---

Tunisia

The noble Lord knows more than most about Africa strategies and speaks wise words. Perhaps he would also recognise that Africa is a concept, as it were, and a geographical continent, but that it contains a vast range of different societies, cultures and trends in political and social evolution, all of which must be calibrated to ensure that one gets right one’s relations with different countries and shows the necessary respect to different countries, rather than lumping them all together into one general formula by which they should be treated. I think the noble Lord accepts that point, and I hope he will feel that I am adding to, rather than subtracting from, his wisdom on this matter. Food prices and unemployment are the uneasy shadows of the age. There are tremendous volatilities in the availability of food. Some experts tell us that it is not the basic lack of supply of foodstuffs but problems of distribution, processing, handling and getting the right kind of food into the right kind of supply chains that create so many of the problems. Unemployment is similar. What does a world, and particularly a region, do, given that we are talking about the Maghreb and the Middle East, where almost the majority of people are young and are waiting for an opportunity to fulfil themselves and find useful employment? What do they do if no employment is available and the opportunity to contribute to their community is not there? What do they do if they have no country that they feel they should love and no confidence about getting a fair share of a country's prosperity? That is one of the angry themes that has come through in Tunis: the feeling that some people were doing extremely well—the fat cats—while the majority struggled and did not benefit from the relative prosperity. I say ““relative”” because the country is not as poor as some. It receives a great deal of aid from France. Did that help the men and women, the families and children, in their homes? Clearly not, and now we are seeing the results.