planning information and facilities throughout the region. I hope that that will be done in co-operation with the World Bank programme in sub-Saharan Africa.

I thank the Minister for the fact that he has increased Britain's contribution to the UNFPA and the International Planned Parenthood Federation. That is a marvellous response from the Government to existing needs, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

In 1983 the International Wheat Council, together with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, estimated that more than 20 million people in Africa were facing severe food shortages. It was estimated then that 600,000 additional tonnes of food were needed in that year to enable those people to survive. That was before the famine became a matter of world comment and interest. I am afraid that the situation is even worse than that. In 1983, the FAO report said: many African countries have been unable to earn enough foreign exchange on traditional export products, such as cocoa, rubber and coffee to finance their food imports. In addition, it estimates that Africa will need to double its food production in the 1980s to have enough to feed itself.

The final sobering conclusion is almost one of despair. It said: Africa is the only part of the world that now grows less food per head of population than it did in 1960. Since then, production has increased by less than 2 per cent. a year and the growth rate is now falling. whereas the population has grown by well over 2 per cent. a year and the rate is rising. In the areas that we are particularly concerned about in sub-Saharan Africa the lack of growth in food supplies is even worse and the population growth is even higher. There are real problems which will need to be worked out in association with other donors.

The United Nations Children's Fund estimated last year that no less than a quarter of the young children in Africa, those aged from nought to four, were suffering from either mild or severe malnutrition. That figure is likely to be much worse in the areas about which we are now talking.

I hope that the debate will show that the Government, in co-operation with the World Bank, other bilateral aid donors and United Nations organisations, need, in order to put right what is wrong with food production in Africa, to reduce the emphasis that has existed for the past 20 or 30 years on the production of cash crops for export, often at the expense of growing food for domestic consumption. We must also do our best to try to convince some of the African Governments that in order to encourage local food production they will have to adopt rather more realistic pricing policies than in the past. Often the facilities are there but the incentive to grow food for domestic markets is not.

We need to survey existing agricultural practices in the region, many of which are environmentally destructive, quite apart from the fact that they do not result in much increase in food production, to see whether the aid donors and the World Bank can give appropriate advice to put right the longer-term problem. That is a task that the World Bank might undertake as part of its special programme. If that is not done we shall have crises not merely every few years but increasingly from year to year and they will become almost a continuous process. The emphasis on domestic food production must be a top priority.

In the light of the problems of population and food supply, aid must be seen as a long-term activity. Obviously, there are short-term crises and a need to get food to the people through our own agencies and organisations, such as, Oxfam, Christian Aid and War on Want. We must make it clear that people cannot expect results immediately, other than safeguarding people from immediate starvation. It will take time to get agricultural practices right and to spread knowledge of and the facilities for family planning services in sub-Saharan Africa. When one bears in mind that some Governments are neutral, to put it mildly, especially Chad, which has adopted pro-natalist policies, one realises that we face a big task.

I agree with the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) that there is a great deal of good will in the United Kingdom and in other countries. I am delighted to see the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath) in his place, because he was an architect of both Brandt reports. As he spent much of his time travelling with my right hon. Friend the Member for Clydesdale (Dame J. Hart) and with my former colleague, Frank Judd, who is now the director-designate of Oxfam, and speaking to marvellous public meetings in 1981 and 1982, he will know of the tremendous response from the British people. That response died down because it was not taken up politically and it seemed that there was nothing that individuals could do. The response has been resurrected by the current famine.

The good will of the British people extends beyond the task of merely giving emergency aid. Increasing numbers of them appreciate that we are engaged in a long-term activity which will not merely require the sort of measures that I have mentioned in relation to sub-Saharan Africa, but the many other measures which were the spurs of both Brandt reports, especially the first report. There are many good points in it which need to be taken up. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley) will develop that theme shortly.

I know that the Minister is well aware of the importance of development education. We need to continue with it in this country with some public backing, not merely because our children and people need much better education about the real problems in sub-Saharan Africa, Africa and the developing world generally but because, strangely enough, many people who work in the aid sphere, especially those in voluntary agencies, are not aware of the true nature of the problems. Their approach sometimes tends to be rather simplistic, and that is the one thing that one cannot be about the problems of the developing world. One cannot blame the position wholly on Governments or economic systems. They are important factors, but not the only ones. Therefore, I ask the Minister — I do not expect a commitment from him today—to take on board the need to maintain a continuing programme of development education in the United Kingdom abort these issues and the wider issue of the relationship between rich and poor countries.

10.13 am

Mr. Edward Heath (Old Bexley and Sidcup)

I am glad to be able to support my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) and to say how much I agree with him. The hon. Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Deakins) mentioned the support generated by the Brandt report when it was published in 1980. I assure him that that deep interest remains. Last Saturday morning I addressed 1,200 Rotarians and their wives in Bournemouth, who specifically asked me to deal with the two Brandt reports and with relations between North and South. The number of invitations that I receive from business groups, universities, schools and sixth form colleges is far beyond anything that I can meet. We should not think that the interest that was aroused then has in any way disappeared or weakened.

The most striking phenomenon recently was the impact of the television pictures of famine and the consequences of it for those involved, especially in the sub-Saharan belt, on people who would not normally take an interest in the Brandt report. That shows that, although many of us have been talking for four years with some effect, albeit limited, when famine appears on the screen in the sitting room or kitchen, people realise what is happening in the sub-Saharan belt and respond immediately. That was a most extraordinary phenomenon. Those who have had the opportunity of seeing Mohamed Amin's new film "African Calvary" were so deeply moved that it was almost impossible to say anything. It will have a similar effect on all British people and people throughout the English-speaking world when they see it.

I commend my right hon. Friend the Minister on what he has already achieved, and especially on the personal interest that he took by visiting the most affected areas and by the battle that he has fought for overseas development in extremely difficult conditions. The Government have made a substantial financial contribution in trying to deal with the problem, but in many ways they have not received the commendation that they deserve. There is probably a psychological reason for that. Despite everything that my right hon. Friend has done, the Government have not appeared to take the lead, but have responded to pressures from other sources. At times, that may be necessary and perhaps good for a Government, but not in this case. If we are seen to be taking the lead, the Government can influence public opinion in the direction that they wish to take to help solve these permanent problems. Without the Government taking the lead, stating what they think is right and organising it, remaining public opinion will drag. I know that my right hon. Friend has been trying to deal with that, but it remains a permanent problem.

The other aspect is departmental bureaucracy in Government. Someone expressed to me the fear that in a month air transport would no longer be available for transporting food. The Minister will be able to tell us whether that is the case. I can see the problem clearly. The Department will be unwilling to carry the financial burden in its Vote and will insist that another Vote carries it. If we were truly acting as a Government, the Department would agree to carry it on its Vote because the matter was essential to the policy of the country and for the welfare of a large part of Africa.

The last review by the Food and Agriculture Organisation showed that at the end of December there were 35 countries either suffering from or facing famine and that three quarters of them were in Africa. All the countries that are suffering from famine are in the sub-Saharan belt. That summarises the position.

I am anxious that we should maintain the interest of the Government and the public in these problems. We should never let it be thought that what was seen on television screens is a one-off problem. It is a continuing problem, which will continue in its present severe form for at least a year. Many observers report that the matter is now getting worse in some areas. In areas where it has been possible to transport food to the people, there is an obvious improvement, but in other areas the situation is becoming worse.

It will be a long-term problem, and not just until the autumn when we see what the harvest is like and how long the drought will continue, but for many years after that. That is why it is necessary to go a stage further. I want the Government to take the lead in organising a strategic plan for dealing with the long-term problems of the sub-Saharan belt, including those that have already been mentioned in the debate.

Of course, fundamental to those problems is the population, which has increased by 3 per cent. a year for the past 20 years. We have seen the consequences of that, but it can be handled. It is being handled in Sri Lanka and in China, and if we set our minds to it there is no reason why it should not be handled in the African countries. They have institutions that could organise it.

Hon. Members have mentioned the long-term future of agriculture. During the past 10 years, per capita food production has decreased by 11 per cent. in those African countries. That was partly due to drought, and partly due to inadequate provision for agriculture. The hon. Member for Walthamstow said that some countries are exporting foodstuffs, and Ethiopia has been criticised in the press for sending exotic foods to the London market from time to time. However, we must realise that those countries have had to raise money in any way they can to cope with the repayment of interest and of debts. This has meant that they have denied themselves things which we would say were essential in a desperate attempt to hold their own with the problems of interest and debt repayment.

That points to the need for an overall strategic arrangement with those countries to deal with the problem of their indebtedness. Of course, in recent months, the problem has become worse. For every point that interest rates increase, the developing world must find $3.5 billion. They must export a tremendous amount of commodities, raw materials and metals to recover $3.5 billion. When interest rates increase in the United States or Europe by 4½ percentage points in three days — although it can be said that it is necessary for our policy—the impact on the developing countries can be fatal. One aspect of the reconstruction of debt is that it has been applied almost entirely to major countries, including Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela, although it has not gone far in Nigeria. However, for the mass of smaller countries, so far little action has been taken.

The British Government were among those who said that they would turn debt into grants in the poorest countries, and they have already done so for 19 or 20 countries. The cost is comparatively small. To do so for all those countries would cost only about $4 billion, which is a small sum compared with the other money that is at stake. I hope that we shall use our persuasive powers to force other countries who have made loans to the poorest 30 nations to take similar steps.

Britain could do much to create an overall strategic policy for the organisation of food. There is a problem of confidence, because many countries still believe that we want them to remain primeval and agricultural while we develop our new technology and become even richer than we are. Any group that produces an overall plan must try to deal with that problem of confidence. We can provide all the seed, stock and basic instruments that those countries need, and as Britain has so many past connections with Africa and present connections with Commonwealth countries it should provide leadership in that respect.

Far too little attention has been paid to water. We are halfway through the United Nations water decade. In 1980, the United Nations promised that every village in the world would have clean ater, but we are nowhere near that objective. Britain produces basic machinery for deep boring and the machinery for getting the water up. Again, it is a matter of resources. Denmark and other countries can supply more elaborate machines using solar energy, but we have the basis now. It costs comparatively little to carry out the simple business of deep boring and constructing equipment at the top of the well to get the water up. This is another area in which Britain could take the lead. The provision of water is essential both for irrigation for food and for clean water for people in order to avoid disease.

I come to the broader questions of international strategy and especially the resources that are being made available. The sixth IDA replenishment totalled $12 billion. For the seventh replenishment, Mr. Clausen asked for $16 billion, but he is getting only $9 billion, largely because of the attitude of the United States. That is a reduction of $3 billion on the previous replenishment and one of $7 billion on what Mr. Clausen asked for. As chairman of the World Bank, he is a hard-headed banker—he was formerly head of the Bank of America—and he is not asking for unnecessary money to throw around for wasteful purposes. There is a problem of resources, and we must all pine for the day when Washington will resume its former policy, expressed in the Marshall plan and in the support that it gave to international organisations up to the end of the 1970s, which enabled them to do so much work which at present they are inhibited from doing.

There is some difficulty in deciding what will happen with the Africa fund. I wish that the Government had simply said, "Yes, this is an emergency. Therefore, we shall contribute $75 million to the fund." However, as I understand it, Britain will not contribute that sum directly through the fund and it will be removed from our normal development aid programme. That is neither logical nor justifiable. It is illogical because, in a world crisis, the position in other countries which we had planned to help with our normal development aid will not have become so much better that they do not need the money. If it is a world crisis, or a crisis in Africa — it is a major continent— we are justified in saying that we should make special contributions. I do not believe that the United States and Britain cannot afford to make the contributions that France, Italy, Germany and other countries will make. I also wish that Japan would do more. It has an enormous credit balance, and could do much more for the developing world, especially the African countries.

I hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister will continue urging the Government to treat this as a special objective which we must meet immediately, and not to remove the money from our normal development assistance.

People constantly ask me, "Can we do anything about this?" In some ways, that is a difficult question to answer, but there is something for everyone to do. There is the opportunity for individuals — a considerable number have done it—to offer their services to deal with the problems. There is a special need for doctors, nurses and administrators. They are indeed the salt of the earth when they offer voluntarily to go there and deal with the problems, although they know that the risk of disease is enormous in some areas. Individuals can also contribute to the voluntary organisations, which play a major part. Also, public opinion can exert much influence on organisations and on Governments to resolve the problems.

The water realisation decade fund, which is aimed primarily at transnational companies, has just been started. It should be possible for individuals, and especially shareholders, to influence transnational companies to make contributions to the fund. It is largely concentrated on Africa, and is designed to cover the cost of equipment for producing water. The fund is beginning to grow, and I hope that the transnational companies will show that they are not wholly interested in profit from Africa but are prepared to make their contribution to the general welfare of Africa, from which I have no doubt they will benefit later on.

It is the Government's responsibility to organise international institutions, particularly the World Bank, the IMF, the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Health Organisation into forming a strategic long-term plan for coping with the problems in Africa. We cannot go on living from hand to mouth and bilaterally doing so many things without any co-ordination and without knowing that we are going to achieve our long-term purpose. That is the way to waste resources and to be unsuccessful in what we are trying to do. In this again, British Government can take a forceful lead in bringing these institutions together and putting them on the path of working out an overall strategic plan.

I know about the political difficulties, and there is a difference here between Washington and almost the rest of the world. I was delighted when the Foreign Ministers of the Community had a meeting in central America and said that they would help these countries regardless of their political regimes.

The Ethiopian regime is often criticised, but we have done far more in the past six months to influence it than we ever did before, and more than we would ever do by telling their Government that it is their problem and that, as they are responsible for a large extent of it, they will have to get themselves out of the mess. From the political, international point of view, we can have far more influence by dealing with the basic problems from which these countries, with millions of people, are suffering than we can by trying to boycott them or put them on one side and tell them that, because of their political regime, there is nothing that we can do.

Mr. Tony Baldry (Banbury)

Does my right hon. Friend accept that the increase in public awareness of the problems of Africa that has arisen in the past few months would be rapidly dissipated if it were felt by the people of Britain and Europe that we are helping Ethiopia to feed itself while it is using its resources to buy arms and weapons to prosecute a civil war in its own country? Such help as we give should be met equally by the Ethiopian Government in the ways that they adjust their own policies.

Mr. Heath

It has that effect on public opinion, and the only way to handle that is by our efforts and those of our diplomats and Ministers, who can explain to these people what we are doing and the dangers of not recognising that fact. Countries that have revolutions always have such problems, and rebellions go on for many years, just as they have in Ethiopia. However, the one means of influencing the Ethiopian Government is by following the advice of my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford rather than saying that, because of a distasteful regime, a country must be left on one side.

I thank my right hon. Friend the Minister for Overseas Development for the strenuous efforts that he has made over the past few months and for the contribution that has been made by the Government. I hope that my right hon.

Friend will keep up the pressure to deal with existing problems, which will last for at least a year and probably longer. Above all, we should try to get the rest of Europe and the United States into a co-ordinated strategic plan with the international institutions so that we can use our resources to the best advantage and show Africa that it has a long-term future.

10.43 am

Mr. Tom Cox (Tooting)

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) for initiating this debate and for his record in the House in bringing to the attention of hon. Members and the country the sad and tragic events that have been happening in Africa for a long time, but most specifically in recent months. On a day when in our press and media we hear about the savage, brutal attacks taking place in another part of Africa, it says a great deal for the House that this is one of the issues on which there is enormous respect for the comments made by hon. Members, irrespective of the party to which they belong. I hope that the press, television and radio will show us in the light that we generally are in when we express our concern, our knowledge and the hopes which we, as Members of Parliament, wish to see fulfilled by our Government.

It is always a great pleasure to listen to the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath) not only on this but on many other issues on which he has spoken in recent years. His comment about the audiences to which he spoke last weekend is a sign of the great respect in which the people of this country hold him. They listen to his comments on many crucial issues which now face the country. In the area of south London which I represent, unemployment is a major problem and my constituents often refer to comments made by the right hon. Gentleman. It is a great pleasure to listen to the right hon. Gentleman on a subject about which he has enormous knowledge. He has spent a great deal of his time trying to ensure developments in many parts of the world.

I pay tribute to the television companies, which have reported events in Africa with great dignity and respect. It would be easy to try to sensationalise the suffering that people of all ages have, sadly, had to experience, and are still experiencing. The television companies and the people connected with them have shown great restraint and great respect in presenting these pictures, which have had a dramatic effect on the attitudes of people in this country and in many parts of the world.

We have to consider two aspects of this problem. First, there is the immediate need of countries such as Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia, which is undoubtedly food, and we are now aware that a great deal is starting to reach those countries. Equally, the need for food will continue, not only this year and next year, but for several years to come. No one can say that he is unaware of such needs or that there is a great shortage of food. Millions of tonnes of grain in many parts of the world are surplus to the requirements of the countries that have produced it. Already there are reports that the next food mountain within the EEC will be the grain mountain.

