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Fishing and Logging Policies

My Lords, like the other speakers in the debate I begin by welcoming it and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, for introducing it. I am sure that we all agree that without environmentally sustainable fishing and logging policies, the world could quite shortly be turned into a pretty sorry place. We do not need to be very perceptive to come to that conclusion, nor to stand up in the House of Lords and tell the world. Most of us here have aspects of life away from the House; it is the nature of the place. One of mine is that I am a farmer and what in the old House of Lords would have been called a traditional landed estate owner, and is now probably known as a land manager. I am not hands-on, but it is part of what I do. I remember when I was training, my father said, ““When you work with the land you must produce running with the grain of nature””. We can see plenty of instances of the consequences of quarrying nature rather than simply taking a tithe. Perhaps there is no better example than the fate of the herring fishery in the North Sea. Once you have killed the breeding stock you wipe out the future. It seems that the invariable problem wherever one goes is that short-term greed gets in the way of long-term good management. It is more or less an invariable maxim of resource management that the short term is damaging. We must not forget that almost the greediest of all are governments and their treasuries. It is easy from the perspective of the gothic comforts of the Chamber of the House of Lords to be insufficiently sensitised to how this can come about. Unless we apply our minds to identifying the factors at play, we shall never achieve what I call a sustainable system of sustainability. Much about degradation has already been said, in particular that logging is driven by agriculture, which is intended to improve or at least sustain the basic standards of living. If your family is starving, who gives a damn about the future of the world? Many of those countries where there is much global concern about forests and logging, such as Indonesia and Brazil, or where there is concern about the depletion of the fishing resources, such as in west Africa, are poor. Their argument, which I can understand, is: ““It is all very well for you in the rich northern and western countries. You’ve got rich by destroying the globe and now you want to stop us trying to follow you””. It is important for us to understand that point and not simply to laugh it off. We have no real choice but to back our concerns with our money. We in countries such as ours must put our money where our mouth is. That, almost inevitably, takes one towards that maligned and frequently misunderstood phrase, ““partnership””, whatever it may mean. We need a framework in which that can be done. We need confidence that if we put our money in, an outcome will result. The noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, referred to the philanthropist who, she tells me, is vice-chairman of the Conservative Party and has bought some of the rainforest in Brazil to preserve it. If he is putting a large amount of his own money into that, he needs to have the confidence that the government there will not sequester it and cut it down. An obvious example of this kind of thing in a more general sense at government level is via the mechanism of debt relief. That has been done from time to time, and I entirely commend it. Certainly it is right and proper that aid programmes, whether bilateral or at European Union level, impose conditions. It is important to be sensitive about this because there is always a real risk that the creation of the framework could be perceived as neo-colonialism. I recall an occasion when I was sitting on the Front Bench opposite and had to go on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government to Zambia. Part of my task was to explain to President Chiluba that the way in which he was implementing the aid polices was not quite in line with what had been agreed when the money had been handed over. President Chiluba got the message ahead of me and refused to see me. I can see his point. He did not want a lecture from a young whippersnapper from London. It is important to realise the significance of the way in which we carry forward some of the projects that we have in mind. If we do not win the hearts and minds of those with whom we have to deal to bring about some of the changes that we want to see, we are bound to fail. In life it is not good enough to be right; you must also be able to persuade your interlocutor that he wants, from choice, to run with the gist of the arguments you are advancing. One of the keys to making long-term progress is to establish a marketplace where there are incentives to promote good natural resource management and make them sufficiently attractive that they become more attractive to people in those countries than the rewards of simply exploiting and quarrying the natural resources. This is not merely a matter of government-to-government relations or NGO-to-government relations. It also involves the private sector using its own particular skills and resources, which are of course different from those of the other two parties that I mentioned, and which can contribute significantly to the desirable and needed changes in environmental practices and resource utilisation in many parts of the world. For example, carbon credits can be used to help establish forestry projects in third world countries, which are desirable as long as they are done in the right way with the right kind of species. But there is also a lesson for countries such as our own. What is ““sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander””. There is plenty of degradation of various kinds in our own country, in our own seas, and in the use of our own natural resources. We may not have done anything quite as dramatic as destroying rainforests in the United Kingdom, but it is uncanny how many mistakes of the much-derided common agricultural policy can be seen, at least to some extent, replicated in our forestry policy here. Such things need to be addressed as part of a wider project to ensure proper global resource management as a whole, and also to show the rest of the world that we are leading by example. Capitalism and private business are the greatest force for economic development and change that the world has ever seen. These forces must be harnessed to help solve the problems that we are debating tonight. What will the Government do to try to promote the private sector, much of which is the spiritual successor of those colonial servants who dedicated their lives to other parts of the globe? What about encouraging people once again to leave Britain and to work all round the earth, contributing to making it a better place? All that will cost. My party is returning to having an interest in those aspects of governance. No longer is it the preserve of the cranky few. Ruskinian economics should be at the heart of the economic debate, not a bolt-on to the periphery. It will cost, and it will probably cost us in this country disproportionately simply because proportionately we have a better ability to pay. We in Britain should recognise that with good grace, and recognise that the expenditure of public money outside the jurisdiction may in the long run be just as much in the national interest as spending it within it.