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Zimbabwe

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.