I have obtained some figures from the Library about last year's production of grain. Within the EEC, 76 million tonnes of grain were produced, while the United Kingdom figure was nearly 15 million tonnes—an increase of 37 per cent. over 1983. The Eastern Daily Press yesterday carried a report headed "Grain export boost urged", and went on to say that the Grain and Feed Trade Association was asking the Government to take action to help in the export of grain. The president of the association said: The current grain surplus of almost 10 million tonnes is worth more than £1 billion. If the grain remains in Britain's intervention store, the Government will be forced to pay more than £50 million in interest charges on the stored grain. We all know the deep concern that our people feel when they hear of mountains of one commodity or another. I hope that the British Government will play a major role in the EEC to ensure that that surplus grain is used wherever possible to help those countries in Africa which are in desperate need and that we shall not hear of further suffering there in a few months.

Hon. Members have been supplied with a background briefing by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Because of the television coverage we are all aware of the plight of such countries as Ethiopia and the Sudan, but I see from the briefing that in Kenya, for example, it is estimated that 2 million people are at risk, that in Mozambique there are between 2 million and 4 million people at risk and that in Tanzania there are 2 million people at risk.

Given the evidence that we already have, and with the knowledge that there are enormous food stocks in Europe—I concentrate on Europe; there are also food stocks in the United States of America — we cannot allow a situation to develop where again we see appalling pictures of suffering. There is plenty of food in Europe. I hope that in the ensuing months we shall see a great deal of activity on the part of the EEC in getting this food into those countries which need it.

Mr. Deakins

My hon. Friend has pointed out that people in Britain and elsewhere are alarmed by the food stocks that we have in Britain and the EEC countries—especially cereal food stocks — and our inability sometimes to get those stocks to where they are most needed. Will the British people not be even more aghast to learn that our Government, the Governments of EEC countries and the European Commission are working on plans to convert surplus cereals grown at a high cost in Europe into starch, ethanol, plastics and other industrial materials? Is that not disgraceful?

Mr. Cox

It is disgraceful, and my hon. Friend has expressed the disgust that British people will feel. Obviously his comments will receive publicity, but I hope that the Minister will seek to reply specifically to my hon. Friend.

To give the House some idea of the problems, I cite the example of the Sudan. Yesterday, in The Guardian, there was a report on the problems likely to face the Sudan in the near future. There are enormous problems there already. Yesterday the senior medical officer of the Save the Children Fund said that it was estimated that 500,000 refugees would arrive in the Sudan in the next few months. The report said: Relief efforts were building up in the overcrowded camps of eastern Sudan and new settlements were being created, although these would take two to three months to become established with good water supplies. I pay tribute to the Government of the Sudan. I am not concerned with their political ideology. Despite all the problems in that country, they have never stopped allowing refugees from adjoining countries to come into the Sudan. Great credit is due to a country with enormous problems which is still willing, despite its meagre resources, to say that it will try to help people who, for whatever reason, are leaving their countries and coming into the Sudan.

The Government of the Sudan have estimated that they will need about 3.5 million tonnes of grain for this year, but they estimate that their own grain production will be in the region of only 1.5 million tonnes. They have no reserve stocks. In the course of this year they will be seeking 2 million tonnes to meet the food needs of the people in their country.

I concentrate my remarks in this connection specifically on the EEC, because we are a member, and obviously we have great influence in it. We must do all that we can to ensure that our surplus food finds its way into the countries which need it.

In the debate we have heard about countries which possibly do not seek a great deal of help because of their political philosophy, but that does not apply to all countries. We have a long history of relationships with such countries as the Sudan, Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania. They are close allies of ours. They welcome our help. Often they criticise us about the key issues on which we should be helping them. I hope that we shall hear from the Minister today and in the coming months that the British Government are doing all in their power to ensure that the surplus food stocks in Europe are going to those countries in Africa which need them.

Both the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup and the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) said that we needed to have a vision which was far wider than just the immediate needs of those countries. Again there is a great deal of help that we can give them. The Sudan, for example, has enormous potential. It could become one of the major food producers in the whole of Africa, but the Sudanese need the skills which we and many other countries have, and we should be doing all in our power to ensure that that technical knowledge and those skills are made available to them.

Hon. Members who represent farming constituencies are aware that we are able to produce a crop or a breed of cattle suitable for the climatic conditions of those countries. We have that skill, and I cannot believe that such a skill, along with assistance in the general development of agriculture, cannot be made available from our Government and those of the member states of the EEC. The countries to which I refer have the land and the labour force available, but they need the modern know how based on our experience so that they can start to develop their own crops.

We also need to be told—we have not heard a great deal about it this morning—the kind of industrial help which countries such as our own are starting to give countries in Africa. It is one thing to grow food, but there has to be an much wider base than just food production. Many of these countries have their own raw materials. It would be interesting to hear from the Minister about any discussions that he has had in recent months with, for example, the CBI.

I pay tribute to the Minister for his willingness to visit these countries and see what is happening. During his visits, has he been told about the kind of industrial base which they would like to develop and has he been able to get some feed back from British industry about the kind of help that it would be prepared to provide?

This is not a political debate. However, one of the most regrettable decisions of this Government was to increase charges for overseas students. Without a doubt there are many capable young men and women in African countries who need the opportunity to develop their abilities in our universities. When the Minister and hon. Members meet representatives of African and Commonwealth countries, they are told of the effect that the increase in student fees has had on the number of young people whom they would like to send to this country. Can the Minister say how many young African people are coming to study in our universities?

If the argument is that money is in short supply, can the Minister tell us whether he has held discussions with some of the aid groups which have so generously allocated money to these countries about setting up a joint funding project, which would enable young people to come to this country to study in our universities, their fees being paid by this country?

In recent years, major economic summits have been held—although many hon. Members believe that they are quickly becoming a non-event — in the United States, in Mexico and in London. At those meetings of Heads of Government of the major industrial powers, there is a great deal of talk, but not much action follows those talks. The first of the economic summits took place at Williamsburg in the United States of America. If, two of three years later, we were to ask what followed the economic summit in Williamsburg, I do not believe that we should find very much evidence of help having been given to the Third world. Therefore, I return to the role which I believe the European countries should play.

Enormous skills and research projects are to be found in Europe. Parliamentary and Government commitment to helping African countries needs to be increased. Can the Minister say whether he or his senior colleagues are to hold meetings with senior representatives of the European Community countries to find out whether the EC can begin to develop joint projects for the benefit of the Third world, specifically African countries? Although I refer specifically to Africa, in no way do I minimise the problems that face other Third-world countries. However, if the will is there, because of its relative proximity to this country and the willingness of people to travel to and work in Africa, the problems of Africa do not present us with very great difficulty. I hope that the Minister will say exactly what kind of projects the EC can begin meaningfully to develop in co-operation with African countries.

In conclusion I return to the points made by the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup and the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford. Undoubtedly there is a great willingness on the part of the British people to respond to Africa's needs. If the British people see that the Government are responding in kind to the generosity shown by large and small groups throughout the country, they will continue to support the efforts that are being made to help African countries. If Parliament does not respond by showing the British people what it can do to help those countries, I believe that their efforts and concern will diminish. Nothing would be more tragic than to allow that to happen.

10.57 am

Mr. Jim Lester (Broxtowe)

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Tooting (Mr. Cox), who I know shares my keen interest in the Sudan. I agree with his remarks about the unique contribution made to the debate by my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath). He has made a unique contribution over the years to increasing the interest shown by the people of this country in the problems of the Third world.

The hon. Member for Tooting referred to the grants made to overseas students. This subject has been considered by the Select Committee. Whatever the original decision, the package of my right hon. Friend the Member for Cambridgeshire, South-East (Mr. Pym) restored the ability for students of many of these countries to come here to study. However, our last investigation showed that many of the available places were not being filled. We need to examine why they are not being filled. As the hon. Member for Tooting knows, one of the problems in the Sudan is not so much the training of students, as the loss of management and other able people —about half a million—to the Gulf states, where they can earn so much more money and enjoy a better life style, thus adding to the problems of the Sudan.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) for initiating this debate and congratulate him on his untiring work on the subject, both in the Select Committee and in the all-party group on overseas development. He devotes a great deal of time to these meetings. The fact that he has given such a lead has made this debate possible. It is apposite that it should take place in the middle of our debate on the Budget. It would have been easy to hold a debate this week on a more domestic topic. When we are arguing about Government expenditure which runs into many billions of pounds, it is right that we should seriously consider famine relief and trade and aid to Third world countries. The Select Committee was looking at famine relief and aid generally even before the tragic scenes on television which led the people of this country to realise how serious this problem is.

The House of Commons has set up an all-party group on overseas development, with a membership of over 70. It has active working parties studying long-term aid to Africa. That shows that there has been a mood change here as well, because during the 11 years that I have been in this place there has not been that degree of involvement and work by official organisations within the House. The number of hon. Members who are worried about such matters reflects the changed attitude of the country as a whole.

The change has not been recent because of the horrors of starvation that people have seen; there has been growing interest, which started with the world development movement lobby here in 1979. It showed the massive public interest in the issue. We have all received many letters. They do not deal only with the starvation emergency for which we seek to provide help. They also raise long term issues. People want to know what is happening in the long-term. That is right, and it is important that we should follow that.

Many of us in the House, in particular Conservative Members, have had the opportunity to visit the areas about which most anxiety is felt, because of our involvement on the Select Committee. Standing here on a cool March day, with the green Benches around us, and having had a reasonable breakfast, it is difficult to think back to when we experienced the destitution of Derudeib. I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Minister feels the same. The Minister and I have visited Derudeib. We saw the Sudanese refugees. The Beja nomads are a proud people. They have lived for centuries in the Red sea hills, but are now reduced to living in tiny straw tents and depending for every mouthful of food on the emergency relief services. They also depend upon two nurses.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup said that individuals could do a great deal. I remember now those two fresh-faced nurses in Derudeib, who were working with about 7,000 people. Nothing stopped their cheefulness. They got on with the job. They were prepared to work with the people, although they had few facilities, and given the chance they would load up their Land Rover with food and drive off into the Red sea hills to find those who were too weak to get to the camps.

We have seen camps with 95,000 people in them. That is about the population of my constituency. It is not a camp in the sense that we think of it. Those 95,000 people are spread out across the desert living in little shelters and completely dependent upon aid.

We have also experienced the desert and its growth. We recognised how serious that is. In Mali the desert has been growing by 10 km a year for the past 10 years. A swathe of Africa—a land mass far larger than this country—is becoming desert. We experienced the dust and the dust clouds. We were dust-bound for two days because we could not fly out of Bamako. Cape Verde islands out in the Atlantic can also be dust-bound by the dusts and semi-fertile soils of west Africa. When one realises that the dust reaches as far as that, one recognises the size and seriousness of the problem.

A year ago I was also in the Sudan studying the UNICEF water programme. There I saw the results of people on the move. El Obeid, the capital of Kordofan, is by Sudanese standards a reasonably prosperous little town, but it now has 28,000 destitute people living outside it. If we convert the total figures into our domestic setting, we see that they are the equivalent of about 3.25 million starving Welshmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen or Frenchmen descending on our shores. When we think of it in that context, we get some idea of the size of the problem.

What should we seek to do about it? I join my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup in paying tribute to my right hon. Friend the Minister for what he has already done, the money that he has found and the way that emergency requests have been dealt with. I support the plea of my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford that a special allowance should be made to the ODA budget at the beginning of the financial year. Sitting in the cool of the House of Commons, we all understand the budgetary procedures, and we recognise that we are at the beginning of the financial year and that there are funds to deal with contingencies, but there is here a uniquely difficult problem. It would be worth while if, at the beginning of the financial year, the Government recognised that and gave an amount—however small, it would be important—from the major contingency fund to ODA to enable it to respond to the demands that will be made for far longer than this year.

My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister was one of those who took the lead in trying to co-ordinate the United Nations operation in Ethiopia, and we must continue to work on that. In the field one sees how difficult that is. Separate United Nations efforts are being made in different areas. They have developed their own infrastructure, empires and money raising. The problem demands that they come together. Senor Perez de Cuellar has asked Brad Morse to head a group in New York. It is important to see the work on the ground and how the relative positions of different countries and the relative merits of different United Nations groups come together. I am sure that that is something that the Government can continue to support and encourage so that the maximum effort is focused on the ground and not dissipated in surveys or by talking about the problem.

The same applies here with the non-governmental organisations. They are doing marvellous work. The way that the Government have increased their help to the non-governmental organisations reflects that. It is often individuals, like the two nurses whom I mentioned earlier, who can bring about tremendous changes in one place. They can change a place where many children are dying into one where many children are surviving. They also have a problem. There has been an enormous response from the public, and I am delighted about that, but the result is that such people are increasingly having to organise food relief and the distribution of food relief. That is a good thing, but it is not part of their normal long-term development programmes. It is not part of what they often believe they were set up to do. Having received the emergency relief money, they must recognise that they must help to organise relief and distribute it in areas where there are political difficulties.

There are political difficulties. In Dafur, food prices rose by about 1,000 per cent. in. 12 months. The Government there preferred to see food going on to the market because they thought that it might help to bring prices down and therefore help the urban population. There was a reason for that, because if grain costs about 160 Sudanese pounds to feed a family of six for a month, and a civil servant earns 40 Sudanese pounds a month, even someone in work and with an income can buy only a quarter of the food that he needs.

Against that, there are the destitute who have no money or resources, and who have a gourd and very little else. It is right that the non-governmental organisations should reach out to them with food aid and see that they are fed. Indeed, that is what people want them to do. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister can do everything possible to help, and that while devoting attention in the short term to saving lives we shall not lose the objective of long-term development programmes.

I turn to the European development fund and to the European front. There have been criticisms about the Commission's speed of action. However, it is unfair to criticise it, because it is we politicians who have devised the procedures that have to be gone through. The Commission did not invent them. Indeed, that was clearly revealed to us in Mali, where there is a desperate need for lorries. The European Commissioner there said, "It is no good my putting in to Brussels for lorries, because there is a procedure whereby the contracts must go out to tender to Mercedes, Leyland, Fiat, and Renault. They will all put in their bids, and by the time the lorries have been shipped the people will be dead." Thus, within the Commission and the European development fund we must consider how we can respond quickly and urgently to the sort of disasters that are still to come.

We should not think that because we have seen the figures on paper the crisis is anywhere near over. More things are likely to happen. If more refugees came over from Eritrea and Tigre into eastern Sudan, I could not answer for the effect that that would have on an already stretched inferior sub-structure, where people are already giving up what little they have to share with the refugees. Thus, we need to remain vigilant and able to respond quickly.

There are also other factors to be considered. Within the ODA budget there is a pound-for-pound scheme which helps non-governmental organisations, and although only small amounts of money may be involved, that money can help, in particular, agricultural projects. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister will seek to develop that scheme and to work alongside the many groups in this country which now feel that they want to make contributions. They may have subscribed to non-governmental organisations such as the Save the Children Fund and Oxfam, and that is fine, but that may be just a one-off thing, and they want to do something to help in the long term.

There are many things which can be done to help in the long term and which our people understand. For example, they understand the importance of trees, of water and of wells. They also understand the importance of health and rehydration techniques to save children's lives. They understand the importance, particularly for women, of milling grain to make flour, sorghum and dura. The more mills there are the better the mix of food, and that work can be done in local communities. We should encourage any groups that want to come together to provide facilities for resources for such work, and the Government could, with their pound-for-pound scheme, encourage that response from people to people. That is what genuinely moves people. They are not moved by a response from people to Government and from Government to Government, but rather by a response from people to people.

The disaster unit has been widely praised for its efficiency and speed of action, but it could be given a bigger remit. I think that its expenditure limit is about £250,000. That may sound a lot, but the way in which the unit can respond quickly to a request on the ground may well prove vital in the months and years ahead. I know that it works well now, and that all those involved with it pay it great tribute. It is a good thing to build on success, and we should ensure that money is available for it to respond even more quickly. Those of us who have been on the ground recognise that, if the rains come, there may be an urgent need for seeds, small amounts of fuel, and so on. The disaster unit already helps with that, but my right hon. friend could try to ensure that it is able to respond to any requests made in the critical months ahead.

Many of us would like more resources for the serious problem of long-term development and aid. We realise that those resources need to be given to programmes that work and that will be successful. It would appear from the statistics which the ODA has provided for us that there has been a fairly constant level of programme aid—I think on or below 29 per cent. of total aid—for agriculture in African countries. I recognise that policy changes can be made only over a period, but it is important to reconsider our priorities and our use of resources. The greater share of aid devoted to Africa could go to agriculture, and to agriculturally related projects. I know, for example, that a road to a fairly remote area may be just as important to a farm as the things on the farm. That is one of the issues that we must try to deal with over a longer period.

In Africa we have seen the tragedy of devastation and destitution, and it has sharpened the way in which we think and our reactions, perhaps, for the future. We have seen African Governments who have come round to recognising that agriculture, food, and cash crops are important. Hon. Members should bear in mind that food is also a cash crop. Cash crops are grown not just for export but to raise the standard of living of those who grow them. Governments have come round to realising that they are important elements in their policies. We have also seen the great international organisations, such as the World Bank, accepting that conclusion.

