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Latin America

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, for securing this debate. I appreciate that in doing so she has had to be patient. It is bad luck that it was listed for the Thursday before the Recess and there is a greater interest in this House than is suggested by the list of speakers. Nevertheless, it has been an extremely interesting debate. I cannot match the length or breadth of experience of previous speakers. I have visited Latin America three or four times in the past few years, notably Ecuador and Mexico. I visited Mexico City as part of an IPU delegation. Besides the official part of the visit, which was most interesting, I was able to see some of the shantytown areas through my interest in Juconi, the charity which works with street children. The scale of problems with which many countries in the region must deal defies the imagination. I was interested to hear about the experience of the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parks, in this region. By no means was the infrastructure in place in the city of Guayaquil, which I also visited with Juconi. I am pleased that the part she visited was so improved, but vast areas still lack any services. The issues relating to the street children, in which I took a particular interest during my visit, would merit a debate in themselves and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, who for some time has requested a debate on that subject, will be successful in securing one. I want to move to my second area of particular interest, fair trade, and then to take a more general look at the region. During my visit to Ecuador I took the opportunity to spend some time with a fair trade banana co-operative in El Guabo to see exactly what fair trade meant to them. It is reasonable to regard fair trade as the grown-up relation of free trade and after my visit, I felt very much that that was the case. The co- operative was founded in 1997 by some producers, all of whom have small landholdings, many fewer than 10 hectares. Once they get up into the mountains, they have fewer than two hectares and it is a challenge to make a living for yourself and your family on that amount of land. Furthermore, many employed workers. They could understand that within the regime to which they were selling their bananas it was impossible to make a living and they decided to set up the co-operative. It was founded in 1997 and the benefits they have been able to provide include healthcare insurance, a machinery co-operative, a packing station which they built themselves, and a lorry to take the bananas to the port of Guayaquil. They have also provided all kinds of training in first aid and in farming methods. They have much reduced and in some cases eliminated pesticide use, with all the health and ecological benefits that brings. They provide food baskets for those who fall on hard times through illness and so on and they have a democratic system of governance in their co-operative. All of this and more comes at the price of 1p on a kilo of bananas wholesale. That is a wonderful example of what ““trade not aid”” means. That model can be used by many other communities and producers. For example, in Ecuador, the flour producers are interested in moving towards such a model. In this country, it is incumbent on us to spend our money on fair trade produce and to promote the idea of fair trade. I commend supermarkets such as the Co-op which are trying to buy fair-trade produce and offer it to consumers. I am sorry that I do not have more time today to address the issue in detail, but I want to look at a wider picture which has been mentioned by many noble Lords. Latin America is rarely on the political radar here in Parliament or in the British media with the honourable exception of the BBC World Service. Latin America is certainly not a priority on the Government’s agenda. I realise that not everything can be a priority and that the Prime Minister has decided to make Africa a UK and soon a G8 priority. I am sure that there are sound reasons for that with which I would not argue. There seems to be an all or almost nothing approach to some regions of the world and Latin America has been earmarked for almost nothing in terms of attention, despite its undoubted importance. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, said, it is a global player and it is time it was recognised as such. The lack of attention that is paid to Latin America is a great mistake in many ways. Its countries are classified as middle-income, but that masks a different reality. As mentioned today, 57 million people there still live in extreme poverty on less than $1 a day and I   saw for myself what that means. Furthermore, 132   million live on less than $2 a day. They have no safety net of a health service and few services are on offer to them. The index which measures the difference between rich and poor indicates that that difference is growing. These matters are of concern to DfID, whose future programme is laid out in its 2004 regional assistance plan. The plan starts with a long apology for the closure of so many Latin American offices. Not only has DfID withdrawn from many of the countries; the British Council and the Foreign Office have done so too. No doubt that is a Treasury-driven policy but it is regrettable. Relations become more distant not only with individual countries but also with the NGOs within them. The noble Baroness, Lady Gardner, indicated the importance of the NGO sector in her illustration. The DfID paper is a good analysis of the situation in Latin America but it fails to draw sufficiently strong