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RICK SAMANS: Good morning everyone. Welcome to this morning’s plenary discussion entitled, ‘Beyond Good Intentions: Building Public Support for Development.’ I’m Rick Samans, Director of Global Issues at the forum and a member of its managing board. We’re joined this morning by an extraordinarily distinguished panel: Secretary of Treasury of the United States, Paul O’Neill, Bono,
BONO: …a couple of exceptions.
(LAUGHTER)
SAMANS: Mr. Bill Gates, and former president of Mexico, Ernesto Zedillo, who is also the chairperson of the high level panel appointed by Secretary General Kofi Annan for preparation of the Monterrey Summit on Financing for Development. As in other plenaries here at the forum’s annual meeting, this will be interview style. After setting the stage for discussion, I’ll ask panelists questions and we’ll facilitate a conversation. During the course of the session, we’ll also turn to the audience to take a few questions from the floor.
Now before we get underway here with the conversation, I just wanted to lay out some facts, some observations, in a way of setting the scene for this discussion. Many development goals have been established, as we know over the years. There’s been a long-standing target for OECD countries to devote seven tenths of a percent of their GDP to official development assistance. In addition, about a year and a half ago, no less than 189 countries signed onto a series of very important and ambitious international development goals. Just to give you a few of them: by the year 2015, there is this common goal to halve the proportion of world’s people whose income is less than a dollar a day, who suffer from hunger and who are unable to obtain safe drinking water.
Also by 2015, we’ve all committed to ensure that children everywhere, boys and girls, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling, mortality would be reduced by three quarters, and an under five child mortality by two-thirds of their current rates. Also we’ve committed in these millennium goals to halt and have begun to reverse by 2015 the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and major diseases that afflict humanity.
Now, it’s very clear that these goals, both the OECD targets and the millennium goals, are very ambitious targets–they are aspirations of the international community. But what remains very much an open question is whether aid levels will rise to meet these aspirations. After the Cold War, in fact, aid levels declined quite significantly, rebounding a little bit in the last couple of years. But not nearly enough, not to really meet the reach of these goals. As discussed in the opening plenary session, one has the sense, however, that maybe, just maybe, we have arrived at a special moment in the history of global poverty reduction.
There’s always been an absolutely compelling moral argument for alleviating poverty. We’ve long known that so much human suffering can be alleviated with, in fact, so little on our part, indeed, just an infinitesimal sacrifice in the standard of living of those in more developed countries. There’s also been a widely acknowledged long-standing clear economic case for greater effort on poverty reduction. We know how important addressing disease, malnutrition, illiteracy, and other facets of absolute poverty would be for the take-off of economic growth and for expansion of markets. But while these arguments are widely recognized, they have not yet been sufficient to spur commitment on the part of governments and their publics commensurate with the reach of these aspirations by the international community. Recently, however, two new grounds for action have emerged. Only time will tell whether they are sufficient to transform public attitudes and political wills.
The first involves the political economy of globalization. It’s commonly said repeatedly, I think, in these corridors and halls that greater action is needed to widen participation in the benefits of global integration. However, it’s no surprise to people that many of the countries that have been most left behind are those that are suffered the highest disease rates, the greatest illiteracy, and the weakest infrastructure institutions—that is to say, that the countries that are in most need of this official assistance. So it’s increasingly understood that there really can be no political response—effective political response—to the concerns over global integration, or globalization without making progress on the fundamental poverty issues.
The second new case for action is the one with, perhaps, the greatest potential to change the dynamics of this issue—and we heard about it in the opening plenary the other day, and that is international security. Lately, a big push on poverty reduction has been characterized as an insurance policy against further disaffection, radicalism, terrorism, and war. Since September 11th, and again, here, repeatedly, in this annual meeting, we’ve been reminding ourselves that to fully address the roots of these issues, one has to confront fundamental questions of poverty and economic opportunity.
Today we’re going to discuss with these distinguished panelists whether the accumulated weight of these reasons, has now brought us to a tipping point in the global fight against poverty—whether the stage is set or whether, indeed, it can be set for a new consensus for action.
Now this is a matter of leadership, that, of course, in democratic societies, leadership is often driven by public opinion and domestic politics. So we’ll focus in particular on what it would take to build public support in donor countries for a qualitatively higher level of funding. Historically in the U.S., and perhaps other donor countries, the public has been skeptical of foreign aid, believing that too much spent on it already, and what is spent all to often fails to achieve satisfactory results. Polls find on average that Americans believe that aid for the world’s poor accounts for about 20% of the 2 trillion dollar U.S. budget. In fact, it accounts for only a half of a percent, a 40th of the perceived level.
However, there are signs that opinions is shifting. Yesterday, the forum in collaboration with Environics, a Canadian polling firm, released findings from a poll of 25,000 citizens from around the world, principally in the G-20 countries—the poll interestingly finds that very large majority, and virtually every country, would be willing to pay 1% more in taxes to fight global poverty. In most donor countries, these were extremely large majorities: 92% in Italy, 83% in Germany, 72% in the U.K., and even 63% in the United States. I’d now like to turn to our panel, and explore whether we are, indeed, at a turning point, or how we could make or mobilize the political will to get there.
Mr. Gates, do you think a big increase in development assistance is warranted? And if so, what do you think would be the right goals, and why do you think other citizens, particularly other business leaders, ought to support them?
(discussion continued)
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