Given how the great mass of our people feel, regardless of political persuasion, I hope that the Government will continue to respond as well as they have done to the emergency and disaster, and will respond with even greater generosity in future to the huge problem which we all know lies ahead.

Several Hon. Members

rose—

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Paul Dean)

Order. As many hon. Members wish to speak in the debate, I hope that hon. Members will help one another by making brief speeches.

11.16 am

Mr. Clive Soley (Hammersmith)

I too thank the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) for introducing the motion. Thanks are in order, because several of us have considerable sympathy with it. But I am puzzled about whether it will have the Government's full support. I think that it will have considerable support from the Minister, who deserves some credit for the position that he has taken on Ethiopia and the Sudan. Indeed, he has made a major effort there.

But it must also be said that this Government's record on aid is dismal. Aid was one of the first things to be cut by them, and cut quite dramatically. It is a tragedy that, as far as I can recall, it is still about £100 million less than when the Labour Government left office in 1979. The hon. Member for Cambridge (Mr. Rhodes James) seems to be shaking his head as if to say that it is not correct. But the answers are in Hansard and he can look them up. Of course, we are talking in real cash terms, because there is no other way of measuring aid.

My other criticism of the Government concerns their lack of overall strategy. I think that there are hon. Members on both sides of the House who are genuinely concerned about what happens in the Third world. I do not want to attack Conservative Members for what they have said this morning, because I agreed with much of it, and felt very sympathetic to it, but our problem is more extensive than we sometimes realise. We all know that today's debate will not obtain much coverage in the media. Today I have already done several radio and television interviews on the tragedy of the killing and police siege in Earl's Court. Obviously that is a newsworthy subject. But it is deeply distressing that the concern expressed by hon. Members on both sides of the House in a debate such as this will not obtain the media coverage that it deserves.

To some extent, that reflects the decline of the influence and power of this House, and the way in which the power to assist in a big way in such situations has switched to the European Assembly and to North America.

Sadly, the United States is no longer playing its full part, and under Mr. Reagan is in many ways being counterproductive towards the Third world.

The right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath) mentioned the interest of the public in the subject, as did the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Mr. Lester). Many years ago aid to the Third world — or the underdeveloped world, as it then tended to be called—was regarded as an electoral liability. All the parties felt that it was not a subject that would win the sympathy of voters. I do not think that that is true any longer because there has been a change in the climate of opinion, in some ways for the worse and in some ways for the better.

Opinion has changed for the worse in that we have tended to dismiss the United Nations and to give up hope in the various international organisations which were doing such good work in the 1960s to help the whole of humanity, but there has been an increase in public concern about the Third world.

I represent the London borough of Hammersmith, an inner city area with more than its fair share of social and economic problems. Yet, despite those problems, my mailbag frequently contains letters asking me what I am doing and what the Government and Parliament are doing about the famine in north Africa and about aid generally. I find that very encouraging, as do other hon. Members.

I am sure that we were all encouraged by the record issued last Christmas, "Do they know it's Christmas?" It was a marvellous initiative by a number of people in pop music. It was fantasically successful and that sort of effort should be encouraged. Unfortunately, the public's interest is often frustrated. People recognise that we are, in effect, involved in crisis management. Many people have written to me asking why politicians have allowed the various crises to occur when we knew for several years that they were likely to arise.

We knew several years ago that Ethiopia was approaching a crisis of vast proportions. It did not suddenly emerge overnight. For at least two years we have known about a major problem in north Africa, and for the past six to 12 months we have known that it would reach catastrophic proportions. The reaction, when it came, was to television programmes bringing the full horror of the crisis into our drawing rooms.

I have been urging people to make sure that there are constituency groups throughout the country supporting the world development movement in various ways. One such group was organised in my constituency some years ago. All the candidates at the general election and at the elections for the European Assembly were asked to give their views on aid from the public platform. Members of the public who are concerned about the problem should be asking their Members of Parliament what they are doing about it. It is a difficult question to answer, as the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup said.

It is extremely important that there should be political pressure on this House. If people are genuinely concerned about the subject at a deep level throughout the country, it is right that that concern should be transferred to their representatives in this House so that we can then transfer it to the Government. In that way we may be able to persuade the Government to restore the cuts in aid which have been made in the past five years. I should like to see the Government beginning to focus on a strategy for the Third world. I recognise the difficulties, because they have to do it together with other countries, and it is far from easy to get agreement with them.

Early in this Parliament I was amazed that the Government had chosen to cut aid at the same time as the British Leyland truck factory at Bathgate in Scotland was getting into acute difficulties. Those difficulties were aggravated by the cut in aid. That factory was producing trucks for countries with a poor road infrastructure and was ideally suited to helping them. When aid to east Africa was cut, that had an effect on British Rail production facilities in several parts of Britain.

Many people are aware that we cannot be prosperous if other countries are in a state of poverty. On our television sets we see pictures of people dying of poverty because the distortions in aid and trade are allowed to continue.

It was war and world poverty which, more than anything else, persuaded me many years ago to think politically and to come into politics. In the 1970s, and particularly in the 1980s, I have been deeply troubled by the appallingly close link between the arms trade and the growing poverty and instability in the Third world. I think that we all know what is happening. When the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup was speaking, the hon. Member for Banbury (Mr. Baldry) intervened to ask what the British public would feel if aid to Third world countries were to be used for military purposes. In a way that is a fair question, but it should also be directed at our own country.

In the developed world we have been spending more and more on arms production, and now all the arms-producing countries are pressurising Third-world countries to buy their arms. In many Third world countries, up to 40 per cent. of the budget is spent on arms. It might be suggested that that is the fault of the countries concerned, but that is not necessarily so.

If Conservative Members are asked why we should spend so much money on arms, their answer is, "If the Russians would spend less, we would spend less." As the expenditure on arms increases, the money available for aid from the developed countries is reduced. More importantly, as the Third-world countries spend more on arms, they in turn are less able to deal with their own internal difficulties, particularly in education, health, agriculture, and so on. The borders of most of those countries were drawn in colonial times; they are not stable nation states which have been in existence for many years. There are conflicts of interest over territory. When those conflicts are combined with an arms race and with political and economic instability, there is bound to be trouble. At that stage, the armed forces are the only group in the country which can keep control. They have the technology and the discipline to maintain a Government in power, thus the Government have to rely on the armed forces. They have to keep the armed forces happy and provide them with their needs; otherwise the Government are in danger of falling.

Mr. Deakins

My hon. Friend is dealing with a very important point, particularly for those of us who are on the Left in British politics. We do not always give sufficient thought to the question whether there is a substitute for international expenditure on arms by Third world countries—for example, more effective peace-keeping by the United Nations. Is my hon. Friend aware that during 1985, for the first time ever, total world arms expenditure will exceed $1 million million? According to the president of the World Bank two weeks ago, that is equivalent to the total income of the bottom 50 per cent. of mankind.

Mr. Soley

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that information. I was not aware that that figure would be reached this year. It is a damning indictment of all of us. It behoves us not just to criticise Governments which are in an unstable position but to consider what we in the developed world can do about it.

I am well aware of the past effort by Labour Governments — and I think by Conservative Governments, although I am not sure of my facts. Certainly the last Labour Government tried to control the arms trade with the Third world, and probably other Governments have tried to do it. The fact that we failed is not a reason for not continuing to try to control that trade. It is an extremely difficult problem. I am not suggesting to anyone or to any Minister that all we have to do is to stop trading in arms and that that will solve the problem. Sadly, it is not realistic to pretend that this will happen in that way.

The arms trade link between the growing cycle of poverty and the danger of instability followed by the danger of war is intense. I shall give one example. I am a little dated in my facts. I have not kept up with these matters as much as I should have liked because of my other responsibilities during the past few years. Several years ago, the Libyans gave £600 million—which had come from the sale of oil primarily to Western countries—to Syria, which passed that money on to the Soviet Union to pay for the tanks that had been knocked out by the Israelis who had been financed by American money. One can cite many examples; in a sense, the countries are incidental. We realise the dangers in which we are becoming involved when we notice the effect of this process on the political stability and economic development of the world. The two aspects are clearly linked.

This is an enormous topic, and in a way goes beyond the motion. I am sure that the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford is aware—I think that I shall probably take him with me on this point—that the system and events that I have described have had those effects on certain countries, and particularly Ethiopia which provides us with a classic example. The position in Ethiopia is especially tragic.

Agriculture, especially afforestation problems, is another matter that has troubled me greatly, and I am afraid that the Government have not had a clear strategy in dealing with it. People often express concern about nuclear power, oil, coal and pollution—they are right to be concerned about those matters—but, in a way, they pale into insignificance compared with the dangers of continuous wood burning and clearing of areas to provide agricultural land in the Third world. The problem involves not just tropical rain forests—those problems have been well portrayed by "The World About Us" on BBC television and, recently, by ITV—but marginal land areas where trees are cleared not only to grow produce but to provide fuel. That has a devastating effect on agriculture.

A couple of years ago, the Prime Minister was asked about aid to international bodies trying to reverse this process. I recall that Canada was the only country that had not cut aid and that we had cut ours out. President Reagan is now declaring war on the Planned Parenthood Foundation. The Western world stands condemned by its short-sighted policies.

If we do not solve these problems, we shall not be immune from their consequences. They will affect all of us dramatically—not only through seeing the horror on the television set of something happening elsewhere but because of what is happening to the environment of this planet and the way in which we are exploiting it. The arms link is of central importance. I wanted to link that point with a request to the Government and the Minister, who has made a major effort with respect to the Sudanese and Ethiopian famine, to win the case for putting together a strategy for the Third world.

In a way, the Brandt report, which the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup did so much to present, was a classic example of what can be done. Some people feel that the Brandt report has not gone far enough while others feel that it has gone too far. Surely no one can deny that the report was a major milestone showing what we should be doing. We should take up its points, instead of retreating, as we are doing constantly in the 1980s, into our national fortresses to protect ourselves and in so doing putting ourselves at greater risk.

11.34 am

Mr. Peter Lilley (St. Albans)

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) on bringing this issue before the House. I congratulate him also on bringing to the debate his considerable experience of these problems and highlighting the importance of trade as well as aid. His notable mixture of realism and compassion is of considerable benefit to the House.

Reports which my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford and other hon. Members have brought back from Ethiopia and the Sudan have spoken directly to the hearts of the British people about the suffering of our fellow human beings in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. I agree with my right Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath) that it is essential that we do not let the response generated by this initial concern flag as the problem fails to diminish. It is the duty of all of us, if we have learnt anything from our Christian heritage, to recognise that while people are starving, no matter how distant or different they may be from us, we have a duty to come to their aid.

To a large degree, the concern that has been generated has rehabilitated in the minds of the British people the concept of foreign aid. But "aid" is a word covering a variety of aspects and uses. If we are to understand and get our priorities right, it is important that we recognise the different uses to which that word may be put. The highest priority must be humanitarian relief — the aid that is called for when there is famine and distress with which the local population cannot conceivably cope themselves.

That is, however, only a comparatively small part of the total budget that is labelled "aid". In my experience, a large part of what is called aid is simply an export sudsidy. I venture no opinion on whether it is wise or foolish to subsidise exports in this way, although I have always thought that the easiest way to ensure a trade balance was to have a floating exchange rate. We should not accord the same moral approbation to the subsidy of British exports as we do to other forms of aid.

Overlapping with export subsidy is state development aid, whereby this country, through its Government, tries to help other Governments to develop their economies. For many years, I worked as a consultant economist, mainly in underdeveloped countries and on aid projects. I should like to make a few points in the light of my experience. First, I think that there is a more limited scope for this form of Government-to-Government aid to assist development than is often supposed. Secondly, inevitably this aid involves a great deal of bureaucracy. Thirdly, few of the projects that are beneficiaries of aid could not be done as well, if not better, by private enterprise acting in response to the natural incentives of the market place.

I recall my first big project. I was based in Addis Ababa. The project covered the whole of east and central Africa and was carried out by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Its aim was to identify potential plants and industrial enterprises exploiting the fact that Africa produced its own copper but did not, at that stage, fabricate much of it into items that Africans used. The project looked for copper fabrication plants that could be established in Africa.

Our report was ecstatically received by the United Nations Economic Commission in Addis Ababa. More and more copies were required, and I recall thinking wryly that the cost of the paper on which the report was printed was considerably greater than my salary during the time I had to prepare the report. As so often happens, the report remained unacted upon in the headquarters in Addis Ababa, and, for all I know, it is still there. That has been disappointing, because the Governments liked the idea but could not agree among themselves. The report was bogged down in bureaucracy.

Happily, I discovered some years later that all the plants that I had identified, which had been suggested for location in countries that allowed free enterprise to operate, were subsequently initiated by free enterprise, now exist and, as far as I know, are trading away merrily. That suggests that free enterprise can do the job if it is permitted to do so. The intervention of state development aid is not necessarily required.

The great problem about state development aid is that almost inevitably it leads to state control of development. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) said, that can be damaging. From my experience, one danger is that once the state becomes involved, it loses sight of the real need of the country, which is to make more value by consuming fewer resources. It becomes involved in prestige projects. Let me give an example. We carried out a study in east Africa in which we considered a range of industries that might be developed. One that was continually thrust under our noses for attention by local Governments was establishing car assembly plants. Those Governments wanted to have a car industry. That was the glamorous, prestigious project. It was easy to see that, as the knock-down parts of a car cost more than a fully assembled car, any such plant would be loss-making because its raw materials would be more expensive than the value of what it produced, even not taking into account any other costs involved.

There were other projects, such as the manufacture of lorries, which were economical at a local level because the scale of production was much smaller and the scale of demand much greater, relatively speaking. However, those projects were not so appealing to local Governments, so the prestige projects were carried out and naturally absorbed the aid. That is damaging to the countries that fall victim to it. However, if the economies were left—with some help from the Government, of course—to free enterprise, such waste would not occur.

Of course there is a role for the state in any country. There is a role for the state in our country and in underdeveloped countries. However, in the West we recognise that the role of the state is comparatively limited, and we recognise more and more that perhaps it should have been more limited in the past than it has been, and that we should allow private industry and private enterprise more scope. That is understood increasingly even in the Socialist world. China has made great advances by allowing free enterprise greater rein. If free enterprise is good for us, why is it not good for the underdeveloped countries? Why must we foster and encourage the extension of state control? We know perfectly well that if we nationalised agriculture in this country we would have a famine. Why do we help other Governments in underdeveloped countries to nationalise and collectivise their agriculture, producing the famine and undernourishment that are the inevitable consequences?

There is often a whiff of neo-colonialism and latter-day imperialism in some of the talk about development aid, as if those countries cannot achieve without our help what we managed to achieve unaided. From my experience in Africa and Asia, I have considerable confidence in the ability of people in those countries to develop and bring themselves up to the level where they can take advantage of modern technological developments and contribute to them. However, that development will come primarily from their own efforts, and the best way to harness their own efforts and their immense abilities and resources is through the free market. We should not hamper and hinder the extension of the free market by subsidising the extension of state ownership in those countries more than is appopriate.

Two consequences follow from that. The first is that the West must not close its markets to the underdeveloped countries. If they are to develop by harnessing their efforts through free markets, we must make our markets open to them. We must, profitably to them and to us, trade with them to our mutual benefit. That will—and it does, to the extent that we already do it—involve a more rapid pace of change and development in this country. Old industries may decline more rapidly than would be the case otherwise as they give way to cheaper imports from underdeveloped countries. It may therefore be necessary to spend money in this country on the retraining and assistance of those who lose out in the process. We should recognise that that is a valid form of aid, which ultimately will be to the long-term benefit of the underdeveloped countries, and should receive more moral approbation than the subsidy of British exports.

We should also recognise that the underdeveloped countries would be foolish to exclude our investment. We should try to encourage them to accept investment from the western world, of large and small companies. Indeed, the abolition of British exchange controls has considerably contributed to that. I understand that private flows of investment to underdeveloped countries are now about four times as great as public flows from this country. That is much to be desired, because in general it will produce greater benefit to the recipient countries.

I conclude by re-emphasising that our first and overwhelming priority on this matter must be care and concern, and relief of famine and other emergency humanitarian calls upon our aid. That should always have top priority. However, if we are also to contribute to the long-term development of those countries, and although undoubtedly there will be a continuing role for state development aid, we must recognise that the main role must be through opening our markets to trade and allowing our investors to invest in those countries to bring the most rapid possible development so that the prospect of famine and poverty can be banished entirely from those countries.

11.46 am

Mr. Guy Barnett (Greenwich)

I should like to thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for your indulgence in permitting me to take part in the debate, although I have had to miss a great part of it. I apologise to those right hon. and hon. Members who have already spoken. I was particularly sorry to miss the speech of the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath). The fact is that I have been involved with the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association in a long-standing engagement. Among the delegates who are visiting this country are many politicians from African countries, so perhaps my activity was not so totally out of line with the subject of the debate.

