I thank the Chairman for inviting me and giving me an opportunity to share the platform with the Minister of State again. Twenty years ago we sat around the same table for the first time, and that was also in terms of planetary networking. It is nice to be among parliamentarians again.
The Minister of State mentioned that one of his priorities is education and, in that context, the millennium development goal. I am not sure to what extent I have to spell out these eight goals for this audience but I believe it is about the best news on development that we have heard in half a century. In 2000, Heads of State and Heads of Government came together for the first time in New York. We have never before or since seen so many at that level come together. They all signed on to the Millennium Declaration that year from which these eight goals are derived. The goals include halving the number of poor people; getting all children through school; fighting AIDS; doing something about child and maternal mortality; ensuring sustainable development from an environmental perspective; and the need for global partnership where each country helps other countries to achieve these goals. That was great news.
I have been involved in development co-operation my whole life but none of the meetings at an international level were productive because there were always disagreements between north and south or east and west, and the UN system and international financial institutions disagreed with governmental and non-governmental organisations. The great news with these eight millennium development goals is that everybody is on the same page. We all agree what should be done and what this is about.
We in the development field have spent far too long in ivory towers. We were using abbreviations that nobody understood. Now with these goals designed to get all children to attend primary school, people can relate to these issues.
The third item of great news is that the package is very holistic and underlines the synergy between the goals. For far too long there was competition between money being spent on private education versus that being spent in other areas such as the fight against AIDS or the provision of water. We have realised there is a synergy. If we move on one goal, another goal comes closer to realisation. For example, if one wants to get girls to go to school, providing clean water near their homes means that they do not have to walk miles to fetch it. This also helps in the area of child mortality because unsafe water is the biggest killer of babies.
What is also wonderful about the goals is that they are single, concrete and timebound benchmarks and thus one can monitor progress. Approximately 80 countries have come up with their first millennium goals and when one checks their reports, one can see whether they are on track. Members are aware that if neighbouring countries are doing better, it tends to spur political debate. When any of these various reports and indexes are issued, everyone always looks to see where their country is placed. If the Dutch are doing worse than Belgium, that deeply hurts the feelings of people in the Netherlands and spurs debate. It is similar with Norway and Sweden. It is extremely helpful to have this kind of horse race.
What is great about the goals is that they provide a balance. There used to be these endless international meetings where poor countries would state they could not do anything because rich countries would not help them enough or that the rules were rigged against them. Rich countries would reply that they were willing to help but that the poorer countries should first put their own houses in order. With this package we confirm - this was reaffirmed at the conference in Monterey - that it is the primary responsibility of poor countries to achieve the first seven goals. However, we acknowledge that poor countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa will simply never be able to achieve the goals unless rich countries do a better job on aid, trade and debt relief. On current trends, sub-Saharan Africa will not achieve the first goal until the year 2147. Business as usual is, therefore, simply not good enough and rich countries must do their part of the job.
One of the weaknesses in the package lies in the global contract. In a real contract, both parties are obliged to meet deadlines. The weakness of this deal is that poor countries must still achieve deadlines by 2015 or earlier whereas rich countries have not yet committed themselves to deadlines. Cheques can remain, therefore, in the mail and this means we will not achieve the goals.
It is important to underline our responsibility. I wish to provide an example. Two thirds of the world's poor live in rural areas and depend on agriculture. As long as our policies lead to overproduction which depresses prices in markets on which poor people depend, we will not be able to achieve the goal of reducing the number of poor people.
The hard-nosed economists of the World Bank issued a report last fall for the Dubai development committee which clearly stated, tracking progress on both sides, that sub-Saharan Africa has never been better governed in its history. There is still a long way to go but much has been improved. However, the World Bank also stated that rich countries are not living up to their part of the deal.
I must underline the fact that these goals are achievable. We have the know-how, there is a consensus about what should be done and the resources are available. What is lacking, however, is political will. I like addressing parliamentarians because this is what their job is all about. This may sound somewhat bitter but having attended hundreds of international conferences, I am aware that those in power attend such conferences and sign up to the most beautiful pledges but when they return home it is business as usual and they forget about what they have promised to do. It is parliamentarians who can make governments accountable for these wonderful promises. That is the job of those present. Parliamentarians hold the purse strings, set the laws of the land, vote on national budgets and are in charge of monitoring governmental actions.
