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5.52 pm
Dr. Jenny Tonge (Richmond Park): I had hoped to welcome the Secretary of State to her new job. I hope that that will be recorded. I welcome the White Paper and the opportunity to debate it. I understand from my colleagues that there has not been a White Paper on international development for 20 years. That is quite extraordinary.
The political will to build on past successes in combating world poverty has been eroded over the past two decades, and that was illustrated in the speech by the right hon. Member for Eddisbury (Mr. Goodlad). My overwhelming impression was that his speech was a eulogy on the armed forces that are needed to sort out civil wars. In most cases, such wars are the result of failure to provide aid and relieve poverty. The second part of his speech was devoted to trade. It was significant that, in his list of developing countries' needs, he mentioned first, trade, secondly, better government and thirdly, the relief of poverty. My hon. Friends would call that a Freudian slip, but it illustrates the Conservative mentality.
The aid budget is always an easy target, especially when Governments are required to cut costs or to reduce or maintain tax levels. I urge the Government not to stick to their ridiculous boxing in of tax and spending, which we have heard about. No doubt, all will be revealed tomorrow. I hope that we get some good news. We Liberal Democrats are constantly accused of taking the moral high ground. The Government have a huge majority and I urge them to seize the moral option, not only because it is right but because we can afford to do that.
The gap between the richest and poorest countries is wider than ever. Civil wars are increasing, thousands of people are being displaced by conflict and environmental degradation and old and new diseases are threatening public health. The prime purpose of aid is to reduce poverty, and we often fail to acknowledge that aid has brought Britain short-term benefits in goods, services and research. The longer-term approach to aid should be to regard it as investment.
As a doctor, I would opt for promoting preventive health care because prevention makes economic sense. It means less suffering by the patient, and that is also true of nations. Extending aid today will mean less emergency aid tomorrow. Today's recipients of aid are tomorrow's markets. We can all win.
In my short time as Liberal Democrat spokesman for international development, I have come to regard the portfolio, as I know does the Minister, as the most important one. There is no end to the responsibility. It encompasses the environment and the economy and ranges from health to defence issues and all are relevant to international development. I urge the Government in their White Paper to take in aspects of all their policies in other Departments to see how they affect developing countries.
International development to tackle world poverty requires a multi-faceted approach, and it is my job to give the House a brief view of Liberal Democrat policy. We must set a timetable to achieve the United Nations aid target of 0.7 per cent. of GNP in 10 years. I feel ashamed of this country's record. For example, Norway provides 1.05 per cent. of its GNP in aid. While that country's percentage has risen, ours fell under the Conservative Government. Dare I suggest that a timetable for debt relief in the poorest countries and a programme for cancelling debt which has been called for by Jubilee 2000 are surely better ways to celebrate the millennium than building a dome at Greenwich?
Liberal Democrats endorse the Foreign Secretary's fine statement that human rights will be central to the Government's foreign policy. However, we want to see practical measures such as suspending United Kingdom aid programmes in countries where human rights are not being respected such as Indonesia and East Timor. The White Paper must also assess the nature of international trade and how global markets often operate against the interests of developing countries.
We must reform the international trading system. For instance, multinational commercial-style agriculture and industry expanding at its present rate will cause 36 per cent. of the world's arable land to be lost by 2025. Is that sustainable development? Millions of children under the age of 12 work in sweatshops in ever-expanding cities to satisfy the world demand for cheap consumer goods. Is that sustainable? How can we let it continue? My major concern, however, is the targeting of aid, especially to women and children who are illiterate, sick and dying because their countries are so busy paying off debt and encouraging unsustainable development that there is no money left to give their people basic education and health care.
Some hon. Members may already know that I have spent most of the past 15 years working as a woman's health doctor in Southall, Middlesex, where the majority of residents are from the immigrant Asian community. They have access to the best health care and education and they make the most of it, but my patients used to tell me how lucky they were and that the majority of their countrywomen left behind in developing countries faced a different future--a nightmare.
About 600,000 women a year die while giving birth. Many of them are teenagers. I say to hon. Members: imagine if they were their children or grandchildren. The suffering of those women is no less because they are in the third world. Of those 600,000 women, 140,000 bleed to death. [Interruption.] I do not think that the hon. Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) can stand the statistics. About 75,000 women die from the results of self-inflicted abortions. They do not want unlimited pregnancies; they want to decide for themselves how many children they have. In many cases, they have no access to birth control, so illegal, self-inflicted abortion is the only answer.