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the debate, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) on choosing this subject and on the way in which he introduced it. I am glad that we are able to have a debate on this important subject during a time of considerable crisis in Africa.

The experience of the past year or more is a bitter commentary on the aid efforts of the past three decades or so of so-called development in Africa. I do not think that we can lay the blame at anyone's door in particular. Many of the pundits, Governments, aid experts and others have been seriously wide of the mark. I remember coming back from Kenya in 1962, having witnessed famine in Africa, and addressing Freedom from Hunger meetings, confident about the answers and knowing the remedies. How wrong I was, and how wrong most of us were in those confident early days. The problems of development turned out to be far more difficult than most of us had assumed 20 or 30 years ago. There have been success stories, but there have been too many failure stories as well.

Perhaps the most prescient of people at that time was Aneurin Bevan, who predicted with horrible accuracy that modern technology would make it possible for half of mankind to watch on their television screens the other half starving to death. That is what millions of us in this country have been doing over the past months.

When faced with a record of failure, people are apt to take up extreme or strongly held philosophical positions. There is a temptation at the moment to say, for instance, that the food crisis in the continent of Africa is so serious that attention should be concentrated on food crops, to the virtual exclusion of cash crops for export, as if Africans are no longer capable of earning a living. Some people, like Lord Bauer and others at the other end of the political spectrum, reject all aid and say that it is counterproductive. Others reject all official aid flows, arguing that money invariably falls into the wrong hands and causes much corruption. It is said that the trickle-down theory does not work and that the poor can be reached only through the non-governmental organisations. Yet others argue for this or that political system—oblivious of the fact, to which Julius Nyerere drew attention in London this week, that the disaster that has struck much of the continent is no respecter of political systems or ideologies.

I believe that there is a danger in such simplistic fashions. Whatever else may be said of the experience of the past three decades, we now have an immense amount of experience of successes and failures to draw on. Perhaps we are wiser today than we were 30 years ago.

Many of us recognise the impressive contributions made by the non-governmental organisations. As a member of the board of Christian Aid, I am very much aware of the unique contribution of that organisation. When I saw the Ethiopian Foreign Minister in this country on Tuesday, he expressed his gratitude and that of the Ethiopian people for the work done by Oxfam, the Save the Children Fund, Christian Aid and other bodies in his country, with the generous support of the British people.

It is wrong to reject official aid as ineffective in reaching the needs of the poor. Contributions to solutions will come from a variety of sources. My only plea is for a recognition of the potential for complementary relationships between official and unofficial aid, between bilateral programmes, and between bilateral and multilateral aid.

The all-party group on overseas development has set up a working party which is currently examining the effectiveness of British aid to agriculture in Africa. The working party is taking evidence from a great variety of experts. Without attempting to anticipate its conclusions, I suspect that it will suggest a greater measure of cooperation between agencies of various sorts working in the field.

I disagree with those who think that we should try to bypass African Governments, or suggest that developmental objectives can be achieved despite the Governments of African countries. It is only through Governments, or Government agencies, that the development of the infrastructure is possible. One of the advantages inherited by Zimbabwe from colonial days, as I learnt last August, is a much better infrastructure than exists in any other African country that I have visited. That gives Zimbabwe a head start over other countries, to its ultimate benefit.

Mr. Ivor Stanbrook (Orpington)

Would it not be fair to say that a great deal of the benefit which the hon. Gentleman says Zimbabwe derived from colonial days in fact derived from the fact that there were many Europeans there who thought that they had a permanent place in the country? Was it not thanks to their expertise and devotion to the country that standards were so high at the time of independence?

Mr. Barnett

I suspect that the hon. Gentleman is making a political point. I merely stated the facts. It is also a fact that the existence of European farmers in Kenya for some years led to the development of an infrastructure superior to that in, for example, Tanzania. The lesson that I draw from that fact is that countries need an infrastructure, and that developing an infrastructure is the business of the Government, whoever happens to be running it at the time.

Those who reject working in co-operation with and in support of established Governments must recognise the serious dangers that arise from the collapse of government and law and order in Africa today. We remember the Congo disaster of 1960, and the civil wars in Angola, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Rhodesia which set back development in those countries.

We should not turn a blind eye to abuses of human rights or to repressive policies, provided that we recognise the fragility of many of the regimes with which we have to deal. The social and economic pressures on those regimes are enormous. For example, the population of Kenya is growing at a rate of over 4 per cent. a year. There are 7 million people without jobs and there is hardly any cultivable land for settlement.

That is only one illustration of the daunting problems with which some African Governments have to grapple while facing near-bankruptcy. They cannot hope to tackle problems of such magnitude without outside help, but we, the Americans and the other Western nations are pursuing policies which are about as unhelpful and damaging as they could be.

First, debt servicing for the continent as a whole has escalated from $5.8 billion to $7.2 billion between last year and this. Brian Walker, the former director-general of Oxfam, described that burden as a millstone around the necks of the poor". At a splendid banquet in the Mansion House on Monday, Julius Nyerere asked the City of London whether he should pay up and starve his people. That is the nature of the choice he faces and which others will soon face if they do not face it now. That being so, how can the Government go on hiding behind the coat-tails of the American Administration by tacitly supporting policies pursued by world financial institutions, or by failing to make a strong stand against the current attack which has been launched on some of the agencies of the United Nations? There is the failure to fund the International Fund for Agricultural Development, or even to support UNESCO, and the failure, in effect, to play a full part in improving the effectiveness of the bodies in doing the jobs which they were set up to do.

Secondly, there is the movement in the terms of trade. I believe that between 1973 and 1981 low-income Africa lost 23 per cent. as a result of the movement against primary products. That again reduces the money available to Governments for the development of their own countries. Lack of development of the insfrastructure makes such countries unattractive to private investors.

The hon. Member for St. Albans (Mr. Lilley) should bear in mind that private investors will not invest in a country where the infrastructure does not exist or is poor. Julius Nyerere claimed that less than 10 per cent. of capital is currently invested in countries with a per capita income of £500 or less. That is a point that must be faced by those who claim that private investment is the solution to the problems of the seriously underdeveloped countries. Those who are content with current official aid flows must face the stark fact that the West is currently taking more out of Africa than it is putting in. The result can only be—the signs are there—a series of disasters in Africa. They may not be on the gargantuan scale of Ethiopia, but no one should be surprised by further crises in other parts of the continent.

As so much economic power lies in Western hands, we sometimes talk as though it was entirely up to us to put things right. It is not. The development of Africa must lie in the hands of Africans themselves, their Governments and their peoples. Africans will make the choices, run the equipment, work the land, run the institutions and provide the services after the experts, the technical co-operation officers, the advisers and the volunteers have gone home. It is important to lay emphasis, as the administrator of the United Nations development programme, Mr. Bradford Morse, repeatedly does, on the importance of human development—the development of skills, expertise and administrative capacity. That is a vital long-term contribution that we can also make.

The ODA should examine its whole technical co-operation programme. I have said that before. It should be doing that in order to raise the level of our contribution to human development by the transfer of skills and expertise to African countries. We are uniquely qualified by our colonial experience to do that. We can do it supremely well both on the ground and by re-opening the doors of our higher education institutions to a much larger number of African students.

Britain can make a major contribution to technical cooperation. Our colonial experience and knowledge and expertise of tropical conditions are such that among the developed countries of the world we have a larger contribution to make than almost anyone else. That is perhaps the most valuable contribution that we can make.

Proof of that could again be seen when I visited Zimbabwe last year. The initiative of my right hon. Friend the Member for Clydesdale (Dame J. Hart) when she was Minister of Overseas Development in assisting hundreds of refugees from Rhodesia to gain education in Britain was obvious when I witnessed the skill, expertise and administrative capacity that exists in Zimbabwe.

I hope that we shall take seriously that contribution which we are capable of making. I hope that the ODA will heed those words and review carefully the size of the contribution that we can make to human development by improving, extending and developing our technical cooperation programme.

12.1 pm

Mr. Robert Rhodes James (Cambridge)

I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Greenwich (Mr. Barnett) and, in particular, to be able to express my admiration and gratitude to the work of Christian Aid in the Ethiopian crisis. I am a member of the council of the Save the Children Fund and chairman of the stop polio campaign of that fund.

To give an example of what has been done by the voluntary organisations, between July 1984 and December 1985 the Save the Children Fund will have spent over £21 million in Ethiopia and Sudan in addition to all the work that it does elsewhere in Africa. That would not have been possible had it not been for the support and encouragement that we have received from my right hon. Friend the Minister for Overseas Development and the Government and from remarkable contributions made by individuals such as Bob Geldorf with his famous record and my friend Oliver Walston in his campaign to send a tonne of grain to Africa, to which the farmers of Britain, and especially East Anglia, made such a remarkable response.

As has been emphasised again and again by my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells), who introduced the motion and to whom we are all deeply grateful, and by others, disaster relief, although important, is not enough. If there is one criticism that I would make of the debate it is that it has been rather too general. I want briefly to draw the attention of the House to the conditions in one country—Namibia, South-West Africa, which I have just visited with the hon. Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson) and the noble lord, Lord Kennet.

Namibia is one and a half times the size of France and more than twice the size of Britain with a population of 1 million, of whom 95 per cent. are black. As the House knows, that population is concentrated in the north on the Angolan border, a zone of conflict and war. I spent two and a half days there. I shall not comment on the political problems which confront that unhappy country. The British Government, rightly, strongly support Security Council resolution 435 for the independence of Namibia and the holding of free and fair elections, in which they are supported by the United States and four other western countries.

Ideally, the House would wish Namibia to proceed fairly rapidly to independence, but in reality that is unlikely. During my visit I saw no signs of any inclination by the South African authorities rapidly to withdraw. Faced with that problem and, being realists, accepting the fact that independence will not be coming swiftly, what can we do in the period up to independence? As has been frequently emphasised, independence, particularly in Africa, has proved to be a catastrophe. It has proved in so many cases to be infinitely worse than the state which preceded it.

Although South-West Africa has only briefly been Britain's responsibility, we can learn from our experience and that of other African countries. The difficulty is that we do not recognise the legality of the South African presence in Namibia. Therefore, there is no possibility, politically or otherwise, of our giving direct aid via Pretoria.

However, let me assure the House that there is a profound need in Namibia. Its needs are enormous. It needs drugs, doctors, nurses — here our expertise in tropical medicine puts us in a good position to help—teachers, agronomists to advise and assist, and technical training. But perhaps the list should come from Namibia and not from us.

Despite the political difficulties, we should seriously consider the request for the appointment of an aid coordinator in Windhoek who can determine the needs of that country and that any aid should be given through the churches and voluntary organisations. Eighty-five per cent. of the population of Namibia are Christians and are active members of the Christian Church. The Churches represent one of the most important organisations.

If we cannot as a country intervene in the tragedy which is now gripping Namibia, perhaps we could give a lead and assistance, not least with the West Germans with their historical involvement in that country, and, through the EC, give some practical help in the period up to independence.

When I was in South Africa and South-West Africa I could hear Radio Moscow clearly on my radio. It was difficult to hear the BBC external services. May I ask the Government once again, as I have before, why they have cut that vital voice of truth and freedom to our friends?

12.7 pm

Mr. Stuart Holland (Vauxhall)

My hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich (Mr. Barnett) gave his apologies for being absent earlier. My right hon. Friend the Member for Clydesdale (Dame Judith Hart) would have liked to be with us, but she is, unfortunately, ill, as she told me this morning. My hon. Friend the Member for Monklands, West (Mr. Clarke) would also have liked to be with us, but he was able to initiate the Adjournment debate last night on international famine, making a direct contribution to the issues that we are considering this morning. I note that, as far as I am aware, no apologies have been given by any members of the alliance parties, none of whom is present.

I join in the congratulations to the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) on tabling his motion, which is carefully and well worded to stress not only the crisis and tragedy of starvation in Africa but the contribution to be made by trade and aid. It is important that several hon. Members have been able to address themselves to both those issues today.

Clearly, public opinion has been overwhelmed by the tragedy which has unfolded in sub-Saharan Africa. It is a tragedy of truly biblical proportions, with the mass movement of population and decimation of families, peoples and regions.

The House has already given considerable time, both in debate and especially during questions on overseas development, to the specific problems of Ethiopia. I do not want to reiterate all the matters that have been stressed before, save to say that, when public opinion in Britain and elsewhere in the developed countries is so anxious to save life in that part of Africa, it is tragic that the Ethiopian Government should pursue a war, especially in Tigre and Eritrea, and appear more concerned to take life in pursuit of political interests rather than to join those who seek a safe passage agreement for food aid. I note that Conservative Members agree with me. I would focus on short-term issues, irrespective of the long-term and highly contentious political issues — for example, whether Eritrea should be part of a federal Ethiopia, autonomous or a relatively autonomous region within that country.

Both sides of the House would appeal to the Ethiopian authorities to agree in the short term to a safe passage agreement for food aid. The tragedy is that, while Eritrea and Tigre need about 20,000 tonnes of food aid a month, they are getting less than 2,000 tonnes. It is extremely disturbing to hear reports that the Addis Government may be preparing a major military initiative in southern Tigre. If they do so, the House will express its horror.

Several hon. Members have referred to the refugees in the transit camps. My latest reports from those leaving the area show that the position is worsening. The camps in Sudan lack appropriate financial and technical assistance and are becoming overwhelmed. The hon. Member for Broxtowe (Mr. Lester) referred to the difficulties encountered by the Sudanese in the transit camps. The camps have between 75,000 and 95,000 people but lack adequate water supplies, medicine and health care. As disease has been breaking out in the camps, the message has got back to the transit camps in Tigre and caused a greater resistance among the families against moving to the Sudan. By so doing they are overwhelming the limited facilities in the transit camps.

The water boring equipment for those camps, which could have been in use, is not available because the Ethiopian authorities intervened and impounded the materials scheduled, for example, by an Australian aid agency to Port Sudan. That is a further illustration of how the Government in Addis are not showing that they are as worried as many people in the international community, which they approach for assistance, about the fundamental problems.

My hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Mr. Cox) drew attention to the food aid needs of the Sudan. Literally hundreds of thousands of refugees are coming into that country. I join him in giving credit to the Sudanese authorities for maintaining an open-door policy. A cynic or critic might say that, granted the length of the border, it would be difficult to do anything else. However, it is evident from the way in which the Sudanese authorities are making efforts within their country that they do face their responsibilities, albeit with resources that are unequal to the need. Although some hon. Members gave credit to the Minister for recognising the scale of the problem, we must see a significant shift and increase of resources to assist the Sudanese in the short term while they face this terrible tragedy.

The Minister said earlier—he may return to this—that he was impressed by the fact that there is already a considerable transport fleet in the Sudan, which is mainly private, but that the problem was not essentially one of trucks. That may be his view, but there is a terrible fuel shortage problem. If we were to mobilise the scale of additional food resources needed for the Sudanese, it has been estimated that it would add 25 per cent. a year to the fuel needed within the Sudan. That is a quarter of a million tonnes, which is equivalent to a medium-sized tanker.

If we are talking about acts of imagination which the House should endorse, why are we not ensuring that we get such fuel to the Sudan? It can easily be shipped to Port Sudan. Fuel on a significant scale would assist in food distribution efforts. I make that point positively and constructively because we would be delighted if it were possible for the Government to respond. I know that the Minister will have to reflect on the matter and that he may not give an answer today, but that should be done.

Criticisms have been made of European Community food aid distribution and the considerable time that it takes by approval of multiple committees to schedule resources to drought areas. We are aware, and I believe the new commissioners are aware, that the Commission is not moving quickly enough to respond to the crisis and that further initiatives are needed. If there is the political will among some commissioners and Ministers, why cannot something be done?

In the interim we should make more fuel available to a country such as the Sudan. It is not the only place, but it is a critical case because of the numbers of refugees coming from Ethiopia. As we are a shipping and oil-producing nation, why cannot the Government show some imagination? Why do they not recognise that, unless food aid is distributed by the end of April, little will be distributed by June, and if it is not distributed by June, although the rains are not adequate, they may be sufficient to make food distribution by road virtually impossible. Why do not the Government respond by providing a tanker of fuel, challenging the European Community by showing it that this can be done, welcoming its support in principle for joint financing, if it will agree to it, and acting effectively?

Although the Minister appears to have been persuaded that there is not a shortage of transport vehicles in the Sudan or in other areas of the Sahel, I know from visiting Chad, Upper Volta, Mali, Niger and Burkino Faso 10 years ago that food distribution by medium-sized trucks is critical. We appreciate the difficulties that the Minister would face in finding enough trucks in the short term to help with food distribution in the Sahel. However, when my right hon. Friend the Member for Clydesdale found that the waiting list for Leyland or Bedford trucks was so long that in a few weeks she could not possibly acquire the number required for food aid distribution in response to the drought, she took an initiative. She asked the Ministry of Defence for so many hundred vehicles and said that the Overseas Development Ministry would finance their replacement.