conclusions. I felt that DfID may have come to those conclusions but that they had been watered down during the ministerial approval process. I shall explain my criticism. For example, the plan talks of negative environmental trends and severe environmental degradation. That is a very topical issue, as noble Lords will have noticed from the reports of extensive logging in the Amazon, which has been far greater than any of us realised. But there was no suggestion in the DfID report or, indeed, in press reports this week of how countries, which can better afford to do so, should deal with that situation. We cannot expect Brazil to deal with it on its own. Brazil has already been recognised by the UK Government, the US Government and very widely within the world as a hub for change and development in Latin America. But Brazil has plenty of issues of its own—from extreme poverty and unemployment to antiquated red tape, which prevents foreign investment. The President is now trying to deal with that. He has made a fantastic start both at being an engine for change within the region and at getting his own country’s house in order, but he is not a miracle worker. That is why I say that we should treat the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest as critical to the future of the world’s climate. Its destruction is a disaster. We should treat it in the same way as a war zone because environmentally and actually that is what it is. Indigenous people, other Brazilians and westerners have been murdered over the felling and logging that has taken place there. We, as the international community, should be offering to help with policing and not simply wringing our hands. Another area in which both the Foreign Office and DfID need to be more explicit is in thinking about the identity of Latin America as a region. That is why I was particularly grateful for this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Luke, referred to terminology. I believe that terminology is important, and perhaps his was better. Certainly, the Brazilian Minister for External Relations came out with a very interesting quote. Indeed, it was so interesting that I had to write it down for my own speech. Ambassador Celso Amorim said:"““In fact, the expression ‘Free Trade Area of the Americas’ rather makes one think of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, which, in the words of a certain nineteenth-century thinker, was in fact neither Germanic, nor holy, nor Roman, nor an empire””." He certainly does not see that the area of the Americas and the offer of free trade is all that is understood by the rest of the world. In concluding my comments on Brazil, I recognise and applaud the contribution that that country has made in establishing an agreement between Mercosur and the EU and all the other initiatives that it is pursuing with the rest of the world. Finally, I turn to DfID’s comments on poverty reduction strategies. It made a tactful understatement when it said that there is some concern that poverty reduction strategies have been driven more by donor demands than by national priorities and that ownership and civil society participation is weak. For me, that goes to the crux of some of the things that have happened within certain countries in Latin America over the past few years. The external demands of the poverty reduction strategies have, indeed, played a fearsome role in fostering so much discontent in societies throughout Bolivia and Ecuador. I have not been to Peru but I should be surprised if that were not also the case there. Such has been the discontent fostered by the demands upon those countries by outside institutions that democratic government has been almost impossible to achieve. Governments there cannot respond to their own agenda or to the mandate for which they were elected because they have to dance to the donors’ tune. It is time that donor countries and regions understood that point. It is interesting that we are having this debate following the debate on democracy. If we as a country, together with the Foreign Office and DfID, are interested in promoting democracy in Latin America as a means to changing and underpinning development, then we must become an advocate for those countries and not allow the demands of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to take precedence. That was illustrated graphically during the recent problems experienced by Ecuador when it tried to create a social programme based on the difference between last year’s and this year’s oil prices. As noble Lords know, the price of oil has risen considerably as a result of the Iraq war. However, because of the terms laid down by the World Bank in 2003, it is not able to benefit from that windfall. It is not able to develop a social programme under those World Bank terms but must give back 70 per cent of the windfall to the bond holders. I believe that the arm lock in which the donors have placed these countries explains the political instability in some of them. The UK Government must make an effort to help the new President of Ecuador to move forward on the agenda that he has laid out. I could go through the other issues that Bolivia is facing, but I can see that I shall not have time to do so. The noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, underlined some of them. Therefore, I simply say that it is very important that we listen to what the Bolivian people want before we come to a conclusion about what is in the best interests of the UK. With that, once again, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, very much and hope that it will not be too long before we have another debate of this nature.