About 75,000 women die from convulsions due to eclampsia, which is a complication of pregnancy, and 100,000 from blood poisoning. About 40,000 go into obstructed labour, which goes on for days and days and there are enough women in the Chamber, thank goodness,
to know what obstructed labour might feel like. The baby is already dead and the women go on until they eventually die themselves. Help is not available. The ones who die might be regarded as the lucky ones. The women who live face a life of terrible ill health and of rejection, often by their families and communities because they simply cannot support someone who is unproductive within the village or family.
Those women and their children must be helped. They must have access at least to basic health and maternity care. I accept that it is a tremendous task, but I cannot accept us turning a blind eye to such suffering. As other hon. Members have mentioned, help must be linked with basic education. That must be a high priority. Studies have shown that the education of girls, in particular, is one of the best investments available to developing countries.
I welcome the fact that the Government have announced that we are going to rejoin the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, but I am sad that the money has to come out of existing budgets and that no new money is to be found yet. Education can increase incomes, free women from subjection and lead to better child health and nutrition. Ultimately, it can lead to a more prosperous society.
Mr. Foulkes:
I welcome what the hon. Lady says about UNESCO. The Secretary of State for International Development was in Paris this morning hoisting the Union Jack over the UNESCO building, while the Union Jack was being taken down on the other side of the world. I also reassure the hon. Lady that the moneys to pay our subscription to UNESCO will not affect our bilateral programmes to any country, but will come out of the contingency fund.
Dr. Tonge:
I am delighted to hear that because, in a reply several weeks ago, the Minister told me that the money would come out of the reserve and did not explain that new money was being found. I am not sure even now that that is new money and we look forward to new money for overseas aid.
Mr. Jeremy Corbyn (Islington, North):
I welcome the debate and the opportunity for a discussion before the publication of a major Government paper on international development issues. I particularly welcome the fact that the Government have changed the Department's name from Overseas Development Administration to the Department of International Development. It is a far more appropriate title. It recognises a sense of sustainability and interdependency in the world, rather than one of a paternalistic disbursement of funds to the needy poor.
I also welcome what goes with that change: that the Government's foreign policy statement on human rights is a central part of British foreign policy. It is about time
that that was a central factor in our foreign policy because human rights abuses throughout the world are getting worse. Many of those abuses are a product of poverty, of the gap between the rich and the poor, of the sale of arms and of the arms race. Those are all factors that must be borne in mind.
The end of the century provides us with an opportunity at least for some degree of hope. When we were having such debates 10 or 15 years ago, the world was gripped by what could only be called the Thatcher-Reagan axis of a never-ending arms race, an ever-growing gap between rich and poor and the brutal imposition of free market economics on the poorest economies and people throughout the world. That brutality cost the lives of millions of people, as did the United States arms race and rearmament programmes. However, things have moved on a bit since then and I hope that we now recognise that this planet cannot survive unless we find an environmentally sustainable form of development and eradicate the gap between the richest and poorest nations, and between the richest and poorest people in both poor and rich nations. This country has much to learn and much to contribute to the debate. Until last year, Britain had the fastest growing gap between the rich and poor of any industrial nation and we exported that belief to many poor nations.
On Friday, a BBC "Newsnight" report on the New York environment summit suggested that there was some difference between environmental groups, aid lobbies and world anti-poverty organisations. There is no difference between the two because the world's problems--including global warming, pollution and desertification--impact on each other. If people chop down forests on the coast of west Africa, it affects the rainfall further in the interior. If people chop down forests anywhere, it increases run-off and it reduces water retention and the atmosphere's ability to gain more oxygen. We suffer as a result.
Throughout the world, it is the poorest people who suffer the impact of pollution. The smog clouds in third-world capital cities are over the poorest neighbourhoods. It is the rich who can afford to move to the hills in the suburbs and who think that they can get away with it. The poor suffer from low life expectancy and appalling housing and health because of the environment in which they live. We have to look to develop a world in which we protect the biodiversity that exists, in which we encourage an environmentally sustainable policy by all countries and in which agricultural and industrial systems do not continually warm the planet and create problems. We have to look to sustainable agriculture as well, which brings me back to the point about the economic models that are imposed on people.
