This snapshot taken on 23/10/2008, shows web content selected for preservation by The National Archives. External links, forms and search boxes may not work in archived websites.
Newsroom & speeches
09 July 2004
I want to begin this morning by expressing my gratitude to the Holy See for your leadership, your inspiration and your commitment to the eradication of global poverty; by thanking Cardinal Martino and the Pontifical Council for convening this very special seminar with church leaders, governments and NGOs here from all around the world; and by paying tribute to you all, not just for what has been achieved but for what you aspire to achieve.
To address you this morning
- to speak in this great historic city on the question that is the great social, economic and moral issue of our day and this decade…
- to address the greatest single cause of poverty and injustice across the earth, and potentially one of the greatest threats to peace…
- and to do so in front of such a distinguished body of people who have given so much to fighting injustice and poverty across the earth…
is not just a responsibility that humbles me, it is a responsibility that challenges me, as it has challenged you to call for action:
Today the very process of globalisation reminds us of the economic and commercial links that now bind countries and markets together in the increasingly internationalised economy.
And I applaud the churches work with the UN; your partnership agreed with countries; and your mission day by day in every country. And I thank Cardinal Murphy O’Connor for his leadership in the UK, holding those in power to account.
But for far longer, indeed for centuries, the Church, with its worldwide mission, have affirmed - and by the work, in every continent, of priests, nuns and missionaries has demonstrated - the links that bind us together, all of us, citizens and nations, rich and poor, in one moral universe.
For it is our Christian teaching that when some are poor our whole society is impoverished; that when there is an injustice anywhere it is a threat to justice everywhere; that what “selfish men tear down selfless men and women must build anew”.
The starting point of the proposal for an International Finance Facility is that five years ago, in an historic declaration, every world leader, every major international body, almost every single country, signed up to the historic shared task of meeting over fifteen years eight Millennium Development Goals – an extraordinary plan to right some of the great wrongs of our time, at the heart of which is a clear commitment to ensuring primary education for every child, the elimination of avoidable child and maternal deaths, and the halving of poverty.
Next year, 2005, is the first date that the first target comes due.
But we know already that, in the absence of finance, the first target to be set and to be met – the 2005 target that ensures for girls the same opportunities in primary and secondary education as boys - is going to be missed. Not only are the vast majority – 60 per cent of developing countries - unlikely to meet the target but most of these are, on present trends, unlikely to achieve this gender equality for girls even by 2015. This is not good enough – this is not the promise that we made.
Take education. Yes, in the past decade, primary enrolments have increased at twice the rate of the 1980s. But consider the 104 million children – 80 million boys and girls in Africa and South and West Asia – did not go to school this morning. At the current rate of progress, in the absence of an international finance facility, more than 70 countries will fail to achieve universal primary education and in sub-Saharan Africa we will not achieve our goal until at the earliest 2129. This is not good enough – the binding promise we made was for 2015 not 2129.
Take health. Just as in the last 40 years the numbers of illiterate have halved so too life expectancy in developing countries has increased by twenty years. But because inexpensive cures are not funded, 2 million die unnecessarily each year from tuberculosis, 1 million die painfully from malaria – curable diseases – 40 million are suffering from HIV/Aids, and, tragically, in the absence of an international finance facility, on current forecasts sub-Saharan Africa will achieve our target for reducing child mortality not by 2015 but by 2165. This is not good enough – the binding promise we made was for 2015 not 2165.
And take our millennium global poverty target. Although the number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen by 10 per cent in the last ten years, there are one billion people still living on less than $1 a day. Without greatly increased growth, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the transition economies of Europe and Central Asia will all fail to see the halving of their poverty by 2015 – and our best estimate is that it will not be achieved in sub-Saharan Africa for a century and a half. This is not good enough – the binding commitment we set out was not for 2147 but for 2015.
And in the absence of finance the Millennium Development Goals look like another set of promises set, reset and reset again and then only betrayed.
So our goals demand urgent action, indeed sacrifice, from the world’s richest countries.
