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Lord Sainsbury of TurvilleDTI's Technology Transfer Conference |
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I am delighted to have the opportunity to say a few words to open what I am sure will be an exciting and stimulating two days. I am only sorry that other commitments mean that I am not able to participate throughout the workshop. First, my congratulations to Chatham House on organising the event and gathering such an impressive group of experts with a wide range of expertise and experience. The issues you will be considering are of crucial, practical importance – not just for the success of the World Summit on Sustainable Development later this year in Johannesburg but for progress in making sustainable development a reality. I hope you will find it helpful if I explain from my perspective as UK Minister for Science and Technology my hopes of how this event might contribute to making the Summit a success. I am particularly pleased that Dr Ngubane, Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology from South Africa and Dr Yu, Vice Minister of Science and Technology from Korea, have been able to join us to share their ideas and experience. The fact that Tony Blair was the first leader to commit to attending the Summit is testimony to the importance that the UK attaches to the event and its success. Success will depend on developing consensus around an agenda that focuses on practical action by all stakeholders not just government. It needs to be an agenda that is about all three pillars of sustainable development – economic, social, and environment. It is not just about the environment. And it needs to show that the world can unite against problems such as poverty, over-fishing of the oceans and lack of access to clean water and energy, in the same way that it has unified in response to the tragic events of last September. A high priority for the Prime Minister will be to work for outcomes from the Summit that can make a real difference for the poorest countries, particularly in Africa. There are encouraging signs that such a consensus is starting to emerge. A number of common themes and priorities were highlighted in the build-up process of regional preparatory meetings. Poverty eradication was commonly identified as the main challenge. Together with sustainable production and consumption this was identified as an overarching objective at the UNECE Ministerial meeting in Geneva in September. The UNECE meeting also proposed a number of specific priorities for the Summit that also figured in recommendations from other regions. These include linkages between environment and health, sustainable management and conservation of natural resources, making globalisation work for sustainable development, improving governance and democratic processes at all levels. And of particular relevance to the work before you over the next two days, education, science and technology were among the proposed priorities. The challenge we now face is to take all these broad areas and identify the specific outcomes that we want the Summit to achieve and how we can ensure that it does so. There can be no doubt about the critical contribution of innovation, science and technology to all three pillars of sustainable development. The UK Sustainable Development Strategy explains sustainable development as being about ensuring a better quality of life for everyone, now and for generations to come. Some see technology as primarily being a cause of problems we face today. But it has been scientific understanding and its translation through innovation into technological progress that has enabled so many round the world to enjoy a quality of life that was once the preserve of only a tiny privileged minority. And it will be science that will help us understand challenges such as climate change, and technology that will provide the means to address it. A static model, which did not allow for technological innovation has been behind many terrible predictions of economic disaster, from the predictions of Thomas Malthus that populations would inevitably outstrip food supply, to the 'Limits of Growth' in 1972 which predicted the depletion of the world's natural resources, to the 'Population Bomb' by Ehrlich in 1968, which predicted that a quarter of the world's population would starve to death between 1973 and 1983. All these models failed as predictors because they didn't take account of the power of innovations in technology, and we should learn from these examples the extent to which technological innovation can be a driver of development. To put this point another way, it has been estimated that life expectancy in 1900 in what we now call the developed world, roughly speaking everywhere apart from Western Europe, North America, Australasia and Japan, was 26. Today the figure is 64, a figure two-and-a-half times longer. The strongest force propelling this change was the application of simple science and technology. For far too many round the world, the security and comforts that we in countries like the UK take for granted are out of reach. Access to the very basic needs for clean water, food and shelter represents a daily struggle. That is simply unacceptable and we have it in our power to transform the situation. Some progress has been made but much more needs to be done, and it is quite right that so much emphasis is being given to these issues in the preparations for the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Development and application of technology are critical elements of the range of actions that are required. Clearly even in today's globalised world circumstances vary greatly from country to country and in particular those in developing countries will often be very different. But we need to think about