13:00 Heidi Alexander (Labour)

When the all-party group visited Kenya in September, we met family after family who told us that while their livelihood was their land, that land often did not produce enough for them to live on. They are not even subsistence farmers; they are sub-subsistence farmers, and there are millions of them in Africa. Given the effects of climate change and more irregular rainfall patterns, there are likely to be many more in years to come.

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13:16 The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (Mr Stephen O'Brien)

I was delighted that both the hon. Lady and my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) had an opportunity to travel to Kenya with the all-party group on agriculture and food for development—there is no substitute for seeing things for oneself in order to bring these issues to life. To some degree, I have seen these things for myself, as I was born in Tanzania and partly raised and educated in Kenya. The scale of this issue is immense. More than 200 million people in Africa—more than one in four of the continent’s population—suffer chronic hunger. Although Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda and Ethiopia have all made significant progress in reducing hunger, many countries have made little or no progress and, frankly, some are going backwards. Levels of hunger in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have nearly trebled since 1990, and the levels in Burundi, Botswana, Swaziland, Zambia and Gambia have also increased due to conflict, rapid population growth, economic stagnation or HIV/AIDS. In the years to come, climate change and the scarcity of natural resources will add to the challenge.

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