Speech
9 March 2009
Eliminating World Poverty: Building our Common Future
Secretary of State for International Development Douglas Alexander's speech at DFID Annual Conference, Monday 8 March
Ladies and gentlemen, it is a pleasure, as the Secretary of State for International Development to welcome you to the inaugural DFID annual conference. Thank you all for coming to the first of what I hope will be an annual event, bringing together the best thinking and practical experience on development issues from around the world.
Over the next two days, we have the chance together to review and invigorate our shared commitment to tackling poverty.
And that renewal is needed now perhaps more than ever. Nearly two years ago Gordon Brown declared a ‘development emergency’.
Speaking in New York just one month after becoming Prime Minister, he said that, and I quote, ‘the goals the world has set are not being met and we face an emergency – a development emergency – and we need emergency action’.
Since then, since that declaration, that rallying call:
The world has been engulfed by the most serious financial crisis for generations.
The urgency of tackling climate change has become ever-more evident.
The international system has been put under quite extraordinary strain.
And conflict has continued to dominate news headlines - not least in Sudan, the focus of Gordon Brown's concern at the UN in 2007, which is of course again in the newspaper headlines again this week.
Behind these crises lie further challenges: urbanisation; population growth; global disease threats; environmental degradation; and, of course, the continued and unacceptable extent of poverty, ill-health, inequality and discrimination around the world.
So we must not forget the progress that has been made, the successes to which we in the UK have been able to contribute. But we must together now regroup, rethink, renew our efforts.
That is why my Department is in the process of reviewing our policy approach to international development. And this conference is important to us, because it will contribute to that process.
We understand that in the battle to alleviate poverty, ideas matter. But we need ideas allied to action.
It is now almost 30 years since I heard former British Prime Minister Ted Heath talk about the challenge of international development.
He spoke that evening many decades ago in Glasgow as a member of the Brandt Commission, about the report which recognised our interdependence on this small, crowded planet – and set out in its time a new compact between North and South that we might better pursue our common interest.
Undoubtedly, for a time, the report captured the public imagination and sold nearly a million copies. Yet tragically, if we are honest, the opportunity was lost. For too many countries, the decade that followed was a time not of growth and development but of stasis.
The Brandt report stands as an example of thought not translated into deed. The responsibility before us in the next couple of days is not simply to understand the scale of the challenge before us.
For if we are to fulfil the pledge made by world leaders back in 2000 - to ‘spare no effort’ to free men, women and children from extreme poverty’ – it is not enough for us, over the next couple of days, to stand and describe the mountain before us.
Instead we must chart a path to climb it.
As we contemplate this challenge, we can draw heart that in contrast to the decade that followed the publication of the Brandt report, the last 10 years have borne witness to unprecedented progress in our efforts to tackle hunger, illiteracy and disease.
Remember where you were when the new millennium arrived? It was just nine years ago, but in just nine years, aid increases and debt cancellation have helped to put nearly 40 million more children into school.
The number of people on antiretroviral treatment has risen from just 100,000 then to some 3 million today.
The proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has fallen from a third to a quarter.
Sometimes people unwittingly come to believe that fighting poverty globally is a never-ending task – that it is always journey and never destination. But for many hundreds of millions of people in recent years, a critical destination has been reached – they no longer live in extreme poverty.
Development works and we must continue to remind ourselves that whatever the setbacks in the short term, in the long term of human history, we really can transform the lives of our fellow citizens for the better.
So the challenge facing us today is to build on the progress we’ve made in tackling poverty, illiteracy and disease, but to do it in a suddenly much tougher environment.
For while the achievements I have mentioned were made against the backdrop of benign global conditions, we know that the next decade will be more challenging.
Financial crisis and impact on the poorest countries
For if developing countries are less affected by the immediate fall-out of the credit crunch, they are if anything now more vulnerable to the second wave of what has been called a ‘once in a century credit tsunami’.
And for the poorest people in the least developed countries, this is a crisis upon crisis. Over and above the perennial hardships faced by people living in poverty, last year’s spike in oil prices pushed around 25 million people into poverty, higher food prices trapped as many as 130 million people in poverty, while up to 40 million children suffered the lasting effects of malnutrition.
Now comes this credit tsunami – and those same people, in those same countries, are finding that their every source of financing is being hit.
Private capital flows to developing countries are likely to fall from $1 trillion two years ago to less than $200 billion this year.
Remittances to many countries – globally worth as much as $280 billion a year (significantly larger than global aid flows) – are starting to fall, as workers who migrated to the west are finding it much tougher to send money home.
World trade could shrink this year for the first time in more than 25 years.
As we know, that means job losses. As many as 26 million of China’s workers have already lost their jobs, as demand for exports plummet. And the knock-on effect is that demand for commodities is falling too, leaving as many as 300,000 miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, now without work.
So the human cost of this global recession will be real - by the end of next year we could see 90 million more people living in extreme poverty.
Our own economists in the Department suggest that is equivalent to losing up to three years of the progress we have made towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals.
From justice to interdependence
So we must act together to address this crisis, to protect the gains that we have made, and to deliver our global promise enshrined in the Millennium Development Goals.
