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EU Committee: EU and Africa

My Lords, as a member of the sub-committee throughout this very timely inquiry—as was my noble friend Lord Hannay—I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, for his great courtesy in chairing the committee for the past four years and our Clerk, Dr Emily Baldock, who has now moved on to higher things. I thought that the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, was excellent. I will try to avoid going over the same ground. I should like to say a word about our self-interest and moral obligation vis-à-vis Africa, because that is the basis for our analysis. We are concerned about where some of the present trends in Africa are taking us. I should like to quote from a recent analysis by the European Defence Agency, to which the UK is a party, that looks ahead to the next 20 years. It states: "““The regions neighbouring Europe will face particular challenges. High fertility should see Africa’s population growing faster than anywhere else—up by 48% to 1.3 billion by 2025—despite AIDS. The average African’s age is projected to be 22. Desertification may increasingly concentrate this young population in urban centres (11 African mega-cities of 5 million plus by 2025)—many of them without hope of employment. The implications for despair, humanitarian disaster and migratory pressures are obvious””." I draw attention to the mention of migratory pressures at the end of that quotation. That is why I say that self-interest and moral obligation go together here. That is why that quotation rang lots of bells. A time bomb is ticking away. That is why, if for no other reason, we need a very strong European engagement—it may be, in close co-operation with China, a point to which I shall return. I echo all the remarks about African solutions for African problems—African ownership, in the current usage—albeit in a context where direct foreign investment will require people to be clear about the circumstances that do and do not engender that investment. By the way, that is not just investment in raw materials, because people in those cities will be looking to build businesses through micro-finance, the cities already containing more than half of Africa's population. Overseas development aid is of course vital, but we cannot unilaterally solve the problem just by throwing more money at it. Such assistance, as in all cycles of dependency—we can give only the analogy, however imperfect, of parts of the United Kingdom—can do little to change the underlying dynamic. I also echo the EDA’s analysis that demographic development is an issue of great importance. Population growth rates currently far exceed what is compatible with increasing living standards or meeting the Millennium Development Goals. Reducing the number of offspring per woman from five, six or seven to nearer the replacement rate will not happen by some magic virtuous circle. Perhaps we need to be more courageous in putting that problem on agendas. It has become something of a taboo subject and the appalling conditions, low expectation of life and infant mortality require that to be a more explicit issue. Economic development requires productivity growth. It requires growth in the total rate of employment. Africa is falling behind the rest of the world rather than catching up at present. We have not only the problem of low investment—10 per cent of the world's population getting only 1 per cent of the world's foreign direct investment. It would take Africa 10 years or so of growth per head of 7 per cent per annum in real terms to get anywhere near the MDGs. The statistics on the first main page of the report state that in the past decade the economic growth per head in real terms has been only 1.38 per cent, lower than in Europe. The total growth rates of approaching 4 per cent are the arithmetical consequence of adding up the growth rate of population of 2.32 per cent, which is far too high, doubling every generation, and its consequence for slums and unemployment. Against that background, to say simply ““cut poverty now”” is to ignore the long haul that is entailed. It takes a long time to get the gross national product per head to anything like European standards, but we must do all we can to get those policies in place. It is in that context that I come to the indispensable role of the European Union, which is parallel to the role of the African Union. Building up the credibility of the African Union is indispensable because the African Union has already become the inescapable dialogue partner of the European Union. This is not seriously challenged, and no one should now underestimate the value of the EU/AU dialogue set in motion by the European Council under the British presidency a year ago. I was in Algeria recently—I am secretary of the All-Party Group on Algeria—which pointed out to me that it has a senior AU commissioner, the commissioner for security and development. It is partly because of this sense of ownership of the AU that Algeria is totally behind the pressure on Khartoum in relation to Darfur. That is one example. Incidentally, it also demonstrates why it is fallacious for people to think that north Africa is somehow not interested in the rest of Africa. It