The millennium development goals are the summing up of the aspirations of electorates. This is easy to say in developing countries where getting one's daughter to attend school is a daily concern. However, I have been struck by the fact that public opinion polls in member states of the OECD show, time and again, that the populations of these countries are prepared to do more. In all these states, 50% of the population - in Italy it is 91% - say they would be prepared to pay 1% more tax if it would help to alleviate the problem of poverty in Africa. The payment of 1% more tax by every citizen living in an OECD country would make available more than the $50 billion required to achieve the goals.
If parliamentarians pick up on these issues, they will not lose votes and they could even win votes. The time has come for political leadership to create the link between this latent public support and the need for more action on the part of governments.
In what areas would I like parliamentarians to act? I wish to make some brief remarks about aid, trade and debt. On aid quantity, the world has never been richer than it is today. Nevertheless, until 18 months ago, the level of aid being provided had been in decline for 15 years. The good news is that since the conference in Monterey there has been an upturn. The European Union's contribution to that has been crucial. At the Barcelona summit, under Spanish leadership, in the lead-up to the Monterey conference, the European Union committed to reaffirming the 0.7% goal and to achieve an average across the EU of 0.39% in 2006. This was a tremendous breakthrough. For 30 years there were only four countries which achieved the 0.7% goal or above and the rest of the world looked the other way. Now, however, this goal is part of the European project. All countries that are below the average - Spain, Italy, Portugal and Austria - have committed to achieving, as a minimum, 0.33% in 2006.
Many more governments have promised to end the "cheque is in the mail" approach and to achieve the 0.7% goal. In this regard, I must recognise the leadership shown by Luxembourg and Ireland which were the first two countries in the past year to set a date for achieving the 0.7% goal. In Ireland's case, it will be by 2007. Since then, others have also come on board. France has a target of 2012, while Belgium's is 2010. The majority of the 15 existing European Union member states have either achieved the 0.7% goal or set a date for doing so. I do not believe it is reasonable to ask the accession countries to achieve that standard in the immediate future. It is great news that the majority of EU member states have set target dates.
Ireland, which is committed to the 0.7% target, currently holds the Presidency. The next two countries that will hold it already exceed that target. Britain will then assume the Presidency. While it has not yet set a deadline for the 0.7% target, it has announced that it will focus its Presidency on African development and that a monitoring system developed by Finance Ministers relating the pledges made would be put in place.
It is not only about the quantity of aid. In many of the countries represented by those present, polls also show scepticism. Some of your people believe that middle income Spanish or Italian citizens put money in the pockets of non-taxpaying and exploitative elites in poor countries. That does not help poverty reduction. Some of that criticism is correct. It is, therefore, important to improve the quality of aid. Many developing countries do not need external concessional aid to achieve the goals. Aid should be focused on poor countries - sub-Saharan Africa - the least developed countries which need that aid. Ireland is at the absolute top, far above any other country, in terms of the percentage which actually goes to countries which need aid. Too much aid is leaking away to countries which do not need it.
A second point is that too much aid leaks away, not to these countries, but back into the donor economy. Again Ireland is a leader here. It has never tied its aid to its own procurement, though most other countries did. All too often we said: "You can have money but you must spend it in our country or on scholarships for students who study at our universities," while poor people cannot get their children to primary schools. Something needs to be done about that.
As donors we must harmonise our policies. Poor countries are getting huge headaches because of all the different procedures for the 2,000 aid missions we send every year to Tanzania and Zambia. The one and only good civil servant in the Health Ministry in Zambia is writing reports according to all the different standards of the donors and their agencies. The European Commission has just rung the alarm bell on this, stating that the commitment made by European member states to harmonise procedures is not being followed up.
If people want to know the quality of the aid, there are fantastic reports from the OECD development assistance committee and in my country once in a while we debate them in Parliament. This is the best mine of information one can get for each individual country, because we can then see where there is room for improvement and where the problems are. This is not just aid but what we call coherence. When I was a development Minister we had a wonderful project where we were able to help dairy farmers to increase production of milk in Tanzania, but however successful the project the local factory would never buy the milk from local farmers because Dutch milk powder is so cheap that no farmer would be able to compete with it. Therefore what we do with one hand in helping production we take away with the other by destroying or denying markets.
The phone call Tom and I had, when he was Minister for trade and I was development Minister, was about sugar. The first time I became politically active was over 30 years ago, when the European Union was still a net importer of sugar. Now, because of the Common Agriculture Policy and because we have more members, we are the biggest sugar exporter in the world where beet sugar is not cost effective. We are destroying other countries' markets. The CAP needs more domestic reform.