We must do so because quite simply it is our moral duty to hear the timeless call of justice – as argued so passionately, and so persuasively over the last 25 years by one of our speakers here today, Bob Geldof.
Yet to this timeless moral argument we can today add a contemporary understanding of our shared interdependence.
Migration, disease, terror, pollution, crime. On this ever shrinking planet, we cannot escape each other – so we must find better ways to live together.
For as the food, fuel and finance crises have shown us, no country can insulate itself from what happens overseas – for good or for ill.
From the attacks of September 11th, to the global recession today.
From deforestation in the DRC and Indonesia to the risk of avian flu incubation in South-East Asia.
From the terrorist networks of South-Asia to the drug traffickers of West Africa.
None of these problems are confined to the countries in which they originated.
In a world of cross-border risks and opportunities, in a world where there is no more ‘over there’, and ‘over here’, fighting poverty is – to put it bluntly - in our own self-interest.
So we must continue our unwavering focus on delivering the Millennium Development Goals, and go beyond it - towards a collective effort to address a set of challenges that bind all of us together at the start of the twenty first century:
The continuing global downturn; The threat of climate change; and The threat or persistence of violent conflict
The most pressing task for all institutions, governments, companies, charities and individuals alike is addressing the current global economic downturn.
Dealing with the downturn and building back better
And that will be the primary objective of the London Summit taking place here in four weeks’ time, and which the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown will host.
The United Kingdom will take into that summit a commitment to ensure that global efforts to address the economic challenges facing the world economy include key support for the poorest countries.
Together, we can ensure that this is the first recession in history where we consciously address the needs of the poor.
That this perilous moment in modern history might come to be seen in time by future historians as a crisis when we were not paralysed by our individual fears, but came together to act in our common interest. When we recognised that we sink or swim together – and together we chose to swim.
That is why we should now establish a new Global Poverty Alert to tell us more quickly, and more accurately the needs on the ground – in order that we might best direct an effective international response.
And as the Prime Minister will set out, we now should establish at the World Bank a new fund to help developing countries provide social protection for the poorest and most vulnerable – not just for this but also for future crises.
And we must look not only at the immediate crisis but beyond it to how we build our way more effectively out of this global recession. That means reaching a deal on world trade round, helping developing countries to compete by providing aid for trade, and supporting governments to make the difficult and necessary reform choices.
Because it is often in the toughest times that tough choices are made – think of the reforms made by the countries of East Asia in the last decade. Those choices can help rebuild economies to be more inclusive, more fair and yes more equitable.
That is why I recently launched a new International Growth Centre – to give the governments of developing countries access to some of the world’s finest economists.
Equipped with this kind of independent advice, developing countries will have the chance to come out of this downturn in better shape for the future. And building back better will also mean building back greener.
Climate change
For if the financial crisis demonstrates how quickly risks can escalate and how far-reaching systemic breakdown can be, climate change today represents global systemic breakdown on unprecedented scale.
Indeed as one of our keynote speakers later today, Professor Nick Stern has said, the financial crisis is profoundly serious. But it is not as serious as climate change.
None among us today is in any doubt as to the scientific argument behind climate change, or the scale of the economic and human cost that it could wreak.
And I know from many of the world’s poorest people, that climate change is not some future possibility – but a lived reality.
So the challenge for all of us this year, as we advance towards Copenhagen, is to turn this knowledge into action. We must strike a global climate deal that is both ambitious and equitable.
My cabinet colleague Ed Miliband will set out this afternoon the UK’s efforts towards achieving that key deal in Copenhagen. I have suggested before that a deal should be subject to five tests.
Our first priority must be to agree a long term goal, with credible interim targets, to contain temperatures to within two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels. Anything less rigorous would pose serious risks for the most vulnerable states in our world.
Second, and with a goal established, we need to allocate the task of meeting it in a way that is fair and equitable – that means developed countries taking the greatest responsibility for cutting emissions that they have largely caused.
We need to reorder the global economy towards low-carbon development. Crucial to achieving this will be what I argue should be the third test of any deal – a reformed carbon market that has a greater impact in reducing global emissions and increases the flow of finance to least-developed countries.
The fourth test should be the ability of a deal to support the development and diffusion of low carbon technologies. For the ‘greening’ of our global economy is fundamental - both to ensuring both the resilience and sustainability of our recovery.
And while we have to transform developed economies into low-carbon ones, we also have to encourage developing countries to leapfrog our own mistakes, and arrive at green solutions far quicker than we have done in the developed North.
And we must ensure that any climate change deal includes support for developing countries to build their resilience, and adapt to climate change.
Put simply, while many of us in this room came together in 2005 determined to help make poverty history – if we do not tackle climate change, it will make poverty the future for millions of our fellow citizens.
Tackling conflict and fragile states
We know too that for millions of people around the world, the future remains a terrifying prospect, filled with threats of violence or conflict.
For of the 34 countries around the world furthest from reaching the Millennium Development Goals, 22 are in the midst of, or emerging from, conflict.
