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Latin America

My Lords, I am delighted that my noble friend was successful in the ballot because this is an important debate. I am much less delighted that it has been tabled for today. Only for such a good friend would I still be here on the last day before a break. My experience in Latin America has come in a number of different ways. I have been on delegations to Cuba, Uruguay, Peru, Guatemala and Nicaragua with the IPU. Some of those trips were fascinating experiences, such as when I went to Nicaragua with the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd. Our meal cost 250,000 of whatever the currency was and there was no note bigger than 1,000. The restaurant had to set up a table with two men to count the money before we could say we had paid the bill and depart. The two men were sitting next to a pool with a crocodile in it, and we felt it was very important that our money should be right. Inflation was a major issue in Latin America. When I first visited Peru as a private individual, we were advised to pay for dinner by course because prices went up so fast that by the time you finished eating the meal would cost more. There were no stamps. You had to go to the post office to send anything. You joined the queue and the price of postage depended on the time you paid. I believe that Latin America has been through certain blips with its currencies but, on the whole, they are much more stable now and inflation is not at that level. The second way that I have visited Latin America is as a tourist travelling for pleasure. I have been to Mexico, Peru and Brazil. I visited Manaus on the Amazon. I am concerned to read about deforestation there, and hope that the Amazon forest remains as the most marvellous forest in the world. A tropical forest of that type takes centuries, perhaps even millions of years, to grow. It cannot be easily replaced. I have also visited Argentina where I saw some of the most beautiful and elegant women in the world in Buenos Aires. The third way that I have visited Latin America, and the way that I wish to speak about, is through my position as chairman of Plan International, which is an NGO working in a number of Latin American countries. Through Plan, I have been to Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador and seen the work being done. At one time, Plan had to pull out of Peru. Shining Path was a force there and it became so dangerous that we could not allow people to continue working. That danger is over now, but I am concerned to see people in recent programmes on television saying that they would welcome the return of Shining Path. That alarms me. There was a recent programme in which people in Peru were saying that they were not happy with things as they are and that they felt that the government were not coping. I cannot comment, other than to repeat what I saw on television, but I would like to know what the position is and to be reassured that we are not going to have Shining Path back. Until fairly recently, I was the UK chairman of Plan International and I was a member of the international Plan board for 12 years. Plan International is an international humanitarian child-centred development organisation, without religious, political or governmental affiliations. Child sponsorship is the foundation of the   organisation and its child-centred community development. It works in partnership with other local organisations and with the participation of local people and communities at all levels. It works with local NGOs. Very often, grants are given—although I do not know whether that happens in Latin America—and the Department for International Development has been very good in supporting Plan. As I said, we work with other charities. I particularly remember working in Bolivia with Pro Mujer, which means, ““For Women””. It is a body that operates a small rotating credit scheme. It is extraordinary how difficult it can be for women, particularly in really poor communities, to get a few dollars to start up a small business for themselves. I saw women who had been given as little as $10 or $20 and who had set up a market stall selling soup. They had made a great success of it. The women are very reliable. They handle the credit union themselves. They pay the money back and when they do so they often lend it to the group so that another woman can be financed. It makes a huge difference to the lives of those people. In microeconomics, NGOs can do a tremendous amount. In Peru, I went to see a very small area—I do not know whether you could call it a village or a hamlet—called Rujero. When I visited other places in Peru where we were doing work in health clinics there were mayors, bands and lots of welcome and it was all very impressive. But Rujero was a much smaller place. For the 30 years that it had existed, every drop of water had had to be carried there by hand, or on the back of a donkey. Plan provided the expertise and money to run a pipeline the 30-odd kilometres to the nearest water supply, a natural spring. Right in the middle of the village there was one standpipe for water. It so exciting to the people of the village that the headman had to turn the system off every so often because the children would dance around the tap with glee and turn the water on, delighting that water was there. We believe that all those amenities are there at the turn of a tap, and yet people have had to carry water all that distance for so many years. Again, it was only a small thing, but it had changed the lives of those people. The hours that had been spent going to get water could now be used more productively to prepare food or do other things. I thank Lord Montgomery, who was such an expert on South America. Before my first visit to Ecuador, he said, ““Do not let them put you on a plane between this place and that place; you must see for yourself what is happening there””. I followed his advice, and it was excellent. I went to see Guayaquil, where people had settled in the middle of a swamp. Plan had co-operated to the extent that it was able to build up hardcore areas to walk on between the houses, which were built on stilts in the swamp. When we met the people over lunch, we asked them, ““Why have you come to live here?””