Humanitarian Crisis (Southern Africa)

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 3:21 pm on 26 June 2003.

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Photo of Mr Tony Worthington Mr Tony Worthington Labour, Clydebank and Milngavie 3:21, 26 June 2003

As the hon. Lady said, I will come to that. The point about the quality of governance is valuable and crucial.

The neglect of agriculture is not just by the Malawi Government. The international financial institutions must take their share of responsibility for the sad state of agricultural management. The Washington consensus—the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—rightly demanded the abolition of inefficient and often corrupt state structures. However, as my hon. Friend Mr. Battle said, it is ludicrous to expect peasant farmers to achieve economic growth in the absence of markets and capital and with a viciously rigged trading system. The market has failed chronically, and we must put that right.

I was surprised at how little has been done over the years through the international financial institutions to build up Malawi's infrastructure. As other hon. Members have said, the treadle pump was greeted as something from the 21st century rather than something that has been around for centuries. Extraordinarily, we found that Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, would have been a net contributor to the World Bank this year if one new and questionable project had not been started. Ironically, the project is designed to provide food handouts for the population. We could not find any evidence of an irrigation strategy, although the Government's response claims that there is one.

In response to the crisis, DFID was, to its credit, funding the reopening of the Nacala railway to the coast through Mozambique. That would seem to be a priority for a landlocked country such as Malawi, so why, after the Mozambique war was over, was it not a priority for the Malawian Government and the international financial institutions? Why did it take a starvation crisis to stimulate the opening of access to the sea? The international financial institutions must improve their performance.

Almost every area of life has an appropriate UN organisation—WHO, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNESCO or the International Labour Organisation—but agriculture has the Food and Agriculture Organisation, which is the lowest-profile, most subterranean UN organisation. Its impact on farming in Africa is undetectable, yet it is crucial to a country that is dependent on agriculture. It is extraordinary that in the generally excellent briefing documents that we receive from NGOs there is little reference to the production of food and agricultural organisation. There are occasional references to what are termed "livelihoods", but rarely anything about overall land policy and agricultural production.