how we can best share the lessons we and others have learned about the role of government and the role of other actors, particularly business, in relation to science, technology and innovation issues. And we need to identify how such lessons might apply to the circumstances of different regions and countries and the partnerships that can help put these into practice. We know to our cost that the development paths that countries like the UK have followed have had adverse environmental consequences which have been and continue to be very challenging to deal with. The way that we have used resources, for example to meet out energy needs, have too often been inefficient with environmental as well as economic costs in terms of the emissions and waste produced. As reflected in the Department of Trade and Industry's own Sustainable Development Strategy, over the longer term we need to find ways of radically improving the productivity with which we use resources. We need major innovations to extract more value and produce less waste. What are the lessons that we need to learn from developing countries in using resources more wisely? What are the opportunities for developing countries in taking different development and industrialisation paths and how can they best be realised? Issues concerning science, technology and innovation are not just important in terms of their role in economic development but also in addressing the more specific challenges of meeting basic needs and doing so in environmentally and socially acceptable ways. There is also a huge need for technology to flow to the developing countries. In 1998 the 29 industrial nations that make up the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) with 19% of the world's population, accounted for 91% of the patents issued that year. They also spent $520 billion on R and D, more than the combined economic output of the world's 30 poorest countries. It is against that background that for many years technology transfer has been a recurrent theme but too often a source of controversy and dispute at the international level. Not just in connection with the Rio Summit and work on implementing Agenda 21 but in a wider range of processes. But too often the debate has been confined to questions about what governments should do and arguments about language to describe that. Governments have important responsibilities in providing the right policy framework, a framework that for example stimulates innovation: building scientific capabilities, encouraging research and the practical application of its results. But other actors, especially business, are the primary drivers for devising and continually improving practical application of knowledge. That is why the focus of the UK's Technology Partnership Initiative has been on establishing a network of suppliers and users of environmental technology. It aims to help encourage effective technology co-operation with developing countries on a commercial basis by disseminating information about relevant technology and helping users in developing countries identify and contact UK suppliers. Too often international debates have focused on technology in a narrow sense of plant and equipment and the terms on which it is bought and sold. That is why I warmly welcome the programme for this event and the wide range of expertise that Chatham House have brought together to consider technology in a wider perspective. As we know from the many studies that have been undertaken over the years, ordinary commercial mechanisms are the primary routes to effective technology transfer both in the narrow sense of specific projects as well as in the wider sense of the development and diffusion of knowledge. But equally we know that as with the Foreign Direct Investment with which knowledge transfer is so often associated, flows have been uneven both over time and in respect of the countries and regions to which investment has been directed. So a critical question for the Summit is to consider what can be done both to increase the absolute level of investment and knowledge transfer and to get them to the places they are not so far reaching. Clearly this is closely linked to the questions about globalisation that have been flagged up in the regional preparatory meetings as priorities for the Summit – and especially the challenge of ensuring that globalisation works for sustainable development and the eradication of poverty. This requires looking carefully at the links between governance, technology, capacity- building and the involvement of the private sector – and in particular the finance sector. The Human Development Report 2001, 'Making New Technologies Work for Human Development', calls for action on four points:
These seem to me to be an excellent list of the sort of practical issues we need to be discussing. In the light of the answers to these questions can we identify specific outcomes that we should aim to achieve at the Summit – and just as important the action that needs to be taken forward after the Summit. And what dialogue and co-operation do we need to encourage as the preparations for the Summit move forward to ensure delivery? I hope that your work over the next two days will provide stimulating debate on the many important questions that I have raised. But above all we need practical suggestions on how to ensure a constructive approach at the Summit on technology issues. We need ideas on how to make sure we move from debate to practical and effective action. I have every confidence that these two days will be a success and I have the pleasure in declaring the conference open. |
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Other speeches by Lord Sainsbury of Turville
(the following are available from the archive) |
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