is, because of migration and the possibility of huge problems in north Africa if there are further disasters south of the Sahara. Ownership of the African Union is rather like the schizophrenia that we have about ownership of the European Union. I noted that the European Union’s special representative to the African Union is Mr Timothy Clarke, the brother of Charles Clarke. On that basis, we should take more ownership of the European Union. I do, however, have a quibble with the Government’s comment, in an otherwise rather well thought-out response on the AU’s role, that we should, "““remember that not all countries in Africa belong to the African Union””." To the best of my knowledge—I stand to be corrected—this is true solely of Morocco and its policy on Western Sahara. Although this is highly regrettable, it is getting things rather out of perspective to imply other than that the African Union is representative. The point has also been taken that the African Union needs a great deal of institutional support. The initial €55 million, agreed in Addis Ababa this October, is very timely. One example of the AU’s many resource deficiencies is the Darfur peace agreement follow-up. In principle, the AU is the custodian of the DPA, but only one full-time professional staff member is working on the Sudan at its Addis Ababa headquarters. The DPA implementation team in Khartoum has only three senior professionals. I shall say a word about the architecture of the relationship between NePAD and the APRM, which is now under one umbrella, as my noble friend Lord Hughes of Woodside has said. They are not, and certainly should not be, in competition. This relationship must acknowledge that the expertise in the Johannesburg area—NePAD is located between Johannesburg and Pretoria—is several times greater than in the Addis Ababa area. Given the nature of Africa, Ethiopia is in some respects a very typical African country. Yet the part of Africa that is nearer to embracing the globalised world is South Africa. There was a danger of some tension between the two. The question of accountability and again of ownership by African heads of government is perhaps more positive than my noble friend believes. There is a degree of operational independence and certainly no one is interfering with the African peer review mechanism; that is my take on the particular problem. So we and the African nations in the AU must build on the credibility of both bodies and on the nature of the dialogue between them. The spectre of China has been mentioned. It is said that China is undercutting some of the EU’s principles in the areas of governance, the rule of law, the environment and social standards—all this despite protestations to the contrary made by the Chinese. I should like to give chapter and verse on that. Only two weeks ago a huge jamboree was held in Peking. I say ““jamboree”” because apparently each president had his own anagram sewn onto his silk pyjamas. The Chinese do have their own unique system of governance, if I may put it that way. Given their huge need for raw materials, they are now putting billions-worth of investment in the form of infrastructure, manufacturing capacity and so forth, into Africa. In many cases African countries are to some degree becoming client states. The dilemma was summed up in the front-page story in yesterday’s Financial Times. The president of the European Investment Bank said that the Chinese banks, with whom the EIB is in competition, "““don’t bother about social and human rights conditions””," and are snatching projects from under the EIB’s nose. He goes on to say that: "““It’s clear that China is trying to build closer links with Africa and build privileged access to the resources of this continent””." A further point on that is that this may be short-termism and not necessarily an indication of a long-term commitment to Africa. That could also form part of the dialogue we ought to have. I am rather disturbed by the conclusion of the president of the EIB: "““We have to consider the degree of conditionality which we want to impose””." In other words, he wants to dilute the sort of principles that we have set out in Europe. I cannot think of a more succinct demonstration of the danger of creating a paradigm which is the opposite of that in our own report. Finally on this, I think that Her Majesty’s Government should be promoting some sort of trilateral dialogue with the Chinese and we should test to the limit the critique that we are destined to undermine each other. A good deal of progress has been made in the past year and I think that we can look forward with a degree of confidence. I was privileged to be in a position to observe the second round of the very difficult elections held in Congo. In some parts of Africa things are beginning to move in the right direction. I am sure that the policy must be to go forward even though rogue states such as Zimbabwe are difficult to deal with. My final sentence on that is that while nobody is talking about dropping sanctions, we do not want the Chinese to be able to have a dialogue at heads of government level with Africa and we are not able to, so we must find a way of solving the problem. I think that the proposal from Brazzaville on a joint strategy is very encouraging.