24 March 2010
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown calls on the Government to do whatever it can to ensure Zimbabwe moves towards a democratically elected Government and to enable a country that was once the 'bread basket of Africa' to be able to feed its own people.
Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold) (Con): I pay tribute to the hon. Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) for obtaining this debate. It is very timely, coming in the wake of the excellent report from his all-party Africa group and in the light of the fact that the International Development Committee is about to publish its report.
I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Mr. Benyon). Many of our constituents have an instinctive empathy with the plight of the people of Zimbabwe. Like him, I have had tragic cases of people who fled from Zimbabwe, having lost close relatives in brutal circumstances. They have been well looked after by others in my constituency, and there are strong support groups in this country that are giving a great deal of help to the people of Zimbabwe.
I shall start where the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) ended. We and the British Government need to do everything we can to make the global political agreement work and to ensure that there is a finite date for the next election, because the only sustainable way forward is for Zimbabwe to move from a transitional Government to a Government who are properly elected through free and fair elections, if that were ever possible.
In the short run, However, IHS Global Insight shares the International Monetary Fund's concerns over the sustainability of Zimbabwe's recovery. It says that for that country, which is starting from an extremely low base, rising output in the agricultural and mining sectors is the quickest way to growth. It is clear that this debate on land is extremely important, and that how land reform moves forward is also important.
An aspect of the conditions in Zimbabwe that has not been raised in this debate, although the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey) got very close to it just now, is that an estimated 3 million to 4 million people have fled Zimbabwe and are refugees and asylum seekers, many of them-probably 2 million to 3 million-in South Africa. That leaves an estimated residual population in Zimbabwe of about 8 million, of which about 6 million were in need of food aid in 2008. According to the World Food Programme, perhaps 2.7 million are still in need of food and subsistence aid. The situation in Zimbabwe is dire.
My hon. Friend the Member for Newbury is a great expert on farming, and I farm as well. There is no doubt about it: Zimbabwe used to be the bread basket of Africa. Not only could it feed its own people, but it was one of the major food exporters to the whole of the rest of Africa. It is sad that the land reforms instituted by President Mugabe from 2000 onwards have resulted in a situation in which an estimated 4,000 farmers have been displaced from their land, and, just as important, as my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton) said, almost 300,000 agricultural workers have been displaced from the farms where they worked-many were brutally killed-and their skills have disappeared. As my hon. Friend knows, what is important is not only the ownership of a farm, but the skills of the people who work on it and produce the crops.
The global political agreement that provides the mechanism for a land audit is a good way forward. Once we have established who owns the farms-whether they are the right people to own them is a different question-it will be possible develop some form of land registration system, and then people will be able to borrow against the collateral of the land and reinvest in some of the infrastructure that has been so run down. That is why farms are lying idle: infrastructure for grain storage, irrigation and so on has in many cases gone to rack and ruin because it has not been maintained properly.
There is a need not only for capital infrastructure for the farms, but for working capital to buy machinery to harvest and plant crops and for the sort of assistance that the Department for International Development is giving by supplying farmers with seeds to plant and fertilisers. Production can be cranked up, but many things needed for that are desperately lacking.
Mr. Cash: I am sorry, Mrs. Dean, that I had to nip out for a European Scrutiny Committee sitting.
Does my hon. Friend agree that the action of the South African court in giving a right to seize Zimbabwean Government property in South Africa in pursuit of compensation claims by white farmers is a tremendous step forward in establishing their rights? What does he think about the attitude of the President of South Africa in that context? We have the sense that the South African Government are reluctant to take the right action against Mugabe.
Mr. Clifton-Brown: As he so often does, my hon. Friend reads my mind; I was coming on to that point. We need to make the global political agreement work. We need to make the judgments of the panel enforceable under the judicial system of Zimbabwe. My hon. Friend is a great constitutional lawyer, so he will know that unless one can obtain enforcement of a judgment, there is not much point-I will not say that there is not much point in getting the judgment, but the judgment itself is not the critical thing. Enforcement is critical, and that is why Zimbabwe needs a proper judicial system.
My hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell) stated in a report on his recent visit to Zimbabwe:
There is real fear in the back of Zimbabwean people's mind that the law and order situation is still highly unpredictable and unsatisfactory. That is why the country needs a general election and a properly, constitutionally and democratically elected Government.