John Kennedy once warned us that if a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
So to build anew I have four proposals to make – demands we make of ourselves and of other governments:
Our proposals are for nothing less than a new compact between developed and developing countries:
For our part, building on record increases in aid since 1997, the British Government will increase aid and Hilary Benn will redirect that aid to areas of urgent need. Development will be a key part of our forthcoming Spending Review in the UK, as we continue to move from the 0.26 per cent of national income we inherited in 1997 towards the 0.7 target. And on Monday I will announce as part of our Spending Review further increases in the UK’s development aid budget in the years to 2008.
But we know that even if one or two of the G7 could overcome fiscal constraints and go to 0.7 per cent tomorrow, we still would not reach the scale of resources needed to begin to achieve the Millennium Development Goals - $50 billion extra a year.
That is why we have put forward our proposal for an International Finance Facility, a complement to our commitments to 0.7, to increase the resources available for the poorest countries now, when they are so urgently needed.
The IFF - an annual fund of $50 billion - advances aid payments and front-loads them. It is founded upon long-term, binding donor commitments from the richest countries. It builds upon the additional $16 billion already pledged at Monterrey. And it leverages in additional money from the international capital markets to raise the amount of development aid for the years to 2015. An additional $50 billion each year until 2015 that will allow us to attack the root causes of poverty not just the symptoms, and to meet the Millennium Development Goals.
And the demand we make is not unprecedented. Let us remember that to finance the development of a ravaged post war Europe, the richest country in the world - the USA - agreed in the historic Marshall Plan of 1948 to transfer one per cent of their national income each and every year for four years – a transfer in total of the equivalent in today’s money of $75 billion a year.
If anything, however, the scale and the global breadth of the challenge is more urgent and pressing today.
The IFF will enable us to deploy a critical mass of predictable, stable and co-ordinated aid as investment over the next few years when it will have the most impact on achieving the targets – saving lives today that would otherwise be lost. And it will enable us to invest simultaneously across health, education and economic development so that the impact on investment in one area reinforces the investment in another.
First, the IFF is necessary for and will enable sustainable debt relief.
We know that:
In Sea Island last month G8 Heads of Government agreed that we need to do more.
So we will work together to ensure completion of the HIPC initiative – to extend of the Sunset Clause to 2006 making it possible for a further 10 countries to benefit from HIPC relief; to achieve more effective topping up at Completion Point; to encourage other creditors to participate; and to ensure that the initiative is securely and fully financed.
Debt relief is an economic issue because there is still a mountain of inherited and hitherto immovable debt standing in the way of economic development in Africa and elsewhere.
But debt relief is also a moral issue - that unsustainable debt is a burden imposed from the past on the present which is depriving millions of their chance of a future and preventing them breaking out of the cycle of poverty, illiteracy and disease.
When we set up the Enhanced HIPC Initiative in 1999 we financed $2.5 billion dollars of debt relief through off-market gold transactions – a hard decision for many governments to take. And it was your moral authority, joining us in pressing other governments on this issue that made them take the decision on gold as a matter of both necessity and morality.
And now today while 100 per cent of bilateral debt of the poorest countries is cancelled by many donors, in practice only 50 per cent or less of multilateral debt is being cancelled. So to do more to complete the process of debt relief, we propose to the international community that we consider anew all options to finance further debt relief for the poorest countries, including making better use of IMF gold, through revaluation or off-market transactions, so that to match bilateral debt relief that is up to 100 per cent, we can begin to provide multilateral debt relief of up to 100 per cent.
Second, we know that education is the best anti-poverty investment we can make and the best economic development programme…
And we know that there is simply no better way to empower the powerless, and to put their future directly in their hands.
So we must commit the extra $10 billion needed each year so that 100 million children who cannot go to school today can do so tomorrow.
And all of us here must have the courage to demand that all citizens everywhere should have access to decent health care.
As many as half of all malaria deaths could be prevented if people had access to diagnosis and drugs that cost no more than twelve cents.
A quarter of all child deaths could be prevented if children slept beneath four dollar bed-nets - in Africa, only one per cent of children do.
Improving and expanding immunisation could save a further two million lives each year.
So we must release at least $10 billion more a year for tackling TB, malaria and AIDS.
In the UK our spending settlement for the next three years will allow the Department for International Development to allocate significant additional resources to fighting HIV/Aids.