We appreciate the constraints under which the Minister operates in a Government who are wrongly worried, in terms of their reasons, about the restraints of public expenditure. The British public has responded to the drought with an overwhelming act of imagination. Cannot the Government find the vehicles needed to bring food into the areas where people must stay to plant the seeds which must be planted if there is to be a harvest next year? Cannot we have an act of imagination similar to that shown by my right hon. Friend the Member for Clydesdale in 1974–75? We may be told that it takes a long time to get the trucks there. Last time we drove the trucks across the Sahara. How they get there is a secondary matter. If the Ministry of Defence would release some trucks, the British people would feel that the Government were not only talking about their concern but demonstrating it in practical ways.

One of the longer-term issues is food aid versus development. Most hon. Members who have spoken in the debate are convinced that there is no alternative to food aid in the short term. Tragically, there will probably be no alternative to food aid in the medium term in some of the Sahel countries, because of the problems that will occur if there is no planting later this year if inadequate rains fall, or if the rains fall and there are no people on farms to undertake the planting.

It is clear that the International Fund for Agricultural Development is relevant to this problem. I noted with interest that in the Adjournment debate last night, when he was pressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Monklands, West on IFAD, the Minister said that he apparently completely satisfied the Opposition Front Bench spokesman on the subject." —[Official Report, 21 March 1985; Vol. 75, c. 1089.] That overstates the matter. As it happens, on the Floor of the House, I did not respond to his answer. But although we are glad to know that the Government's target for IFAD replenishment is about $600 million, we must stress, first, that this will be over the next three years and, secondly, that it is about half of IFAD's original request. Whereas the United States, French and Scandanivanian Governments are expected to contribute more than would be sufficient to reach that target, a British official is cited in the magazine West Africa of 11 March as saying: Britain is unlikely to provide extra money because a high proportion of United Kingdom aid already goes to multilateral agencies. Hon. Members will be aware that the final replenishment of IFAD must be fixed at a meeting on 2 April. I hope that, when deciding whether the Overseas Development Agency should make a significantly greater contribution to IFAD, the Minister will take into account the unanimous view of the House that if we are not to store up future trouble in present drought areas and perpetuate a recycling of drought in the longer term, a building of the funds of IFAD is imperative.

The problem of deforestation has been referred to by several hon. Members. The position is indeed desperate. Both the Minister and I were able briefly to attend a conference given earlier this week by the International Institute for Environment and Development, in conjunction with Earthscan. Mr. Brian Walker, of the International Institute for Environment and Development cited Lestor Brown's new "State of the World" for 1985, which argued that the process of deforestation has now gone so far into decline that 70 per cent. of the rainfall over Africa as a whole, which was hitherto held by the forests and savannahs, is slowly evaporating into the skies, not to return as rain. I was especially impressed by the argument of the hon. Member for Broxtowe, although his conclusion was depressing, that even out in the Atlantic one can see the earth which should be available for planting as Just in the sky.

This is another area where hon. Members are agreed that there is a problem of dramatic proportions, but we must ask what scale of resources the Government can put into it, what can be done by the European Community, and how much progress there is likely to be in the shorn. term. The Pisani memorandum published in 1982 made some recommendations about deforestation. They included: Saving firewood through the introduction of stoves … reforestation and desertification control through the creation of stocks of plant material in village nurseries … improving village water supply", and so on. But until we can make available alternative forms of fuel in those areas, it will be difficult to ask people not to use wood. The women of the region, who were criticised by an ILO report for burning too much wood in the Sahel and in sub-Saharan Africa, have very little or no alternative fuel. The Minister probably heard the interesting point made by a contributor to the Earthscan debate this week. He said that it was all very well to design a new fuel-saving stove for those areas which, according to the rationality of the technician, could save fuel, but, as most of us realise, at night the temperature in those areas drops considerably, and the open hearth is a source of both warmth and light. We have talked about intermediate technology for a long time, but we have not managed to relate the real needs of those who are trying to subsist in those areas to the environmental claims that we make upon them. I do not say that we have all the answers. Indeed, the illustration that I gave shows that technicians do not have all the answers. But if this is a major ecological problem that effects the entire planet, what priority will the Government give, jointly with others, to this matter?

I hope that the Minister will at least consider seriously providing Government time so that the House can address itself to such longer-term development issues behind the short-term drought.

Mr. Deakins

Many of the matters about which my hon. Friend is talking, especially wood burning and deforestation, affect not only the British Government and other bilateral aid donors, but the multilateral aid institutions. Since there is now a World Bank special fund, should not suggestions and criticisms be directed not just at the British Government but at the World Bank? Is it not essential to have more information, I hope from the Government, about the World Bank programme so that we can see whether our aid effort can be dovetailed in to meet the problems that my hon. Friend has mentioned?

Mr. Holland

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that suggestion. He is correct. Although many of us feel that we have to give at least qualified support to the World Bank initiative, major questions need to be posed. One is about the emphasis in the World Bank's analysis on the free workings of the market mechanism in food aid programmes.

For example, recently the bank encouraged many countries in Africa to increase the price that farmers receive for their food products as an incentive to grow more food. However, unlike export crops, which in many of these countries are bought by state agencies or directly by a multinational company, most food crops in Africa are sold in the open market by private traders to the consumer. This makes Government official prices irrelevant for the most part. How does one cope with that problem? How would one respond to a Government that said that they will be as tough on food prices, within the limits of administrative feasibility, as the French Government have been at different times since the war in setting, at least on an interim basis, price ceilings for specific products?

This may not be the kind of strategy that attracts some people. I believe that once General de Gaulle, when asked what he thought of the pricing system, said that the President of the republic concerned himself with inflation and not with the price of food. But one cannot divorce the two. In practice, the result of the World Bank's approach would be that if a Government were to try to make ceilings for food prices stick and were to try to get resources by grant transfer to agricultural producers, the World Bank would bring pressure on them to relax their programme in favour of market forces. If the World Bank were not doing so, the IMF certainly would do so.

This is another example of the double standards and hypocrisy in the policies of the fund. If we are not careful, we may find it among ourselves, for the policy of food grant to producers is the policy on which British agriculture has flourished during this century. The EEC system directly transfers resources without limits on production. The EEC system is a price support system. We have one standard for ourselves and one for Third-world countries.

One of the great problems faced by Third-world countries in agriculture is the way in which the terms of trade operate. This is directly referred to in the motion of the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford—I nearly called him the hon. Member for Hertford, Hereford, Hampshire and all points south—which has focused on the trade issue. As we know, there is extreme vulnerability in the prices that can be commanded by a few agricultural commodities. Oxfam has stressed that nine countries in Africa are dependent upon just one crop for over 70 per cent. of their income, just as 60 per cent. of Bangladesh's export earnings come from the sale of jute or jute products, and almost 90 per cent. of Burundi's come from selling coffee.

We have been aware for some time of the need for commodity stabilisation. That is why STABEX—stabilisation of exports — was introduced in the early 1970s, and why we hoped that it would assist many of the African, Caribbean and Pacific ocean countries, which are associated to the European Community. But the instability of prices and purchases is staggering. In 1975, the United States bought $100 million-worth of sugar from Brazil but the following year it bought none and instead switched its sugar purchases to the Philippines.

There are several implications of these examples. We need initiatives on commodity agreements and a STABEX-type system, perhaps starting with the European Community but not only concerning it, to be jointly taken by Governments. STABEX needs reform because in practice it has operated to stabilise prices for only a few commodities and a few countries. Among those countries, some such as Senegal, are higher-income countries.

Secondly, we need development agreements with some of the least developed countries and especially in the case of food production in Africa. This is something that we can do, without telling Third world countries how they should run their internal affairs. Transnational companies from First-world countries dominate the commodity trade of the Third world. In that trade, the decline has been dramatic in recent years. For example, the shift against Brazil has been 50 per cent. over 10 years.

Whether it is wheat, sugar, coffee, corn, rice or bananas, up to half a dozen transnational companies account for between 75 per cent. and 90 per cent. of the commodity trade of Third-world countries. Without saying that all was well with the global village until Third-world countries were trampled by multinational companies, there clearly is a problem. The share of the income from food commodities gained by Third-world countries is frequently 15 or 10 per cent. of the final value of that product as sold in First-world markets, whereas frequently the retailer in the First-world market will be getting one third of the final price. In terms of shifting resources towards the poorest people in the poorest countries, especially those who have fallen below the subsistence net and are now the victims of drought and famine, it is deplorable that only about one tenth of what accrues to the producing country accrues to the poorest people in those countries. Overall, we are talking about 1 per cent. of the value of the commodities accruing to the peasant farmers who, allegedly, in World Bank plans are most in need.

Here again something quite simple could be done. If we are to have a project which enables a resource shift towards Third-world countries to help with long-term food production, we should combine commodity agreements and development agreements in which First-world countries take their own responsibilities towards their own transnational and multinational companies for their operations in the Third-world. Alternatively, rather than simply having an aid and trade provision which is assisting investment in Third-world countries for specific companies, it would be useful if the Minister could seriously consider a trade agreement policy by which British funds, if necessary, were made available to compensate for the loss of revenue to transnational or multinational companies which would follow from their paying a higher share of the value of the commodities to Third-world producers.

A further proposal which is important has already been referred to in passing by my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich. It concerns the debt of the sub-Saharan African countries. The bank and the fund are to have interim meetings shortly. If we cannot write off the debt of some £42 billion of the African countries, it is conceivable that we can write off and grant fund on a long-term basis a sizeable share of that debt. As my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich stressed, the argument advanced by President Nyerere should not be forgotten: should the Government of Tanzania really give priority to repaying debt when to do so it would starve its own people?

My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley) spoke of arms and arms sales and the pre-emption of resources in Third-world countries. My hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow pointed out that the trillion dollar arms budget in the global economy was equivalent to the income of the poorer half of the world. It is also equivalent to one half of the Third-world's GDP as a whole, which shows the disproportion in that kind of expenditure.

Although we may not expect such a transformation of attitudes among the super-powers we could within 10 years move to significant disarmament, and certainly progress could be made towards nuclear disarmament. There is a global challenge of drought, disease and death, and we need to move the world out of crisis and poverty. When the Prime Minister goes to the next industrial summit, will she argue that we could spend at least one tenth of the world's arms budget each year on a recovery programme? With a recovery programme of at least $100 billion a year we could make real progress towards resolving not only the debt crisis of the Third world but its income and resources crisis. Such expenditure could increase Third world trade by 4 to 5 per cent. a year. If it did, it would increase the Third world's income by more than one fifth in five years and by more than half in 10 years. In that case, instead of the talk, talk and talk again which we have seen at Williamsburg and instead of Cancuning the Brandt proposals, we might have the chance of a new development decade.

Finally, at No. 10 the Prime Minister was presented on 11 March 1985 with a petition from seven aid agencies, CAFOD, Christian Aid, Euro Action-Accord, Oxfam, Save the Children Fund, War on Want and the World Development Movement, which contained 750,000 signatures. It called on the Government to

1. "1. provide appropriate emergency relief to Ethiopia and other affected areas for at least 12 months—until their next harvest is secured.
2. 2. urge other governments, the EEC and UN agencies to make a similar commitment.
3. 3. ensure that aid reaches hungry people in response to human need regardless of political factors.
4. 4. increase the quantity and quality of long term development aid to avert future famines in Ethiopia and elsewhere."

What are the Government going to do about it?

12.40 pm

Mr. Colin Moynihan (Lewisham, East)

My hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) rightly referred in his motion to the importance of mankind working together. It is the achievement of this goal, above all others, that will alleviate poverty and starvation, but there are hurdles which ironically make it difficult, and in some cases impossible, to satisfy the objectives of the motion. Many constituents of hon. Members say that it is a sad reflection upon humanity that it is easier to put men on the moon than for mankind to work together to alleviate starvation and poverty in the Third world, and I agree with them. Therefore, I wish to comment upon some of the hurdles that confront those who seek to bring all those who are concerned with aid projects closer together, by which I mean closer to finding a solution to this problem.

Sadly, there are Governments in Africa who choose not to make their first priority the alleviation of poverty. We must constantly apply all our powers of persuasion and influence to try to change the policies of recipient Governments who are against the idea of solving indigenous problems, right down to the shortage of foodstuffs. Such shortages are often caused by national marketing boards which price local farmers out of local markets and, worst of all, out of local production and farming.

We need also to look at long-term agricultural developments in Africa, concentrate upon the needs of the recipients and recognise the constraints that are placed upon indigenous populations. Tribes are ecologically based. The most important objective for the vast majority of those involved in African agriculture, particularly in the semi-arid areas, is to have the land ready for the first rains and the oxen fit to pull the ploughs at the end of a long dry season. There is a need for development projects to challenge the problems and bring about timely land availability, timely planting and timely first weeding.

It is not, therefore, either wise or relevant always to impose high technology upon intensive subsistence systems. Instead, a combination of policies are required which reflect upwards from the needs of local communities, villages and tribes. These include the availability of water. I am glad that positive emphasis has been placed in our debate upon that vital commodity. Water is needed not only for irrigation schemes but for people and cattle. Clean water is very important in this context. We need to develop nutritional and health programmes, in particular the primary health programmes and the family planning services which have been referred to by Opposition Members—not least the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Deakins), who referred to the problems being faced by Chad.

African systems of agriculture have been blown apart by the population explosion. Cultivation and fertilisation have disappeared in the wake of that population explosion and given way to desertification. In 1900, 40 per cent. of Ethiopia was covered by forest. Now, only 2 per cent. of Ethiopia is so covered.

Emergency aid is important, but the work of the NGOs needs to be recognised in development policies which take care of important community needs. Their work has been outstanding, particularly in the provision of family planning services and health programmes. The provision of emergency aid, however important that may be, is no long-term panacea for the problems that face Africa. Emergency aid is important, but it must not be at the expense of the development of long-term programmes for sub-Saharan Africa in particular. These programmes are just as important and must be given serious attention by the Government in the months and years to come.

More time is required for the implementation of many of the international agency lending programmes. Many of the subsistence agricultural projects in the sub-Saharan region are not going beyond five years and are being abandoned. Many of us have seen that happening in the Sudan and elsewhere. We need to consider 20-year programmes—five years for establishment, five years for operation and, most importantly, five years for handing over to the locals and local management, and five years for monitoring the performance of the indigenous management team.

When we are considering the long-term multi-million dollar projects, it is important to ensure that the World Bank and the European development fund, or DG VIII officials to be precise, monitor more closely the disbursement of funds throughout the project cycle. Of the six broad stages of identification, preparation, appraisal, negotiation, implementation and evaluation, more attention must be paid to the last two. The lessons of experience during the development of a project must be learnt and adjustments made in the final stages if the project is multifaceted. Tendering, supervision of construction and monitoring of results and final evaluation should be given more emphasis.

The work of the NGOs and the vital importance, in many large international programmes, of social schemes and sociologically important factors in those schemes can be complementary and not confrontational. In other words, I should like to see the NGOs and their work complementing the importance of large-scale projects which are—I think we would all accept—in many areas of great importance to the development of agriculture in Africa. I readily accept, however, that unfortunately there have been schemes that have not worked. I am arguing for a complementary rather than a confrontational approach by the NGOs, and for more attention to be paid to ensuring that the people to whom the aid is directed benefit most.

I shall reflect on the part of the motion relating to the importance of trade. In the current debate over the use of aid for securing commercial objectives, I favour its use in the form of mixed credit or equivalent techniques. I declare an interest, because Tate and Lyle gave me the opportunity to work closely with many of the international lending agencies. I have visited all of them, putting together project financial proposals for the development of agricultural projects around the world.

What came home to me strongly was that in the cold light of recession many valuable development schemes would never have been undertaken without mixed credit or equivalent techniques. Furthermore, our aid and trade provision has provided many companies with the opportunity to match the practice of our competitors.

Guidelines on that practice should be sought, and such finance should be confined to priority projects and programmes which are carefully appraised against the developmental standards and criteria applicable to official development assistance programmes which form part of the recipient country's development programme.

Where I might have parted company in part from what I thought was an extremely important contribution to the debate by my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Mr. Lilley) is in the state's role in development projects. The state's role is important, but it should be within the criteria that I have outlined for developmental programmes.

I have always firmly believed that we have a commitment and duty to strive to reach the United Nations 0.7 per cent. target of GNP. Our historical ties with the developing world and the Commonwealth and our practical assistance through Lomè require us morally, and for humanitarian reasons, substantially to increase our aid programme.

Above all, we need an international strategy for tackling the problems that exist in sub-Saharan Africa. We must recognise that emergency aid is not a long-term panacea and that ad hoc donations, however important, can never be as effective as a detailed strategy to implement development projects with the countries involved. We must look primarily for irrigation for food, clean water for the indigenous population and for cattle and the effective disbursement of funds generated for those participating in what I call the development aid triangle —the bilateral and multilateral pipelines and assistance, private enterprise, which is so important in this respect, and the needs of recipient Governments and the indigenous populations.

