Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, for introducing this debate. In the UN’s 2024 report on progress towards the sustainable development goals, goal 2 on zero hunger was shown to be making the least progress of all. It is not that the world does not produce enough food to feed its growing population but that it does not produce it in the right place. Luckily, it is now well recognised that sending cheap food to countries with nutritional problems only undermines the local agricultural economy, meaning that farmers do not have the money to buy seeds and inputs for next year’s crop—thus the problem spirals downwards in the years to come. Agricultural production in developing countries needs focus and a big shot in the arm that has so far been missing; that is why this goal is drifting away from us. As Bill Gates—I am the second person to quote him —said: “If you care about the poorest, you care about agriculture. Investments in agriculture are the best weapons against hunger and poverty, and they have made life better for billions of people. The international … community needs to be more … focused to help poor farmers grow more”. But it is not only international aid that is needed. The developing nations themselves must play their part. In 2014 the African Union’s Malabo declaration reconfirmed its Maputo commitment for each country to put 10% of its GDP into agriculture—but, so far, few countries have fulfilled that commitment. It is not as though this has not been tried and tested. Vietnam used to be a big importer of rice, at great cost to its hard-pressed treasury. Then, over a decade or so, its Government put 10% to 15% of its GDP into agricultural development each year—irrigation schemes; crop storage; markets, both physical and virtual; roads to get supplies in and out of the countryside; and, above all, training. Vietnam is now the second-largest exporter of rice in the world, a fact that has kick-started a huge economic boom. As I say, it just needs focus. I will focus on smallholder agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa, where the current population is due to double by 2050. The lives of some 60% of the population depend on farming, and 65% of the farmers are women. Every woman farmer you meet who has learned to make money from her holding will spend it on educating her children, with education being the most important goal of all. The World Bank has said that money invested in agriculture in Africa brings three or four times the number of people out of poverty than money invested in other businesses. African agriculture needs investment and could bring huge rewards by kick-starting a much bigger economy. Where is this investment needed? First, there is infrastructure—better mobile connectivity for weather reports, market reports and technical advice. You send a picture of your plant and are told what is wrong with it and how to fix it. We also need better roads for getting seeds and fertiliser in and harvested crops out. We need better power to process crops locally in order to avoid the huge post-harvest losses that are prevalent in Africa. Many countries in Africa do not have a national grid, so local solar power with some form of storage is the obvious answer. Local power will also help kids do their homework at night. Then we need better management of water. Most sub-Saharan African countries actually get more rain than we do but, of course, African rains come all at once. So mini village reservoirs make sense. Also, Africa is full of aquifers, which are hardly tapped at all. Mankind in Africa uses only around 2% of its annual rainfall, compared with 40%-plus in parts of Asia, so there is a lot of slack here. We could quadruple the output of many farms by helping farmers borrow money to put into communal irrigation schemes. Another need is better security of tenure on land. DfID started doing good work in this area, but I am not sure where that programme has got to in the FCDO; maybe the Minister can let us know. The point is that without security of tenure, it is difficult to invest. Why would you spend four years of your income on drilling a bore-hole when you could then easily lose your land? It does not have to be vacant possession—it can be through guaranteed-term tenancies —but it has to be done. Furthermore, why would you borrow money if you can get only 45% interest rates—that is, if the bank will lend you any money at all? Banks do not normally lend to farmers unless they have other collateral somewhere else, such as a town house, but it makes no sense to borrow money at 45% interest rates. Donors such as the UK should guarantee loans to farmers at interest rates of less than 10%. Various UN pilot schemes in this area have worked well, and farmers are now proven to be reliable borrowers. That brings me to the greatest need for African agriculture: knowledge. We must invest in agricultural training colleges, which have to be open to women. We must ensure that women farmers can get training on their farms, bearing in mind that female ownership of land is still frowned upon in some countries. We must encourage the private sector to assist in training, particularly for existing farmers. There are two ways of improving skills in the existing workforce: push and pull. Push is when you go to a village and train farmers on the ground, but it is slow work and quite hard to scale up—although you can train a chosen farmer in each village then get her to train, say, 100 others. It is a sort of pyramid selling of agricultural skills. The other—and, I think, better—way is what I call pull. You encourage a private company, maybe with a subsidy or a guarantee or two, to invest in some form of local processing. It then trains farmers to produce a given crop specifically for it, so the farmer has a guaranteed market. As an example of the latter, a few years ago I visited a Diageo brewery in Addis. It had started training farmers to grow the barley it needed to make its beer. It started with as few as 100 farmers; when I visited, it had some 3,000 and was intending to expand to between 15,000 and 20,000. Those farmers were making money and, of course, educating their children, which is, as I said, the most important goal of all. In conclusion, these are my two main messages: first, get all Governments to wake up and recognise the opportunities that agriculture brings, while working hard to persuade all African Governments to put 10% of their GDP into agriculture and its infrastructure, as they have already promised; and, secondly, we all need to put more money into agricultural training for the women farmers of Africa. There is so much more to be done, but the rewards are huge.