As His Holiness has said, humanity cannot close its eyes in the face of an appalling tragedy.
But let me give an example of what we can do today and now if we work together.
The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation is interested in applying the principles of the IFF to the immunisation sector. If by these means GAVI could raise $4 billion over the next five years and secure a total of $8 billion of additional funds from 2006 to 2015, it would be possible that their work could save the lives of an additional 2, perhaps 3 million people a year.
And if we are to meet the health Millennium Development Goals, we must also make progress in improving access to affordable essential medicines so that poor countries – particularly those in Africa - can do more to tackle the range of health epidemics they face. Last year the WTO reached agreement to ensure that trade rules allow poor countries with limited pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity to purchase life saving drugs, often a third of the market price. But I call on the European Commission today to move urgently to implement the regulations necessary to allow EU countries to export these drugs to developing countries.
I believe that the advantage of the International Finance Facility I have described is not just that it is a better means of providing the necessary resources immediately and thus far faster than other initiatives, but also that unlike other measures like taxes - where all countries must impose it or it simply can’t work - the IFF can proceed even if some fail to participate.
I thank the Holy See and the growing number of countries who have indicated support for the IFF, many of whom are represented here today.
And while we will continue to explore – as the French, Brazilian, Chilean and Spanish Governments are doing through their technical working groups - other ways to provide financing in the longer term including international taxes, the Soros proposal for Special Drawing Rights and other forms of revenue raising on a world wide basis - and we look forward to the outcomes of these working groups, and further consideration of these proposals as potential long-term sources of finance - we have to recognise that each one of these proposals will take time and will come down to whether there is sufficient will in all the richest countries to agree these profound changes.
And next year – 2005 – will be a crucial, defining year: a year of challenge and a year of opportunity; a year that will test the might of the whole international community’s resolve to progress towards our goals.
So that is why, in advance of our G7 Presidency which we hold to be a development presidency, twenty-five years after the original Brandt report, we have set up the Commission for Africa, bringing together Commissioners from across Europe the G7 and Africa - and from governments, academia and civil society – to take a fresh look at Africa’s past and present, and to come up with proposals to try to ensure a better future for Africa, delivering on the promises we have made.
And for our part, the UK Government is prepared to do more and commit additional long term funding to the International Finance Facility.
In my years as Chancellor, as I have visited Asia and Africa, I have seen both need and greed. I have had a new insight into the world as it is - and a glimpse also of the world as it can be, and I know we must help now.
In Asia I have met young children who because of poverty are destined to fail even before their life’s journey has begun - but my memory is not only of the pain but of the hope still left in their eyes.
And I have seen in Africa the unemployment of Soweto, a whole generation of young people denied the chance to earn a better life, yet young men and women who yearn to believe that their new political freedom can finally bring them freedom from want - and they look to us and I know we must help now.
2015 is the fixed point on our horizon – seemingly distant but closer than we think. But it is actually 2005 – as close as can be - that will determine whether our international community, which started in the year 2000 on the road to deliver the Millennium Development Goals, has the will and courage to complete the rest of the journey. And when the need is pressing, when poverty is so great, when suffering is so intense, when illiteracy is so widespread, when ill-health summons us to act, and when it is our community that has made historic commitments for this decade, and made them to be delivered in our generation by our action together, the simple questions that, to use the words of an American President, we must ask are:
If not now, when?
If not us, who?
If not together, how?
In 2015 we cannot look back and say:
“It was not us who acted, it had to be left to the next generation”;
“It was not now, but some other distant time in the future”.
That is not good enough.
And as we ask ourselves what kind of leaders we want to be, and as we ask ourselves what we want future generations to say of the leaders who led now, let us resolve that when the need is urgent and our responsibilities clear - and even when the path ahead is hard and long – we will not falter, nor rest, nor relax, nor lose hope but we will have the courage in our shared resolve to find the will to act. And let us say to each other in the words of Isaiah “though you were wearied by the length of your way, you did not say it was hopeless – you found new life in your strength”.
The strength together to fight poverty, remove destitution, end illiteracy, cure disease.
The economic, social and moral challenge for our time and for our generation.
And let us find in ourselves the strength to overcome it together.