I know as a former member of Parliament that this will be hard to explain to farmers, and not only in Ireland. However, we should also try to explain to the rest of the population that the consumer and the taxpayer pay for this. Recent OECD research shows that except for Greece, in all our countries - and mine more than any else - farmers are far richer than the average citizen. If one wants to give income support one should focus on those who need it, as at present much of the support leaks away and does not end up in the pockets of farmers who need it. Only 5% of the support is used for environmental services. If we want to keep our beautiful landscapes, from the west of Ireland to Tuscany, we must pay people to take care of public goods rather than thinking of effective ways of doing so through giving money to farmers. Agricultural policy is very important.
Much has been achieved on trade barriers but products made by poor people in poor countries face trade barriers which are twice as high as for products made by rich people in rich countries, so that is still on the agenda. Europe took the lead in Doha and promised poor countries that we would would have a trade round where they would not be the beggars at the feast, but until now we have failed to live up to that.
"Everything But Arms" did not deliver as much as we hoped, partly because the rules of origin are far too strict. We must improve this. On the economic partnership agreement, I hear sub-Saharan African governments telling me time and again they simply cannot cope. They do not have the human resources to negotiate their own regional integration, which should be their highest priority. As long as sub-Saharan Africa does not become one market it will always be too small for investment, both foreign and domestic. There is also the WTO to consider. When it comes to pushing economic partnership agreements we should relax a little.
On the debt issue, Jubilee campaigns all over Europe and the US have led to some debt relief for some countries. That has been very successful because every penny countries do not have to repay us on the debts they owe us has been invested in education, health, fighting AIDS and so on. However, that applies only to some countries. Debt is still not sustainable and we must have a second round of debt relief. I hope the World Bank development committee will create that opportunity in April.
I will now address what parliamentarians can do. One option is networking. I believe in that more today than I did 26 years ago because of the democratic deficit with globalisation and global governance increasing. That is not only at European level but at the level of the UN and the WTO also. More global networks are needed. Also, we need to focus more often on debating development co-operation. As a former Minister I was sometimes tired of the degree to which my friends asked me to come to parliament in the Netherlands. However, that is always better than talking once every two or three years about development co-operation, as is the case in some other EU countries. It is important to have this on the agenda and not only for the foreign affairs development committee. These issues are as relevant to the finance, trade and agriculture committees. That is very important.
What can one do? I will give some examples of best practice. Ireland has by far the best practice on the 0.7% requirement. What is being achieved here is cross-party commitment to achieving that by 2007, which means that whoever wins the election, the country is committed. That is a fantastic example of what can be done and it would be great if the UK or other countries could do the same. Sweden has just passed a beautiful law on coherence called share responsibility, where the issues of the main development goal and poverty eradication become the responsibility of every member of government. It was not a bad law when the government sent it to parliament but it was much better when it came back from parliament.
Other good examples include the UK, which has a parliamentary committee doing terrific work in this area. It is worth looking up their website if one is interested in trade. Both before and after Cancún there was a fantastic report on the issues from the perspective of the development issues concerned.
We in the Netherlands have been debating every time our Ministers went to the IMF committee or the WTO negotiations, a period of 20 years. I introduced myself to it in 1983 when I was a parliamentarian but I saw in Ireland for the first time that the Finance Minister is supposed to send a report to Parliament every year on what Ireland does in the IFI. It is very important to demand accountability as to how Governments run international institutions.
What one can do is extremely important. It is parliament which holds the key to making rich countries live up to their commitments - first and foremost the Barcelona commitments, but there is also the 0.7% commitment. Agricultural and trade policies should be scrutinised, as should international financial institutions.
My last suggestion relates to poor countries which, at the request of the UN and rich countries, are sending progress reports on development goals to the UN. Only poor countries are doing that on the first seven goals. The idea arose a year ago and Denmark was the first country to say that this is uneven - we must also send a report on how we are doing on goal 8. Denmark was the first and I know other countries like Sweden and the Netherlands are thinking of doing the same. The funny thing is that rich countries are lecturing poor countries that their millennium development reports should come about in a participatory fashion. I am not sure if the Danish report was debated. It would be wonderful if the Irish Government reported that parliaments should discuss the issue. It should adhere to civil society by doing so.
We are the first generation that has the resources and know-how to end poverty. We should refuse to lose this opportunity. We owe this to poor and developing countries and to the next generation.