As a farmer, I would like to probe some of DFID's policies-that is the information that I hope the Minister will be able to provide today. The hon. Member for City of York said two important things. First, he said that, having examined the matter in forensic detail, he does not think that this country has any further obligations under the Lancaster house agreement, and that, furthermore, the situation is entirely the fault of the ruling political party, which brought about contraventions of the law of that country through the land reforms conducted since 2000. Secondly-on the opposite end of the scale-he said that this country has contributed almost $1 billion to Zimbabwe since independence. That is an important point that we need to keep stressing to the world. Far from abandoning Zimbabwe, we have been a huge supporter and a huge help to that country through its difficult times.
I want to probe the Minister about the almost £100 million-worth of aid that we will give Zimbabwe this year. A great deal of it-I have the programmes written down here-will go to shore up Government infrastructure. How effective does he think direct aid to the Zimbabwean Government has been? Is it bringing about a real improvement in the structure of government? Would we do better by channelling more of the aid through non-governmental organisations, which are able to reach the kind of areas that the Zimbabwean Government, let alone the British Government, are not able to reach?
Only two programmes are to do with food assistance and farming reform, and I wonder whether more cannot be done to encourage the kind of things that I have been outlining-planting crops but doing it better-at least on community and community co-operative lands. The Minister will talk about the conservation farming system, and that is great, but we need to go beyond that and teach farmers how to plant crops properly and how to grow them, and how to get farms recapitalised so that food production starts to increase. Marketing pathways need to be re-established so that farmers can get their food to market and, above all, people must have the wherewithal to be able to buy it. Although the economic situation in Zimbabwe is improving, most people in most situations are still unable to pay for ordinary food. They simply do not have the ability to pay for the food that is now in the shops. I would like to hear from the Minister how he envisages the situation developing, how effective our aid to Zimbabwe is, whether we are right to give aid directly to the Zimbabwean Government and how he envisages the global political agreement panning out.
Does the Minister think that we are able to put any pressure on President Zuma of South Africa? As the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton and others have said, President Zuma was pressurised hard during his recent visit. Were there any diplomatic signs that that pressure on the South African President had an effect? He is able to bring more pressure to bear on Zimbabwe than anybody else in the world.
What the Minister and everybody else will be able to glean from this debate is that the British people care deeply about what happens in Zimbabwe. We want to see an alleviation of the situation in which the former bread basket of Africa is not able even to feed itself and more than 2 million people are today dependent on food aid.
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Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold) (Con): I pay tribute to the hon. Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) for obtaining this debate. It is very timely, coming in the wake of the excellent report from his all-party Africa group and in the light of the fact that the International Development Committee is about to publish its report.
I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Mr. Benyon). Many of our constituents have an instinctive empathy with the plight of the people of Zimbabwe. Like him, I have had tragic cases of people who fled from Zimbabwe, having lost close relatives in brutal circumstances. They have been well looked after by others in my constituency, and there are strong support groups in this country that are giving a great deal of help to the people of Zimbabwe.
I shall start where the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) ended. We and the British Government need to do everything we can to make the global political agreement work and to ensure that there is a finite date for the next election, because the only sustainable way forward is for Zimbabwe to move from a transitional Government to a Government who are properly elected through free and fair elections, if that were ever possible.
In the short run, However, IHS Global Insight shares the International Monetary Fund's concerns over the sustainability of Zimbabwe's recovery. It says that for that country, which is starting from an extremely low base, rising output in the agricultural and mining sectors is the quickest way to growth. It is clear that this debate on land is extremely important, and that how land reform moves forward is also important.
An aspect of the conditions in Zimbabwe that has not been raised in this debate, although the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey) got very close to it just now, is that an estimated 3 million to 4 million people have fled Zimbabwe and are refugees and asylum seekers, many of them-probably 2 million to 3 million-in South Africa. That leaves an estimated residual population in Zimbabwe of about 8 million, of which about 6 million were in need of food aid in 2008. According to the World Food Programme, perhaps 2.7 million are still in need of food and subsistence aid. The situation in Zimbabwe is dire.
My hon. Friend the Member for Newbury is a great expert on farming, and I farm as well. There is no doubt about it: Zimbabwe used to be the bread basket of Africa. Not only could it feed its own people, but it was one of the major food exporters to the whole of the rest of Africa. It is sad that the land reforms instituted by President Mugabe from 2000 onwards have resulted in a situation in which an estimated 4,000 farmers have been displaced from their land, and, just as important, as my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton) said, almost 300,000 agricultural workers have been displaced from the farms where they worked-many were brutally killed-and their skills have disappeared. As my hon. Friend knows, what is important is not only the ownership of a farm, but the skills of the people who work on it and produce the crops.