12.49 pm

Mr. Richard Ottaway (Nottingham, North)

I join other hon. Members in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) on his choice of subject. I also share the concern of the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Mr. Holland) that the Liberals and Social Democrats have not chosen to participate in the debate.

In recent months we have become more and more aware of the extent of the disaster in sub-Saharan Africa. As a country with a history of contributing to humanity, we should give as much as possible to that region. It is worth noting that in addition to the aid that has been given by the Government in recent times, there is a pledge of £125 million in development aid and a further £75 million to the World Bank. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister referred to that during Question Time on Tuesday. That money should be recognised as a substantial sum, and the Government deserve some credit for it.

Like the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Deakins), I believe that many of the world's problems are attributable to the explosive growth of the world's population, and can be traced back to that important factor. The population growth in sub-Saharan Africa has largely contributed to the nature of the disaster. That growth has increased from 2.3 per cent. in the 1960s to 3 per cent. today. In the next two decades that region's population will double, and by the year 2000 the figure will stand at 679 million. By the year 2020, just a generation from now, the figure will stand at 1.4 billion.

We can use our experience in this country to understand the problems that can arise from population growth. For example, a small surge in our population in the late 1950s and 1960s of under 1 per cent. caused immense problems, despite all our facilities. The baby boom then became an employment boom, which has caused problems for education and housing. There will be a granny boom, and an old-age pension boom in the year 2020. But that is nothing compared to the population growth in sub-Saharan Africa. If we had that sort of population growth here, we would face very great problems indeed. As many hon. Members have pointed out, in sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 50 per cent. of the population is aged under 15. That causes pressure on agriculture, education and the economy.

I am also concerned about the level of fuel and food self-sufficiency in the area. With the demand for food up by 4 per cent. and agriculture growing only at the rate of 1.8 per cent., there has clearly been a decline in the ability to feed the population. The schools see a growth in demand for education of about 4 per cent. But if the supply of schools grows at 3 per cent., which is a particularly high growth rate, the level of education must decline. In the economy, investment will have to be maintained at 4 per cent. if the level of per capita investment is just to be retained.

There are also pressures on the land. In Ethiopia, the population explosion has led to a massive demand for fuel. That demand for fuel has resulted in deforestation, which in turn has resulted in the erosion of top soil. That goes a long way towards explaining the failure of crops there in recent years. The agricultural system in the area cannot support the population, and we are rapidly reaching the stage at which Ethiopia will be completely dependent for food on outside agencies.

The drought is getting worse. So what can be done? I share the view of Mr. Clausen, the chairman of the World Bank—who is to be commended on stimulating a debate in recent months on the topic of population—when he said: The existing age structure has already built in a population dynamic which will mean rapid population growth for years to come whatever steps are taken now to slow it. But action now can at least reduce the rate of increase and thus the eventual size of national population. African Governments must make a commitment to such action. In his speech to Members of Parliament a few weeks ago, Mr. Clausen said that the World Bank was willing and able to do more in regard to population. The World Bank currently has plans to double its aid to population and related health lending policies in the next three years, with a major focus on Africa and Asia.

I am convinced that a substantial proportion of the aid currently being channelled into sub-Saharan Africa should be directed towards population control policies. I am aware that many hon. Members have reservations over the use of contraception and birth control. The hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) had a commendable early-day motion earlier this year, and there was an amendment tabled to delete the reference to population. I believe that hon. Members who have such reservations are influenced by principles of morality and Christian belief. I can say to them only that it is less charitable to oppose than to support the burning need for population policies that is staring us in the face.

The estimated figures of those likely to die as a result of the terrible drought are imprecise, but it is a frightening fact, such is the population explosion in the region, that if 1 million die as a result of the drought their numbers will be replaced in a matter of months; if 10 million die they will be replaced in four years. The demand for aid in the region will continue to grow, and we shall be debating for years to come ever-increasing levels of aid unless population growth can be controlled. In the light of that, where is hon. Members' Christian charity? It cannot be un-Christian or contrary to religious belief to support population policies, as their implications are so fundamental.

As has been mentioned by other hon. Members, the Minister is to be congratulated on his recognition of population policies as a means of solving the problem in his recently announced increase in aid from £9.5 million to £l1 million. I welcome that increase.

The United States does not appear to be so enlightened. Many hon. Members will have heard that aid has been withdrawn from the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which makes a major aid contribution to population policies. The aid has been withdrawn primarily because a small number of the members of the IPPF— which is, after all, an umbrella organisation—involve themselves in abortion-related activities. The United States must recognise that the IPPF is not in a position to tell some of those agencies what they should and should not do, or that they should not involve themselves in abortion-related activities. I hope that the United States will reconsider its aid to the IPPF.

It is not as if population policies cost a lot. As the chairman of the World Bank, Mr. Clausen, said, we do not need billions. It is recognised that population policies can be effective. While many may argue that economic growth will bring control of population, such a policy will result in only very slow progress in reducing population. It is not necessary to wait for economic improvement. There has been a significant increase in the use of contraceptives in Asia, and in particular in Indonesia, where a programme of information and education techniques, which has received the endorsement of village leaders and the support of the community, has resulted in a decline in and control of the growth of the population.

There are decades of experience in Asia, and that experience could easily be used in Africa. In Africa there have been very few experiments. Before 1972, there were no family planning experiments whatever. Asia could be used as a model. There is some family planning in Africa by the use of the technique of spacing. Families have children but they are spaced at about three-year intervals. As hon. Members have mentioned, many families in Africa are very large. The average is about seven children per family, and an overwhelming number of families want to have yet more children. To control the problem, we must get to grips with this aspect.

We need an intense programme of contraception and education, and the two must go together. Contraception on its own is not enough, nor is education on its own. Our duty is clear: family planning advice should be recognised as the right of every couple, and providing that advice should be the goal of every Government. Governments can encourage widespread family planning facilities with particular reference to education.

There will be many more famines like this one in sub-Saharan Africa. The famine we are witnessing could just be the tip of the iceberg. History may show that the present drought is inconsequential to the type of problems we are facing and shall face in the decades to come in sub-Saharan Africa.

I have been disturbed to hear about the attitude of the Ethiopian Government to shipping. As we all know, a large number of ships are going to Ethiopia to supply grain and other vital supplies to the area. The normal cost of discharging the contents of a ship in an authority port is usually $1 a tonne. Therefore, a cargo load of grain of 40,000 tonnes would cost about $40,000 in import charges. Reports are coming from Ethiopia that the Ethiopian ports authority is charging $7 a tonne. Therefore, an organisation, such as the World Bank, sending a shipful of grain is facing a surcharge of $250,000. That will hardly provide a suitable climate in which to encourage more aid for the region. As my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Mr. Baldry) pointed out, it will not take much to reverse the current mood that is so supportive of the aid programme.

I should like to express a word of support for the Ethiopian royal family. The present Government came to power in the early 1970s after a coup. Emperor Haile Selassie was taken away. He has never been seen since and is assumed to be dead. However, his family remains in prison. There is considerable concern throughout Ethiopia for the royal family's well-being and welfare. There is no justification for detaining the royal family any longer. I do not believe that aid should be declared to be conditional, at least not at this stage, but I invite Foreign Office Ministers to bring heavy moral pressure to bear upon the Ethiopian Government to allow the release of members of the royal family so that they can spend their remaining years in peace.

We live in troubled times and the difficulty lies in attracting worldwide attention. Progress is being made. Plenty more can be done, but the time for doing it is now.

1.2 pm

Mr. Edward Leigh (Gainsborough and Horncastle)

I welcome the opportunity given to the House by my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) to debate the ways in which we can alleviate poverty in the Third world. I am sorry that the Liberal party and the SDP, whose members wear compassion prominently on their sleeves, have not bothered to send a single representative to this five-hour debate. That is disapponting to the whole House.

I represent 750 square miles of probably the prime cereal more growing area in the world. This year's harvest produced up to 4 tonnes an acre. My hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford commended the British people for the £50 million that their generosity has provided for Ethiopia since October. Lincolnshire people, coming from a food-growing area, have responded especially generously. There has been an unparalleled response from farmers in the "Send a Tonne to Africa" campaign. The largest corn merchants in Gainsborough have offered their professional expertise to the Band Aid group in matching its charitable zeal and ensuring that the food gets to where it is needed.

My constituents believe that, if charity begins at home, it must not end at home. They believe that starvation anywhere in the world must be of concern to everyone in the world. It is right that satellite technology prevents us from ignoring starvation in Africa. There are no more faraway countries of which we know little. To that extent, the world family is at last a true family. The health of the weakest deeply concerns the strongest.

If charity begins with individual conscience, we cannot offload our individual conscience on to the state alone. Of course I welcome the contribution made by the Government of £15.5 million in the two years up to October last year and, since then, of £14 million. There has been a contribution of 82,000 tonnes of grain alone, and 65,000 tonnes to Ethiopia. In Lincolnshire, the home of the Royal Air Force, people pay tribute to the role of the RAF in the food lift.

However, people in Lincolnshire still worry. They stand, as I did some weeks ago, in the middle of a grain store, the volume of which would probably be 10 times the volume of this Chamber, literally filled to the rafters with grain. They ask themselves, and I ask the House: are not grain mountains of that magnitude in this country an insult to the starving of the world?

My constituents question why the common agricultural policy gives cereal farmers the means—rightly—by high input in fertilisers and pesticides, to produce maximum output and then ensures that grain is stored in intervention for three or four years. The hon. Member for Tooting (Mr. Cox) put a figure of £50 million on the cost. The Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, reporting on 28 November 1984, drew attention to the increased costs of the CAP intervention policies. In 1974, at 1983 prices, they stood at £520 million and in 1983 they stood at £1,432 million.

I do not attack surpluses. I believe that surpluses in grain in this country are preferable to deficiencies. However, I attack what happens to those surpluses. A start has been made by the EEC in last year's farm review, and also in this year's in dropping the intervention price to the world market price. However, there is an urgent need for the Community to relax agricultural restitutions and by way of the provision of export credit guarantees to ensure that more of that grain is taken out of intervention and put on to the world market. The pattern of world trade is changing. We can export raw food at the world price. Our farmers are ready to take that opportunity.

There is a considerable amount of hypocrisy within the EEC. It expresses its concern and translates it, as the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs found, to the extent of providing £232 million in aid to the developing world in 1983. However, despite expressing that concern, it puts up barriers to imports of Third-world commodities and to exports of cheap food to the Third-world. There is a need to free the world's markets because I believe strongly that Government aid is not and cannot be the only solution. The Commission for Latin America reported that economic advance in South America before the advent of massive Government aid was in fact considerably in excess of what it has been since the advent of massive Government aid. The Pearson report concluded that there is no correlation between Government aid and economic growth. All the Government aid in the world will not improve living conditions in a particular country unless there are genuine opportunities for productive investment in that country. Economic and social policies of Third-world Governments are a decisive factor in achieving progress. If regimes obstruct entrepreneurial activity through repressive interference and if the developed world cuts off markets, aid will be only a short-term alleviation. Aid can be positively harmful if it props up authoritarian regimes or undercuts indigenous economic or agricultural activity.

As my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Mr. Lilley) said, it may also be absorbed in prestige projects. State aid can become simply regime aid. Academic studies and common sense tell us that there is a direct correlation between the opportunities given for capital and the defeat of poverty in any country. Low rates of tax and unrestricted entry into markets are a recipe for success in the Third world just as in the developed world.

I hope that we will rid ourselves of certain popular myths. One of them is that poverty is caused by the lack of indigenous capital alone. If that is so, how can one explain the industrial revolution in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries? Another is that poverty is caused by lack of natural resources alone. If that is so, how can one explain the success of Hong Kong and Singapore? On the other hand, if poverty is caused by colonialism, how is it that, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath) pointed out, Africa, since 1960, has been the only part of the world where food production has fallen? There is no more point in exporting Socialism than in practising it at home.

I hope that my right hon. Friend will explain how his aid policies abroad match Government policies at home in helping people to help themselves and creating the right conditions for international investment. Let there be no bounds to our compassion; let the Government's first priority be humanitarian support; but let us appreciate that all the aid that the Government can provide is only a grain of sand in the Sahara compared with all the opportunities for indigenous free market development that we can promote by freeing the world's markets.

1.7 pm

Sir John Osborn (Sheffield, Hallam)

This debate has been about Africa. The original intention was that it should be about the prevention of famine and the promotion of trade. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) on making the debate possible.

I was the joint author, 25 years ago, of a Conservative political centre publication entitled "Trade Not Aid". We concentrated at that time on promoting development in the Third world, free enterprise and insurance against political risks.

I am mindful of the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh) about exporting Socialism. What has been exported is, perhaps, a disregard for private capital and the free enterprise system. That may be why so many new Governments, especially in Africa, are almost impossible to help. That is perhaps the nature of the challenge that we should consider.

The plight of Ethiopia, the Sudan and sub-Saharan Africa, thanks to television, has been brought home to people in this country. I have been in close touch with the voluntary organisations and I think that the compassion of the people of this country, shown in their response to the pop record "Do they know it's Christmas?" and in other ways, and in raising the sum of £50 million, is to their credit.

My hon. Friend has chosen a subject that is vital to the people of this country. I congratulate him on the balance of his arguments. It is right to press the Government about emergency relief. There has been some reference to the help given by the RAF. I hope that the RAF and other air forces will continue to give an emergency lift as long as it is required. I should prefer it to be accounted for on the aid budget rather than lost in the defence budget, but that is a minor point.

My hon. Friend has chaired and assisted a number of Committees, including the United Nations parliamentary committee, in which committee members have had a chance to meet those at the front of the relief campaign.

Two aspects of the matter have come home to me. Not only at intergovernmental level, but at the level of the voluntary organisations and non-governmental organisations, there is a need to co-ordinate emergency relief and so avoid waste and duplication. Secondly, the idea of emergency relief has perhaps dominated the attitude of the people of this country to the real problems of a strategy for the Third world.

Drought can be anticipated. Reference has been made to the fact that two or three years ago it could have been anticipated that Ethiopia and Sudan would be an area of famine and starvation now. There is a growing demand for emergency stocks in those areas where famine is likely to continue. They must be organised and be present in advance of the famine, otherwise they will be too late. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister will comment on that.

As has been pointed out, Mr. Bradford Morse of the United Nations development programme, has prime responsibility for co-ordination between Governments and organisations such as the Red Cross. Surely the whole question of stocks must be looked at by him and those working with him. It is wrong for me to ask that that should be one of my right hon. Friend's priorities, because the British aid programme is only part of a vast world aid programme, and what this country undertakes must fit in with that.

Having said all that, in the long term my concern is that emergency relief will discourage starving and deprived people from helping themselves. Why should farmers grow their own food when there is no market for it, or when it would be more expensive to grow it than to accept free food from a compassionate developed world? Unless we in the House are careful, emergency relief today could give rise to even more famine and starvation in the decades to come. That is a dilemma which Britain and the world must face with realism.

When I last spoke in the Chamber on the Third world some 15 months ago I was preparing, as a vice-chairman, the Lisbon conference as part of the work of the Council of Europe. In 1981 a useful summary was prepared by Mr. Olaf Grimmson, entitled "Global prospects: human needs and earth's resources". I sent that to my right hon. Friend's predecessor. Three or four years ago it looked at the impact of the population explosion, the diminishing resources to sustain that and how better the countries of the North could help the countries of the South to help themselves.

At the Lisbon conference the theme speech was given by Willy Brandt, the chairman of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues, which had produced two vital committee reports. He stressed the need for mutual interest and the theme of interdependence. I shall elaborate on those later. The Lisbon declaration has also given the political edge to the work of the main agencies. Bradford Morse spoke for the UNDP. Mr. Benjenk, who rightly referred to conditionality which was not acceptable to some present, spoke for the World Bank, and there was an excellent contribution from Sir Shridath Ramphal, the Commonwealth Secretary General.

At that gathering there were representatives from the Select Committee, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and the IPU from this Parliament. Therefore, the views of this Parliament were mixed with those of other national Parliaments and the conference considered how Europe could look at the problem as a whole. My right hon. Friend knows that the Council of Europe had a debate last September which stressed the need for a European awareness campaign, the need for co-ordination of development and the need for closer contact with Third-world countries.

Let me mention briefly four aspects of awareness. I come back to my constituency. Sheffield has a high level of unemployment, but Sheffield's world poverty in action group, the council of churches and individuals associated with the local United Nations association tend to ask the Government and others to throw money at the Third world.

When there was a threat of Foreign Office cuts, I had a spate of correspondence urging me to prevent the Foreign Secretary from cutting our aid programme, and rightly so. The new challenge of which people are unaware is the need to supervise our aid and to give value for money. I should like my right hon. Friend to touch on that.