Just last week I visited Gaza and saw the devastation that had been caused by the recent fighting. To stand, as I did, amidst the rubble that was once a home; and speak, as I did, to the father who had lost his child – is to glimpse the personal suffering behind the all to often sterile statistics of the dead and injured.
Alongside those conflicts are the fragile states that are home to a billion people. States that are either incapable or unwilling to provide their citizens with safe shelter, the rule of law or the most basic requirements of life. The world will not succeed in meeting the MDGs unless we can tackle the poverty that exists in these countries.
So the Department for International Development has consciously increased the proportion of assistance to fragile states – from a quarter of our bilateral programme, to 40 per cent of it today. And we will go further - until 60 per cent of our bilateral work will, by 2011 be in fragile states.
But as well as where we work, the development community needs to look at what we do. We need to learn the lessons of our efforts in Sierra Leone, the DRC, Afghanistan. That means doing some familiar work – providing health, and education – in different ways.
And it means doing some unfamiliar work, such as supporting peace processes or political institutions. It means helping states to build the core functions they need to survive – taxation, security, rule of law. Perhaps not emotive, perhaps not glamorous, but vital nonetheless. And it means providing support so that states can meet the expectations of their people – for jobs or an end to discrimination.
This kind of work will bring us increasingly closer to our partners in defence and diplomacy, as part of a seamless approach that recognises there can be no development without security, and no long term peace without development prospects.
Tomorrow, I am delighted to say, we will hear from Gareth Evans, President of the International Crisis Group. A man heralded by the Economist newspaper as a ‘crisis clairvoyant’.
Gareth has long understood the importance of reforming our international institutions in the task of preventing and responding to conflict. And one of the challenges facing all of us at this conference is to look not only at immediate crises, but beyond them – to renew those.
Reforming international institutions
For we have all known for many years that the institutions that were formed more than sixty years ago are not attuned to the challenges of the 21st Century. We need now to find the collective will to address the reforms that candidly have been delayed for too long.
With the emergence of economic powers such as China, India and Brazil, the stage is set for a new style of global and regional cooperation. And I look forward to hearing from Donald (Kaberuka) and Ngozi (Okonjo-Iweala) this morning, as to their perspectives on the road ahead to fundamental reform.
But our international institutions are also a product of the ambition of their members, and I want to share with you the reform that I believe we need across three critical pillars of the international architecture – the European Union, the United Nations, and the World Bank.
The European Union plays a unique role as the world’s largest aid donor, the largest single market and a leader on issues - such as climate change – with great importance for developing countries.
Europe must now live up to its promise to deliver more and better quality aid, to play a major role in reaching agreements on trade and climate change, and by setting an example across all of its interactions with developing countries.
The United Nations is critical to our global efforts to tackle conflict, with 130,000 peacekeepers on the ground in 19 different missions. But the UN needs stronger leadership in post-conflict situations, with one clear strategy for action.
I believe the UN should appoint a high-level champion for women’s rights, and merge agencies under this champion to create a single body to achieve greater influence. And we need to learn the lessons from the ‘one UN’ pilots to increase coherence and impact across the board.
Let me turn to the World Bank - responsible for a fifth of global aid. We know, all of us, that the Bank must be reformed to reflect the changing powers in the world today – not the balance of power as it stood 60 years ago.
So the Bank must get closer to its clients – by moving more staff, and more decision-making out of Washington and into developing countries. And we need to strike a new balance of accountability and authority between shareholders and the management of the Bank.
I am determined to play my part as the UK’s Governor of the World Bank to ensure these reforms are genuinely ambitious. For the Bank retains a powerful role as guardian of the world’s poorest people.
And as such, it stands as an enduring legacy to a period of American foreign policy that wrought, from the desolation and devastation of the Second World War, a new era of collaboration – and through its efforts, helped to rebuild the continent of Europe.
The Fierce Urgency of Now
Today, we see across the water a clear echo from history. An administration that has again made clear its intention to engage with the rest of the world.
And today, as 60 years ago, there remain few global problems that can be addressed without the active engagement of the United States.
I’m sure many of us here felt the same sense of optimism and possibility when President Obama made his inaugural address in January.
And when I saw him take the oath of office, on that cold January day, fulfilling the dream of a generation before, my mind turned to that generation, and of the time my parents spent in America, when in 1959 – just a week after they were married – they moved to New York as students.
While there, they joined fellow students and travelled to North Carolina to protest against segregation. They picketed lunch counters which would not serve blacks and were spat upon by fellow whites for their actions. They queued up to attend the inaugural meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Council, where they heard the words of a young Baptist preacher.
The power of his words made a deep and lasting impression on my parents that day.
And in the years that followed, they would make a deep impression on the world.
That man was of course Dr Martin Luther King. And when I have thought of this conference in recent weeks, and the task facing us, over these two days, it was to his prophetic words that my mind turned.
“We are faced” he said “with the fact… that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.”
Friends, let us not look back at this moment and say we knew, but we did not act. Let us not, in years to come, say we acted, but too late. Let us instead use this conference to now chart a new course - and embrace, today, the fierce urgency of now.