African agriculture is very efficient and productive. It is not efficient and productive if development destroys what was an indigenous form of agriculture and instead imposes a plantation system of agriculture based on machinery, pesticides and exports, which reduces the life support systems for the local populations.
Some years ago I was in Honduras, an extremely poor country in central America, talking to a family who lived outside the cash economy. They lived, essentially, in a hut beside the road and grew a bit of corn. If they did well, they sold a bit and could buy a few cooking utensils. If they did not do well, they starved. Behind them was a huge, barbed wire fence protecting the fattest beef cattle
in the world which were using the land--land that that family should have--to feed the burger bars of the United States.
The international development of a plantation or ranching system of agriculture while allowing a minority of the population to live in the most abject poverty possible was presented as a model of development. We can and must do much better than that. The gobbledegook of market economics that says that all private sector investment in the third world, and all investment in such an agricultural system, is automatically good is totally wrong. It is totally fallacious. If we believe in sustainability, we must encourage an agricultural system and biodiversity that sustain the environment and the local population. It seems wrong to encourage the development of such an agricultural system when the poorest people in those countries continue to starve as a result.
The Secretary of State's objectives for 2015 of halving world poverty; universal primary education in all countries; a two-thirds reduction in infant mortality; and global sustainability are achievable. They are, in some ways, quite modest. They suggest that there will still be quite a lot of people living in abject poverty, that there will be an awful lot of children and young people dying prematurely, and, indeed, that there will be many adults who will be lucky to live past 45. We must be able to achieve my right hon. Friend's objectives, but to do so will require a considerable effort by an awful lot of politicians around the world to make the case and to be prepared to promote a trade and aid system.
My concern is that so much of the economic development that is happening in the world at the moment is presented as rapid economic growth, as was mentioned by the hon. Member for Wycombe (Sir R. Whitney), who often speaks with great verve about the development of Latin American economies. He will find that there is indeed very fast growth in many Latin American economies, but behind that growth lies two factors. There is the most unbelievable degradation of the environment by multinational corporations that could not give a fig for the pollution that they pour into the rivers, for the fish that they destroy, the forests that they chop down or the life styles that they destroy.
There is also mile after mile of shanty towns outside the major cities, with children working in unbelievably appalling conditions. As soon as anyone pokes their head above the parapet to try to form a trade union to protect workers' conditions or tries to form a social rights campaign to obtain housing, health or education, they come up--like a hammer against an anvil--against the economic model that that country is following. They are told, "Pay your debt, cut your public expenditure. Promote exports. Don't worry about sustainability." Those people, because they have stood up against those regimes, then become political refugees who seek a haven in western Europe and north America. We can and must do better than that. There is a danger that the economic models that are being pushed on the poorest countries of the world are in effect almost a recolonisation of the countries that fought for their independence some years ago.
Of course we should achieve the aid target. It is a disgrace that we ever went below it. We can and must do much better than that. We must also look at the issues of trade and fairness that go with it. Some countries have traditionally depended on a single product for their main export earnings. My hon. Friend the Member for
Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) mentioned bananas from the Windward Islands; others mentioned cocoa from west Africa and other places. But however much those countries are able to increase their productivity, they end up getting less money for their products because they do not control the prices that they are paid in the first place. They produce more to sell more to get less to pay a debt, the interest rate of which is fixed elsewhere. My hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr. Grant) spoke about the debt crisis.
One can see how countries got deeply into debt. They did not control the petroleum prices. They did not control the interest rates that they paid on their loans. They did not and cannot control the prices that they are paid for tea, coffee or anything else. Those prices are fixed miles away, often only a couple of miles from this Chamber. We must ensure that the World Trade Organisation looks to sustainable and fairer trade and ensure that decent prices are paid for the primary products of the poorest countries in the world.
We have to ensure that the International Labour Organisation's very minimal and basic conditions are applied throughout the world. The biggest abusers of workers' rights around the world are often the small contractors that work for multinational corporations that are based elsewhere. The children who assemble training shoes in third-world countries work for the brand names that are on sale in the high street. However much those brand names might try to wash their hands of it, they are guilty of what is going on.
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