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Future of CDC

I will not take any interventions on that point. There is an internal issue in the Committee. In Burundi, we witnessed for ourselves some of the poorest of the planet's poor people struggling. I was going to say that they were on the edge, but they were beyond the edge—they were not operating at survival levels. If it were not for the intervention of non-governmental organisations, I do not think that they would have survived. It was estimated that their per-capita income was 20p a day. Apart from very basic and poor living conditions—no electricity, one tap for 4,000 people and pit latrines, although not for everybody—we saw exhausted soil, diseased plants and minimal yields that were inadequate even for self-sufficient farming, never mind cash-cropping. The hon. Member for Stafford, as someone who knew a little more about agriculture than other Committee members, said that it should be possible to perform a soil analysis, to work out nutritional benefits and to advise on disease-resistant plants, and possibly to increase the yield of the agricultural holdings by up to eight to 10 times. That would be a massive return, so we felt that CDC should be part of the process of tackling that problem. We would like to think that it would consider investing in improving agricultural outputs in such poor countries.