The global political agreement that provides the mechanism for a land audit is a good way forward. Once we have established who owns the farms-whether they are the right people to own them is a different question-it will be possible develop some form of land registration system, and then people will be able to borrow against the collateral of the land and reinvest in some of the infrastructure that has been so run down. That is why farms are lying idle: infrastructure for grain storage, irrigation and so on has in many cases gone to rack and ruin because it has not been maintained properly.
There is a need not only for capital infrastructure for the farms, but for working capital to buy machinery to harvest and plant crops and for the sort of assistance that the Department for International Development is giving by supplying farmers with seeds to plant and fertilisers. Production can be cranked up, but many things needed for that are desperately lacking.
Mr. Cash: I am sorry, Mrs. Dean, that I had to nip out for a European Scrutiny Committee sitting.
Does my hon. Friend agree that the action of the South African court in giving a right to seize Zimbabwean Government property in South Africa in pursuit of compensation claims by white farmers is a tremendous step forward in establishing their rights? What does he think about the attitude of the President of South Africa in that context? We have the sense that the South African Government are reluctant to take the right action against Mugabe.
Mr. Clifton-Brown: As he so often does, my hon. Friend reads my mind; I was coming on to that point. We need to make the global political agreement work. We need to make the judgments of the panel enforceable under the judicial system of Zimbabwe. My hon. Friend is a great constitutional lawyer, so he will know that unless one can obtain enforcement of a judgment, there is not much point-I will not say that there is not much point in getting the judgment, but the judgment itself is not the critical thing. Enforcement is critical, and that is why Zimbabwe needs a proper judicial system.
My hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell) stated in a report on his recent visit to Zimbabwe:
"A land audit that establishes exactly who is in possession of what, as a first step towards a conclusive settlement on this most sensitive of issues, is crucial yet shows no sign of getting off the ground. Nor has Mugabe released all political prisoners, or honoured his commitments to open up the media space. And all the while Zanu PF thugs and militia lurk in the background."
There is real fear in the back of Zimbabwean people's mind that the law and order situation is still highly unpredictable and unsatisfactory. That is why the country needs a general election and a properly, constitutionally and democratically elected Government.
As a farmer, I would like to probe some of DFID's policies-that is the information that I hope the Minister will be able to provide today. The hon. Member for City of York said two important things. First, he said that, having examined the matter in forensic detail, he does not think that this country has any further obligations under the Lancaster house agreement, and that, furthermore, the situation is entirely the fault of the ruling political party, which brought about contraventions of the law of that country through the land reforms conducted since 2000. Secondly-on the opposite end of the scale-he said that this country has contributed almost $1 billion to Zimbabwe since independence. That is an important point that we need to keep stressing to the world. Far from abandoning Zimbabwe, we have been a huge supporter and a huge help to that country through its difficult times.
I want to probe the Minister about the almost £100 million-worth of aid that we will give Zimbabwe this year. A great deal of it-I have the programmes written down here-will go to shore up Government infrastructure. How effective does he think direct aid to the Zimbabwean Government has been? Is it bringing about a real improvement in the structure of government? Would we do better by channelling more of the aid through non-governmental organisations, which are able to reach the kind of areas that the Zimbabwean Government, let alone the British Government, are not able to reach?
Only two programmes are to do with food assistance and farming reform, and I wonder whether more cannot be done to encourage the kind of things that I have been outlining-planting crops but doing it better-at least on community and community co-operative lands. The Minister will talk about the conservation farming system, and that is great, but we need to go beyond that and teach farmers how to plant crops properly and how to grow them, and how to get farms recapitalised so that food production starts to increase. Marketing pathways need to be re-established so that farmers can get their food to market and, above all, people must have the wherewithal to be able to buy it. Although the economic situation in Zimbabwe is improving, most people in most situations are still unable to pay for ordinary food. They simply do not have the ability to pay for the food that is now in the shops. I would like to hear from the Minister how he envisages the situation developing, how effective our aid to Zimbabwe is, whether we are right to give aid directly to the Zimbabwean Government and how he envisages the global political agreement panning out.
Does the Minister think that we are able to put any pressure on President Zuma of South Africa? As the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton and others have said, President Zuma was pressurised hard during his recent visit. Were there any diplomatic signs that that pressure on the South African President had an effect? He is able to bring more pressure to bear on Zimbabwe than anybody else in the world.
What the Minister and everybody else will be able to glean from this debate is that the British people care deeply about what happens in Zimbabwe. We want to see an alleviation of the situation in which the former bread basket of Africa is not able even to feed itself and more than 2 million people are today dependent on food aid.
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