I spoke about the awareness that relief now can be a discouragement to people in the Third world to help themselves tomorrow. That is the second aspect. I am afraid that those who back campaigns for more Government money tend to be unaware of a need to ensure that the long-term strategy is considered. The third aspect touches on Sheffield. The working committee of which I am chairman and the North-South sub-committee spoke to my right hon. Friend's opposite number in Belgium, where unemployment is high and where there has been a setback in industry. He asked why people who are unemployed in Belgium should interest themselves in the Third world. He felt that there was indifference in Belgium and that it was necessary to promote an awareness campaign to point out that helping the Third world to help itself could help the north European countries to provide employment for themselves.

I have had considerable correspondence with a constituent about a project in Senegal. It illustrates how an aid programme can bring employment to areas such as the north midlands. My constituent stated: You may be interested to know that our project in Senegal is now about to proceed and we will be supplying water to 18 village areas and providing each area with a borehole, diesel driven pumping equipment, water tower and between 5 and 10 kms of distribution pipework … This work will use materials and equipment manufactured in the United Kingdom and the fabrication and construction work in Senegal will take place with the assistance of local labour … The responsiblity for the collection of charges and the running and operation of the equipment in each village will be under our direction with local assistance during the whole course of construction. He then argued with me about the commercial aspects of the project, and I must draw the attention of my right hon. Friend to his remark that the present circumstances make such activities a substantial if not unacceptable commercial risk. In other words, the disregard for free enterprise and respect for capital is a major anxiety.

A month ago, while in South Africa, I visited Transkei where I spoke to many black Africans. I object to apartheid as much as anyone else, but I try to look at what is positive in the relationship between the whites in South Africa and black Africans. I spoke to the National African Federation of Chambers of Commerce, which is the black Africans' chambers of commerce, and admired the growing appreciation of the criteria of economic viability and respect for private capital. That could be a strength of whites rubbing shoulders with black Africans, especially in the homelands, which I know are not recognised by Her Majesty's Government. As I looked from South Africa to Africa as a whole, I could see much constructive work arising from co-operation between white Europeans and black Africans, as I have seen for many years. These same criteria are unfortunately only too absent in central and northern African countries.

Finally, I have been trying to enlist in the work of the sub-committee the interest of the Junior Chamber of Commerce — Jcee International — the International Chamber of Commerce, the Confederation of British Industry and, through it, the Union of Industries of the European Community and the Association of British Chambers of Commerce. I hope that we can take up the challenge that Mr. Clausen gave the Institute of Directors a few weeks ago and follow up the excellent conference of my right hon. Friend with the CBI about 18 months ago. Small businesses, smallholdings and free enterprise, which the International Chamber of Commerce so ably embraces in so many countries, provide an incentive for people to help themselves.

My right hon. Friend the Minister knows that the Council of Europe is trying to co-ordinate aid programmes perhaps through DAC — the Development Aid Commission of the OECD — perhaps in consultation with the European Commission. It is also trying, as the European Parliament achieved through its Lomé contacts, to bring about better contact with Third-world countries. With the Commonwealth Secretariat in Britain, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and a strong Inter-Parliamentary Union, we, too, have good agencies for contacting the Third world.

The debate has highlighted the causes of starvation and famine in Africa, but the challenge is to ensure that the Western world continues to consider the long-term issues. First, it must help the South, mainly the African countries, to help and provide for themselves. The top priority there is adequate agriculture and irrigation. Secondly, there must be a better appreciation in areas where unemployment is high that helping the Third world can also help badly affected areas of developed countries to help themselves. Thidly, there must be a better appreciation of the interdependence of North and South. Tragedy in Africa and the Third world is as much a concern for us in Europe and the developed countries. It is on Europe's doorstep, so Europe must do something to ameliorate it.

1.26 pm

Mr. Ivor Stanbrook (Orpington)

I wish to support the motion of my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells). With others, I believe that he has chosen wisely and to the great benefit of us all, in that this subject is not discussed often enough in the House, especially in these times. We have spent days discussing the distribution of Britain's national wealth and the distribution of the wealth of individual Britons. We are obsessed by details of the welfare state, by the possible contents of the Budget, and about whether pension funds will be affected. We do not consider sufficiently how lucky we are to have such problems. We do not realise often enough that it would be marvellous if the legislatures of some other countries had the opportunity to debate such matters. How lucky all of us are not to have been born the children of poor farmers in Africa, especially those who are now starving south of the Sahara.

It is necessary for our well-being and our economic requirements, as well as moral compulsion, for us to consider how we can assist those people out of their desperate poverty and famine. Therefore, I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving us the opportunity.

However, I wonder whether we are not in danger of falling into the trap that was highlighted recently by Julius Nyerere when he spoke of the genuine compassion of the people of this country for the plight of the suffering millions in Africa compared with the ritual compassion displayed in the responses of western Governments. During the debate, we have heard many well-informed speeches that accurately reflect the concern of the British people about starvation in Africa. However, the great problem is how we can assist practically. There are two aspects to the problem: first, the physical and technical side of poverty and famine; secondly, the contribution which Governments, especially bad Governments, make to the problem.

On the first side, I believe that we have reached the stage in the technological development of the Western world where it is possible to solve the problem of famine in Africa. There are means to push back the frontiers of the Sahara, and we have not only the funds — these means do not necessarily require huge extra funds—but the expertise to do so.

I have a little experience of this matter, having been an officer in the colonial regime in Nigeria for the 10 years before it obtained independence. In those days, we worked through our agricultural officers and others to preserve the cultivable land south of the Sahara and to promote measures designed to increase its productivity, and so to bear a greater population. Many a time I have taken part in a raid in the south of the Sahara on pasturists and herdsmen and their cattle to check that they were not overgrazing an area compared with the permits with which they had been issued. Such devices and practices were common under the colonial regime, as were attempts to prevent farmers from breaking the soil in those areas and cultivating land with their hoes for only one season and then leaving it to revert to the Sahara in an even worse state than they found it. We had intensive policies of this kind.

In this respect, stable government is even more important than democratic government. I am sorry that my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Mr. Lilley) is not here. He was castigating Governments in Africa for adopting Socialist policies. Perhaps he does not realise how impatient the leaders of these countries are for material progress. They may be wrong in their priorities, but it is impatience which leads to the adoption of Socialism in African countries—impatience to solve the problems of poverty.

Only one Labour Member is here, so perhaps I can say with even more confidence that it is inherent in Socialism to use compulsion in the end. If people will not voluntarily do things for their own good, Socialism says that they must be forced to do them. In Africa, many people accept that philosophy and when politicians fail to carry it out, a fortiori, the military come in and force Governments to act for the people in this way.

The other aspect of this problem is, what we are going to do about bad government. We cannot do as my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans seems to think and go in and rearrange the Government and make them govern wisely. That is not possible. Very often, insisting on democratic regimes brings a deterioration in the system.

When the British left Nigeria in 1960, the country had an economy based on cash and export crops of cotton and groundnuts in the north, cocoa in the west, palm oil in the east and tin in the middle belt. It was a stable economy that was growing, although all too slowly. However, the economy is now founded almost entirely on the oil industry, and that by itself has caused near economic collapse. The democratic Government that had been installed, disintegrated under internal forces because of the excessive corruption at all levels of Government.

When a democratic Government take power in an African country, that is not a guarantee of economic stability or progress. No wonder the soldiers in Nigeria were too impatient when they saw what was happening and the politicians were not self-disciplined enough. These are problems of government that we must tackle just as much as the physical and technical problems of development in those countries.

I was fortunate to assist with a rural water supply programme in Nigeria. Water supplies are essentially based upon deep concrete-lined wells built with comparatively simple and cheap apparatus to get drinkable water in individual villages. We were doing a great deal of that in Nigeria before 1960. It is a programme that must be worth while. If we are to spend money on overseas aid to fight famine the priorities within that programme must be studied much more carefully; otherwise we shall fall into the trap illustrated by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Sir J. Osborn), because that sort of money is often wasted. If it were devoted more to practical results through comparatively elementary improvements in water supplies distributed over a wide area, we should be doing much more for suffering Africans than we could with any number of huge, dramatic development schemes.

1.36 pm

Mr. Tony Baldry (Banbury)

I want first to comment on the fact that, although we have to suffer moralist lectures from the SDP and Liberal alliance, not one member of either party has been present during this debate. It is all very well for the leader of the SDP to intervene with quick, slick, populist comments on statements after Question Time. It would be nice sometimes to see members of his party making substantive contributions to substantive debates such as today's.

I wish to make two brief points arising out of the thoughts that I have had since I and others have returned from Ethiopia.

Africa is a continent relentlessly going backwards, a continent producing less food per head of the population now than it did 10 years ago, a continent which sees food production steadily reducing, and yet a continent where there will be almost 90 million more mouths to feed in just five years and 300 million more by the year 2000. Although I am pleased that the United Nations conference on famine in Africa earlier this month in Geneva realised the target of an additional $1,500 million of help for Africa and that the immediate food needs of the Sahel seem now to be within sight of being met at least for this year, this is not the last time that we shall see famine in Africa before the year 2000.

I was first impressed in Addis Ababa by the much greater need for co-ordination amongst the various United nations agencies. Perez de Cuellar recognised that when he was in Addis Ababa for the OAU meeting because he put in Kurt Jansen, with the status of assistant secretary general to co-ordinate the United Nations programme.

The team from the Ethiopian relief and rehabilitation commission was trying to make sense of all the various pledges being offered by different nations and different bodies such as the European Community. Having a pledge was one thing. Knowing when that pledge would arrive at the port of Assab was quite another. Within days of our arrival we saw on the demonstration wall boards pictures of aeroplanes that were supposedly dedicated to the relief and rehabilitation commission, but none of those planes worked. It was only when the Royal Air Force Hercules flew into Addis Ababa airport that there was any real means of moving the grain. Therefore, I was delighted by the reply yesterday of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, who said in answer to a written question that the Hercules will remain in Ethiopia for quite some time.

The relief and rehabilitation commission also showed on its wall board the number of lorries supposedly for use in relieving the famine. However, many of those lorries did not work. It was only when the international community responded by sending spare parts for the lorries that it had the kit with which to move the grain to northern Ethiopia. The hon. Members for Denton and Reddish (Mr. Bennett) and for Roxburgh and Berwickshire (Mr. Kirkwood) and I had various bizarre conversations with the members of the relief and rehabilitation commission. They said that they had received no pledges for grain and that no more grain would be available from the following Tuesday. We then spoke to members of the World Food Programme, who said that this was rubbish and that two more ships would be arriving later in the week to replenish the stocks.

There is a clear need for somebody to co-ordinate all the efforts, and I am glad to report that when Perez de Cuellar went to Addis Ababa he recognised this need. Kurt Jansson has been co-ordinating those activities ever since and it has led to a considerable improvement in the ability of the international community to contribute towards the alleviation of famine in Ethiopia. However, that coordination needs to be continued.

The United Nations disaster relief organisation needs to be beefed up. Whenever a disaster of the type that occurred in Ethiopia happens elsewhere an individual or an organisation ought to be able to get to grips with it right from the beginning so that there are no recriminations. We do not want there to be recriminations about such a disaster not having been foreseen and the World Food Programme not having been alerted much earlier.

Therefore, my first submission is that one of the United Nations agencies ought to be given the prime responsibility of co-ordinating the response of the international community to famine disasters of the kind that has been experienced in sub-Saharan Africa.

Since returning from Ethiopia I have come to the conclusion that there is no way in which the problems of Ethiopia and sub-Saharan Africa can be solved until we are able to stop them killing each other. Just as devastating as famine are civil war and civil disturbances in Ethiopia. A long-standing dispute is whether Eritrea should be integrated with Ethiopia. This has led Ethiopia, in prosecuting the civil war, to look for outside help. At one time it approached the United States. After the Ethiopian revolution the Soviet Union supported the Ethiopian Government.

Ethiopia is now in debt to the Soviet Union to the tune of about $3 billion, a debt that it can never hope to pay, despite the fact that most of Ethiopia's prime crop, coffee, goes to the Soviet Union. Earlier this year Pravda commented on the food prices in Africa and said that it was caused in good measure by the legacy of colonialism and by the sophisticated neo-colonialist exploitation of this continent by monopoly capital. I think we are all agreed that Africa would be better off if the Soviet Union stopped exploiting it as a killing ground. If various countries could be prevented from selling arms to Africa to prosecute wars against each other, there would not be vast tidal waves of refugees moving away from civil war and crossing national boundaries, thus making life even more difficult for their neighbours, as has happened with Ethiopia and the Sudan.

As I explained to the Ethiopian Foreign Minister this week when I was fortunate enough to meet him, I can see no reason why Ethiopia should not start to negotiate publicly with the Eritreans and Tigreans to find a peaceful solution to their internal problems. I am sure that the international community is prepared to respond to Africa's legitimate needs, but it will grow increasingly impatient if we are simply meeting the needs of the children in the feeding stations. They are not Ethiopian, Eritrean or Tigrean; they are just starving children. We are doing that while the Governments are prosecuting their own border disputes.

In the part of sub-Saharan Africa which faces drought, there have been 12 wars, 70 coups and the assassination of 13 Heads of State during the past 25 years. I am sure that, while the West and the international community are prepared to respond as best they can to the needs of Africa, Africa must start to learn to live peacefully and resolve its internal problems without constant recourse to the gun, civil war and civil insurrection which destroy human life and resources and combine with other problems to set Africa back into the dark ages.

1.46 pm

The Minister for Overseas Development (Mr. Timothy Raison)

Like hon. Members on both sides of the House, I welcome the debate. I have found it interesting and constructive. I should like to thank those hon. Members on both sides who have contributed and in particular the large number of my hon. Friends who have taken part. I shall not draw further attention to the absence of the alliance.

The motion refers to starvation in Africa and elsewhere". We must admit, however, that "elsewhere" has been left out of our proceedings. The debate has been about Africa and the reasons for that are understandable.

I wonder whether the House will forgive me if I say one thing about Africa which is important. It does not arise directly from the debate but it has a strong indirect bearing on it. I should like to repeat a statement that my right hon. and learned Friend the Foreign Secretary made this morning about the shootings that have taken place in South Africa. My right hon. and learned Friend said: The shootings which took place in South Africa yesterday are a matter of the gravest concern. I join with others in condemning this indefensible action by the South African police, and extend to the families of the victims my deepest sympathy. Yesterday's events demonstrate yet again the evil of apartheid. It is a tragedy that the shootings are likely to reinforce existing divisions and to overshadow the more hopeful developments of recent weeks. On my instructions, the Minister of State summoned the South African Ambassador this morning and expressed the Government's views to him, covering among other things the need for the fullest possible investigation. We all recognise that the subject of our debate is of enormous importance and difficulty. We all congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) on raising it. As my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Mr. Stanbrook) said in his interesting contribution, it has made an excellent interlude during the Budget debate which is occupying our time.

I accept the motion before the House. We all know that the starvation in Africa today is a terrible and pitiful sight. Several hon. Members, including me, have seen it first hand, and everyone has seen it on television. It has been movingly described, for example, by my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Mr. Lester), who has seen it in the Sudan, and by my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford. I need not perhaps take up the time of the House in describing what the House already understands so well.

I fully recognise our responsibility to act through aid, both short and long-term, and through trade. Indeed, I was interested by the recollection of my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Sir J. Osborn) that 25 years ago he wrote a pamphlet called "Trade Not Aid". I also accept the need, as the motion puts it, for "mankind working together" to prevent such things from happening in the interest, above all, of those who suffer but also in the interest of us all.

I, too, congratulate our countrymen who have raised more than £50 million by their voluntary efforts, and the voluntary agencies that are handling the money. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath) said, individuals can do something. Incidentally, he apologised for having to leave. My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh) reminded us of the way that farmers in his county of Lincolnshire are adopting a practical and direct approach to the problem.

In response to the motion, I hope that I can say that Her Majesty's Government have been responding with generosity and perhaps—if I may say so—wisdom, too. I endorse the motion. Its value is that it gives the House a chance to look outwards and to discuss these terrible questions. Perhaps I should start by giving a short progress report on the famine and the response to it, including some reference to the recent conference in Geneva. Last week's Geneva conference called by the Secretary-General of the United Nations was of real value in assessing the scale of the current crisis. A hundred countries sent delegations. The plenary sessions were followed by working groups on certain specific famine-ridden countries.

It is too soon to sort out all that was said. The United Nations office for emergency operations in Africa—set up under Mr. Brad Morse by the Secretary-General—now has the task of putting the whole picture together. But on the basis of what we heard, this seems to be the situation. There is famine in nine African countries: Ethiopia, Mozambique, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Angola, Mauritania, Burkina Faso and Mali. Of these, the worst affected are Ethiopia, Mozambique, Niger, Chad, Sudan and Mali. Overall, there are 21 countries facing exceptional food supply problems. Their total food aid requirements for 1985–86 are estimated at a little over 7 million tonnes of grain. The total of donor firm pledges, plus a few allocations to be confirmed, amounts so far to nearly 6.5 million tonnes. So if pledges turn into reality, great progress is being made — in the short term. Moreover, that figure covers more than the really crisis — ridden six countries — on whom we have argued consistently that our food aid efforts should be primarily concentrated.