. They answered, ““For a better life””. How bad must life have been for that to have been a better life? Now, years later, they no longer have a lorry bringing in the water—and they had to keep careful records of every drop anyone got; they now have a laid-on water supply that has turned it into a real village, and now people there do have a better life. Those people chose that way to settle and improve—I understand that it happens fairly often in Ecuador. They have seen the result of the effort and work that they had put in. In Cänar up in the mountains, I saw people making Panama hats. Everyone imagines Panama hats come from Panama, but they do not; Ecuador is the number one source of Panama hats. People spent days at work and in the end they got hardly anything for all that work. One of the people from Plan Germany went out there and brought a hat back to Germany. A fashion magazine asked if she had brought anything back, and she said, ““I just brought this hat””. It was put on the front page of a German fashion magazine, and the magazine said that the hats were for sale. They thought that they might have a few buyers; 20,000 hats were ordered instantly. That has changed those people’s lives completely. They have reached the point now where they go to world trade fairs; and Plan no longer works there. That is our aim; to make people so self-sufficient and successful that they no longer need an NGO’s help. That is what has happened there; those people do their own dealing and trading. Instead of going through so many people and getting virtually nothing for their work, they are getting a really good return for their money. Those things are important. I fear that Chile and some of the other Latin American countries may pose a challenge to Australia in the wine industry, because they are getting a good reputation. Australia is so pleased to be doing best; most wine that comes into this country is from Australia. They have overtaken the French. Of course, the gemstones in Brazil are unbelievable and very beautiful. If we intend to build up tourism and personal visits in those countries, personal safety is the one thing that tourists are looking for. That used to be the hazard in Rio; if you went to Rio you were lucky if your whole busload of people were not attacked; sometimes all 40   were attacked. I am hoping that things have improved. The debate today addresses ““recent developments””; it would be interesting to know whether that has changed. If you go back to the old pre-war film, ““Flying Down to Rio””, Rio was the place to go from the United States. But people will now only go somewhere they feel safe. It is no good saying that it would be delightful and enjoyable, if you are worried every minute that someone is going to attack you. Personal safety is important. There are so many things that you could talk about, and time is limited. When I was in Bolivia, I went to Alto Plano. It just so happened that I was there. I was asked to open what I was told was a greenhouse at a school. Noble Lords would almost have called it a chicken shed, as it had a few little windows at the top. In the Alto Plano everything freezes every night. The children were learning how to grow lettuce, which you could not possibly grow outdoors. They asked me officially to open the greenhouse—they had a big ribbon tied across it. I got a bit carried away when they said that I could either cut it with scissors or pull the ribbon. I thought that the scissors sounded great fun and impressive. I had forgotten that it was a primary school, so they had given them non-cutting-type scissors to be safe for the children. I sawed away with the scissors for quite a time, and in the end I had to resort to pulling the string. You could go on and on with such examples. In Bolivia they formed cookers out of the local clay. They took the person’s saucepans and moulded the oven-top around them when the clay set, so that instead of having to use a lot of wood to make a fire to make a small meal, it economised on the fuel, and you did not get the whole room jet black and sooty in the way that you used to when they cooked on an open fire. I remember those open fires in the country in Australia. It really was a pretty sooty way of cooking. All those things can and will be done if there is goodwill and co-operation between NGOs and governments. There is a growing closeness between the various bodies that must benefit everyone. We see here all the time the exported mange-tout peas from Guatemala. That is an excellent export, because it is high value in relation to the weight of the crop; therefore, it is very profitable. Again, Plan has worked with people so that they understand. They must feel that they possess the project, not that someone is imposing it on them. I went to see a place where they were teaching people to grow broccoli, but unfortunately they had not visited again soon enough, and the broccoli were six feet tall. They said, ““Do you think it is time to cut this crop?””. You must really follow it up and show them. In that area in the past they had not known any vegetable except potatoes, so there was a degree of malnutrition due to the lack of green vegetables. All those exports are important, and the whole way of life is improving for people. As my noble friend Lady Hooper said, Latin America is made up of 19 countries. It is a vast and fascinating subject. I make no excuses for just talking about NGOs, because an important part can be played by organisations other than direct government organisations. Perhaps the most important thing about today’s debate is that it enables Members of this House to show how much we care about this very special part of the world and to remind others of the continuing importance of Latin America.