The past year has seen the UK take huge steps backwards from the global stage in terms of its contribution to aid efforts. The Department for International Development (DFID) has been merged with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office – which in reality appears to amount to its abolition. The Co-operative Party and its representatives have campaigned hard to save DFID in recognition of the value that we as a Party and movement put on international development. Our aid budget has been cut, with the Government reneging on manifesto commitments to retaining our 0.7% GDP spend, cut to just 0.5%. This has seen significant cuts to aid allocation to many of the highest priority countries.

Our existing policy reads: “The Co operative Party is committed to supporting a development agenda that seeks to eradicate global poverty once and for all. This can only be achieved through a rights-based agenda that ensures decent jobs and social protection; access to universal health and social care; universal access to basic utilities; quality primary and secondary education; protection of ecosystems and biodiversity; basic food security and eradication of hunger; and women’s empowerment and gender equality.”

The Co-operative Party’s policy platform at the General Election 2017 highlighted concerns about the current trend towards linking the Department for International Development spend on foreign aid to issues of defence and private business development. The CDC, the private sector arm of the UK’s aid programme, has a record of channelling investment through tax havens and into private sector projects. The 2017 Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC) Act, which saw the cap on funds spent through the CDC significantly increased, only served to make this problem worse. With the abolition of the Department for International Development (DFID), this conflation of aid and private business development overseas continues, with the CDC accused of wastefulness and secrecy as well as continuing to use tax havens and investing in coal, petroleum pipelines and oil-burning power plants contrary to Britain’s commitments to tackling climate change.

The co operative movement is one of the largest organised segments of civil society with over one billion members, and plays a crucial role across a wide spectrum of human aspiration and need.

Climate justice is a core plank of the Co-operative Party’s climate policy - it means not just tackling climate change but doing so in a way which is equal and equitable. Climate change and development are closely intertwined. Poor people in the global south will feel the impacts first and worst (and already are) because of vulnerable geography and lesser ability to cope with damage from severe weather and rising sea levels. In short, climate change will be awful for everyone but catastrophic for the global south. Many researchers also point to climate change, damage to biodiversity and ecological breakdown as a factor which creates conditions for new viruses and diseases, such as Ebola or Covid-19, to emerge or existing diseases like Malaria to spread further than they have previously.

The UK is about to renegotiate trade arrangements with a large number of countries around the world. This could have serious consequences for millions of jobs and livelihoods in very poor countries. Covid-19 has also had a serious impact on producers’ workplaces – many have been unable to make a living, or are forced to work in unsafe conditions through the pandemic because of a lack of access to PPE.

The pandemic has been devastating the world over – but in the global south especially so where pre-crisis conditions were already weak. Frail health systems, lower living standards and a lack of services have struggled to respond. Pre-existing endemic health inequalities from malaria to hunger to HIV left populations more vulnerable. Lockdowns, treatment, support and vaccine administration is made harder where populations in cities are overcrowded and in rural regions are widely dispersed and poorly connected. Education was put on pause – in many instances, even when a school had managed to put its lessons online and a parent had a smartphone, the parent might not have a sufficiently generous data plan to make use of them. Lockdowns in the West caused plummeting demands for the export products that sustain local economies, and many workers are in insecure, poorly paid jobs without access to adequate PPE. Now that countries are racing to vaccinate and protect their populations, the global south is again being left behind. Wealthy countries are stockpiling vaccines while poor countries are struggling to afford enough doses to protect their population. High-income nations, home to a sixth of the world’s population, have received nearly half of doses made by the four major Western vaccine makers - while low-income countries which account for around one-tenth of the global population, have received less than 2% of all doses. The Covid jab is one of the “most expensive vaccines in history” for poorer countries. South Africa had been forced to buy doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine at a price 2.5 times higher than that paid by most European countries. Bangladesh and Uganda have also paid more than the EU for the vaccine. Many countries are only able to access vaccines nearing their expiry date which they are unable to rollout in time. At the same time, higher-income countries have paid below the norm for their Covid vaccine supplies – and have stockpiled so many that millions of jabs expire before even being used and are discarded. In 2021, 60m vaccines that could have been sent from the global north to the global south, passed their ‘use-by’ date and had to be destroyed. It is reported that the global coronavirus death toll could double due to a surplus of vaccines in the richest countries and a shortage in the poorest – both because of the unnecessary deaths of unvaccinated populations in those countries and because unequal vaccination globally enables new variants to more quickly develop and spread.