The provisional analysis for these countries shows that well over 1 million tonnes of food aid is already in sight for each of Ethiopia and the Sudan. Perhaps 300,000 tonnes is still needed for each of them, and another 300,000 for the other worst affected countries of the western Sahel. But this total of 900,000 should be reduced substantially once pledges have been allocated. Those broad figures are certainly not unimpressive—provided that the pledges are translated into reality and in time. But the House can be under no illusion about the difficulties to be faced in distribution.

In the two countries with which this country has been particularly involved, Ethiopia and the Sudan, I have seen for myself something of the scale of the difficulties—as indeed has the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs. In Ethiopia the prolonged and devastating drought has been compounded by all sorts of other factors—political as well as geographical. There has been the need to put together an effective transport system, from ports to distribution points.

The civil war in Eritrea and Tigre has thrown up very great difficulties, which have already been discussed by the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Mr. Holland). At the United Nations conference in Geneva Mr. Goshu Wolde, the Ethiopian Foreign Minister, gave a solemn pledge that relief supplies would get through to all those in need, without discrimination and wherever they may be. Western donors and the United Nations co-ordinator must now ensure that that pledge is honoured. As my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Mr. Baldry) said, the key to the situation is quite simply that men must stop killing each other.

Mr. Stuart Holland

The Minister may already be aware that, when pressed on that point, Mr. Goshu Wolde also said that the relief supplies would be accompanied by armoured columns, which clearly does not meet the point about the safe passage of food aid. I think that there will be concern about that on each side of the House.

Mr. Raison

I have repeated the pledge of Mr. Goshu Wolde. It is essential that we make sure that his pledge is interpreted effectively.

There are also in Ethiopia, as we know, the doubts and pressures thrown up by the Government's policy of resettlement. Above all, there is the sheer poverty of so many people, for whom not only food and water but shelter have been so scarce.

In the Sudan, which was vividly described by my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe, the influx over time of 1 million refugees has added to the perhaps 3 million Sudanese who face hunger—and the refugees are still coming in. There is a severe scarcity not only of food and often water but of diesel and even petrol. As in Ethiopia, in spite of valiant efforts by many people, the capacity of the Government to deal with the problem is tested to the full. Again there are political tensions.

The hon. Member for Tooting (Mr. Cox) was right to pay tribute to the generosity of the people of the Sudan in the way in which they have received the refugees and migrants. There are huge difficulties but the response has been in many ways impressive. In spite of the agonies, it is inspiring to see it for oneself.

To use the words of my hon. Friend's motion, for all the civil wars and failures, mankind can be seen working together. It can be seen in the gradual build-up of the pipeline of enormous quantities of food — led by the United States but with others contributing substantially. It can be seen among the volunteers from many overseas nations who work alongside the equally dedicated doctors and other workers from the Sudan, Ethiopia and the other countries. It can be seen in the transport operations—for example, a Save the Children team distributing American-provided food in South Dafur in the Sudan. It can be seen in the machinery for co-operation now set up by the UN representative, Mr. Jansson, in Addis Ababa, who was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury. It can be seen in the aircraft operations in Ethiopia, including the unique East-West collaboration over the air drop, with the RAF, the West Germans, Poles and Russians all involved — together, of course, with the Ethiopians.

The hon. Member for Vauxhall mentioned fuel. There is a serious fuel problem in the Sudan. The world food programme is now setting up an arrangement for fuel imports specifically for food distribution. We shall be providing up to $US275,000 to meet the cost of fuel to distribute the further British food aid that I announced on my return from the Sudan. I shall certainly consider whether we can do more to help with that problem. I know from the conversation that I had in Geneva that the Saudis are intending to send a substantial quantity of oil.

What has been our part? Have we responded generously and with wisdom, as the motion requests? I have just referred to the RAF Hercules team. Everyone agrees that its work has been outstanding, in terms of spirit and of operational efficiency. We have to consider carefully how long to keep it going, and whether other partners could share the burden with us. I have undertaken to give at least a month's notice if we decide to withdraw. We have been working very amicably with the Ministry of Defence in sharing the cost of the operation. The Ministry of Defence bore the cost at first; we now pay half of it. I think that the arrangement is fair and reasonable.

But what of our contribution as a whole? In the two years to last October, the Government had committed over £15 million to help relieve the famine in Ethiopia through the various available channels. Famine relief in our financial year 1983–84 amounted altogether to about £25 million, so it is not true to say that we were doing nothing in Ethiopia until the cameras showed us the tragedy in October.

Since the full scale of the emergency in Africa became as clear as it is, we have stepped up our contribution. In the financial year just ending we have committed more than £100 million in relief funds for Africa. Since October we have provided £34 million for Ethiopia and nearly £14 million for Sudan. Those funds are committed both bilaterally and through our contributions to European Community actions, and also in response to appeals by UN and other agencies.

For the coming financial year, as I said in Geneva on 11 March, we have earmarked at least £60 million for further emergency assistance, half from our share of European Commmunity actions and half from our bilateral programme. Our efforts have covered many different activities, and much of what we have given has gone through international or voluntary agencies. I pay tribute to both groups.

In Ethiopia we have worked to strengthen the ports and distribution system. We have provided blankets, medical supplies, and so on. We have supported water projects. The position is similar in the Sudan, where the viability of Port Sudan in particular owes a good deal to earlier British aid. We have so far this year delivered bilaterally 15,000 tonnes of food to Ethiopia and 15,000 tonnes to the Sudan, with another 35,000 tonnes to be shipped next month. I have stressed the crucial importance of getting food to the Sudan before the hoped-for rainy season in June.

Altogether the European Community and its member states are committed to deliver at least 170,000 tonnes each for the Sudan and Ethiopia this year as part of the total of 1.2 million tonnes pledged at the Dublin summit in December. This food is not cheap. We have talked about food mountains, and that is understandable. One must, however, remind people of the cost of that food. The cost of buying, shipping and distributing a tonne of food in Ethiopia is about £250. We are talking about substantial sums. As I have repeatedly stressed in Brussels, the need is to get on as fast as possible with delivery. The Commission is working hard and has speeded up its procedure. Allocations are going ahead. An amount of £50 million is now in the hands of local Commission delegations or international or voluntary organisations, and they can get on with the job of distributing it. It is true that the only statistic that ultimately matters is the amount of food actually delivered to those who so desperately need it.

I turn to the problems that lie ahead, for the motion is concerned largely with the long term and not solely with the short term. What happens next year and after that? As the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley) pointed out, crisis management is not enough. It is necessary but it is not enough.

The scale of the problem in Africa is daunting, but it is important to keep in our minds the distiction between drought and famine. Drought itself does not signify famine, although the presistence of drought destroys the lines of defence which the inhabitants of arid areas customarily build up to see them through the lean years. Gradually their stores of crops, livestock, jewellery and other forms of capital are used up. It is, above all, the poor who starve.

Some of the other factors leading to the famine are dramatic and obvious, such as civil disturbance; others are more gradual. They include the pressure on agricultural land caused by rapidly growing populations, the failure to conserve land and improve agriculture and the lack of adequate storage and marketing systems.

However generously the international community responds to the present crisis, those countries risk further famine in the future unless the underlying causes are tackled. The problems will require sustained efforts by the countries of Africa themselves—that has rightly been stressed—and by the international donor community. We shall play our part.

Despite substantial aid to Africa over many years, the trends over the past decade or so have been in the wrong direction. Population growth is still high and agricultural food production has failed to keep pace with it. The hon. Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Deakins) and my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Ottaway) were right to say that the population issue is of great importance. I was grateful to the hon. Member for Walthamstow for saying that our increased contribution to UNFPA and the IPPF is a marvellous response.

This is, however, part of a wider picture. Economic performance generally has been disappointing. Some of this has been due to adverse external factors, such as the increase in oil prices. But it is also the case that many countries in Africa have pursued policies that contributed to poor economic performance and made it more difficult for them to cope with the external difficulties which they faced.

So in seeking long-term solutions to the problems facing those countries, including the alleviation of poverty, hunger and malnutrition, it is not enough to focus on agriculture alone. On the other hand, agricultural development is essential. Africa has become increasingly reliant on food imports over the past decade, absorbing scarce foreign exchange. Meanwhile, smallholder food production and incomes have been depressed.

Over the past two or three years, much thought has already been given to how social and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa might be restored. There is a growing recognition among the Governments of many of those countries that changes in policy are required. Making those changes will not be easy. As outsiders, we have to be sensitive to the issues at stake. We cannot just impose standard prescriptions.

It is against that background that we have strongly supported the idea of an improved dialogue between the aid donors and the Governments of the developing countries. That is a significant element in the recently negotiated Lomé III convention. Aid is an important element in the development process, but it is only one element. It can be effective if there is a partnership between donor and recipient to pursue agreed objectives. Donors can provide financial assistance, technical expertise and advice. As my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Mr. Lilley) said in his interesting speech, private enterprise represents a large part of what has to be offered. However, the developing countries have to put into effect the policies and programmes that will best promote and not inhibit development.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup spoke about the need for a strategic plan. I believe that in fact some sort of plan, or at least philosophy, is now emerging in which the World Bank is playing a prominent part, as is its duty, but we are all contributing to it. It is based, among other things, on a strengthening of donor coordination. By "donor co-ordination", I mean not only coordination as it were in New York, Geneva, Paris or wherever, but particularly co-ordination in the countries concerned, which is at the heart of the matter.

A number of countries have accepted that a period of structural adjustment and policy reform is essential to restore sustainable economic development. They have come to agreements with the IMF on a package of measures to improve their fiscal and balance of payments situations, and with the World Bank on measures necessary for long-term development. If they are to succeed, it is important that donors provide aid in forms, and for purposes, which will complement those programmes. That is why we have been increasingly prepared to provide aid for essential imports of spare parts and other maintenance goods for key sectors of the economy where the IMF and World Bank-led adjustment programmes are being pursued. We are spending large sums of money. As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said on Tuesday, we are now spending about £125 million of development aid on the 20 worst affected countries in Africa.

We fully support the World Bank's initiatives in Africa, and in January, as the House knows, we agreed to earmark £75 million of bilateral aid to be used in close assocation with the World Bank's special facility for Africa. That aid will not be tied. Its purpose is simply to encourage economic reform. In our approach to it, we may choose the countries where the aid is to be spent, but our work will be dovetailed with that of the World Bank in the operation of applying those resources. I have no doubt that the World Bank will be forthcoming about what it has to do and that we can work in effective conjunction with it.

I should like to pick out one or two other points that were made in the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe talked about the need for seeds in the countries that are suffering so badly. Ethiopia's needs for seeds are being covered by a Community project, but we have provided assistance bilaterally through Oxfam to the tune of about £150,000.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup and my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington both talked about water requirements. We have welcomed the United Nations water decade and are currently contributing, under bilateral aid arrangements, some £102 million towards the cost of 73 drinking water and sanitation schemes in 35 developing countries. We have also made a number of other contributions, including the work of our special technical units.

The debate is about trade as well as aid, as was rightly stressed by my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans as well as by my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford. The Government take the view that sustained economic growth by the industrial countries is a crucial factor in stimulating international trade and enabling the debtor countries to adjust their economies. We can already see the effects of this policy. International trade has expanded considerably over the past two years and commodity prices have improved. It is of course essential that this process is not jeopardised by protectionist pressures.

The European Community already provides freer access to developing countries' exports than any other industrialised country or group of countries. I fought hard, with some limited success, for further trade concessions in the latest Lome III negotiations. We strongly support the calls that have been made for a new round of trade liberalisation negotiations in the GATT.

I cannot simply accede to the demand of my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford for the abandonment of the multi-fibre arrangement, but at least, when it is renegotiated, we will bring to it an attitude that is sympathetic towards the problems of the countries concerned.

At the same time, a great deal of nonsense has been talked about how developing countries are exploited by the West by encouraging them to grow agricultural crops for export and blaming that for the low level of food production in Africa today. The hon. Member for Walthamstow mentioned that point.

Problems can arise with the introduction of cash crops in particular circumstances, where women and children lose access to land for subsistence crops without staring in the income derived from cash crops, but overall the main problem in Africa is surely not that cash crops have replaced food crops but that both have performed badly in recent years. There is in Africa the capacity, the potential and the fertility to produce both. Rather than thinking in terms of a limited cake, let us do all that we can to encourage the development of both aspects of agriculture.

We strongly believe that one of the key ingredients of success in agriculture must be better incentives for farmers to produce more. That is what the IMF, the World Bank and other organisations all stress at present. It is also important to improve local and national marketing and storage arrangements, and I believe the private sector can play a larger role in marketing, in place of the often all too inefficient parastatal monopolies.

Those elements are essential, but so is high quality agricultural research. This country contributes a great deal in that respect.

I should like to summarise the main elements in our policy for long-term development. First, we are providing substantial assistance in support of structural adjustment programmes, especially programmes featuring the agricultural sector. Secondly, we realise that many countries have over-extended themselves by building up new infrastructure which they cannot maintain. We are therefore focusing more upon rehabilitation and maintenance of existing infrastructure than on new big projects. Maintaining an old road is often far more important than building a new one.

There is an increased emphasis in our policy—this was another point raised by the hon. Member for Greenwich (Mr. Barnett) — on manpower assistance. There will clearly continue to be a need for manpower assistance for years to come. We provide it both by sending out experts and trainers to the countries concerned, and by welcoming a substantial number of people to this country for training.

Within that policy, agriculture and related activities receive considerable support from Britain's aid programme. In 1983 we estimate that £267 million, some 26 per cent. of the total aid programme, was spent in that way. In sub-Saharan Africa the proportion provided was higher—33 per cent. of bilateral aid and 24 per cent. of our multilateral contributions.

At the same time the international agencies that we support give great stress to agriculture. Under the third Lomé convention, which was successfully concluded in December, there is no doubt that agriculture will feature largely in the activities of the Community and the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries.

Another useful multilateral agency is the International Fund for Agricultural Development. The hon. Member for Vauxhall referred to that. I told him on Monday that we hope to see a replenishment and that it will be of the size that he mentioned when he put the question to me. We shall play our part in that.

Mr. Stuart Holland

We appreciate that, but how much will the United Kingdom contribute and how much will that be in relation to the contributions of the Scandinavian countries?

Mr. Raison

That will be decided in the usual discussions which take place among donors. The conference will be in May rather than April, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned.

In the time that I have been at my Department, our help for the voluntary sector has been stepped up. Over two years we have doubled the resources that will go to the joint funding scheme. That is right. The voluntary agencies do an excellent job and I am delighted that we have been able to help them in that way and to contribute substantially to the increase in the volunteer programme.

Mr. Christopher Murphy (Welwyn Hatfield)

rose—

Mr. Raison

I hope that my hon. Friend will forgive me, but I must continue my reply.

The scope of the motion is as vast as it is important. I cannot cover every aspect of it, but I have tried to show that both the Government and our partners in the international community are endeavouring to bring increasingly effective and co-ordinated resources to bear on both the immediate famine crisis and the long-term development needs. Effectiveness is crucial, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hallam stressed.

We spend over £200 million a year bilaterally on development in sub-Saharan Africa and we play our part in the multilateral effort as well. In some cases—for example, Ethiopia—our development contribution may well be largely provided through our share of Community and World Bank funds rather than bilaterally. But our bilateral commitment to Africa will have a high priority, as indeed it should.

I do not claim perfection for all that we are doing. Indeed, the more one stares the problems in the face, the humbler one becomes, but, as the hon. Member for Greenwich implied, we are learning all the time. We can, however, see emerging a clearer development strategy for Africa. I hope that time will show that our contribution has both the generosity and the wisdom for which the motion calls.

2.17 pm

Mr. Bowen Wells

I shall not attempt further to sum up the debate which has been so excellently answered by my right hon. Friend the Minister, but it is important that we record our thanks to all those who have participated in the debate and displayed such a great depth of knowledge and interest in the subject. It has been a good day for the House of Commons. We have served the prestige of the House well and the British people will know that the legislature understands and responds to the needs of Africa.

I shall have to press my right hon. Friend for additional money. Understandably, he could not immediately give me assurances that he will provide additional money, in view of the extra expenditure to which his budget has been subject. I shall also have to press him to ensure that the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry phases out the MFA as soon as possible.

I shall also be asking my right hon. Friend again and again why he has adopted the curious parallel financing of World Bank initiatives by World Bank and United Nations funds. It does nothing to strengthen the World Bank or the objectives with which he has so eloquently agreed. I hope that before long he will give the House an explanation and wholeheartedly join the World Bank and the United Nations to pursue the economic objectives which both sides of the House have so well expressed today.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved, That this House recognises that death and suffering from starvation and diseases related to malnutrition of millions of Africans are capable of being prevented by mankind working together; notes that prevention of famine also promotes international trade and thereby the reduction of unemployment in richer countries; congratulates the people of Britain on the generosity of their contributions to the voluntary relief agencies; and calls upon Her Majesty's Government to respond with equal generosity and wisdom.