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Post-tsunami challenge: Debt write-off for the weak and vulnerable

By Gordon Brown - posted Thursday, 27 January 2005


So we need to end the hypocrisy of developed-country protectionism. We must open our markets, and do more to tackle the scandal of the Common Agricultural waste. We know that macro-economic stability, poor infrastructure, lack of transparency, legal problems, poor labour skills and low productivity are all key risks and deterrents to foreign and domestic investment.

Making better use of existing aid - reordering priorities, untying aid and pooling funds internationally, to release additional funds for the poorest countries is essential if we are to achieve value for money and the improved outcomes we seek. But we face uncomfortable facts: In Africa 25 million people have HIV/AIDS, in 24 other countries 10 per cent of children die early. Africa devotes US$12 per person, per year, to public health. This is a fifth of 1 per cent spent in the richer countries. A commonplace tragedy is mothers struggling to save an infant and losing their own lives.

And while the truth is that the scale of the resources needed, immediately, to tackle disease, illiteracy and global poverty is beyond what traditional funding can offer, let me tell you the significance and scale of what I am proposing.

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With one bold stroke we can double development aid to halve poverty, giving US$50 billion more in aid a year for the poorest countries. It could achieve half the deaths from malaria, if people had access to diagnosis and cheap drugs; a quarter of all child deaths could be prevented by mosquito-nets costing only US$4; US$3 more for each new mother could save up to 5 million lives over the next ten years; for an investment of $9 billion more a year we could build schools so that every child can get a primary education; US$10, or preferably US$20 billion more a year could tackle TB and malaria, build health systems and address the tragedy of HIV/AIDS.

The IFF is not only complementary to the existing commitment to the 0.7 per cent target - allowing participating countries to take faster steps towards this goal by increasing the resources available now - but can be implemented alongside continuing consideration of other proposals to provide financing in the longer term - including international taxes, special drawing rights and other forms of revenue raising on a world wide basis.

The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) - has immunised a total of 50 million children over the last five years and is interested in applying the principles of the IFF to the immunisation sector - with donors making long term commitments that can be leveraged up via the international capital markets, in order to frontload the funding available to tackle disease.

If, by these means, GAVI could increase the funding for its immunisation program by an additional US$4 billion over the next ten years, then it would be possible that their work could save the lives of an additional 5 million people between now and 2015 and a further 5 million lives after 2015. So in one fund, with one initiative, we can glimpse the possibilities open to us if we act together. And there are other possibilities that the International Finance Facility we propose could do to change the world.

If what we achieve for health we could also achieve for schools, for debt relief, for the capacity to trade, for anti poverty program and for economic development, think of the better world we can achieve. The aim of the International Finance Facility is to bridge the gap between promises and reality. Between hopes raised and hopes dashed. Between an opportunity seized and an opportunity squandered.

It was thought that the Marshall Plan was unattainable: even in 1997 people thought debt relief was an impossible aspiration and yet we are wiping out $100 billion of debt. People thought no more countries would sign up to a timetable for 0.7 per cent in overseas development aid, and yet this year alone five countries have already done so.

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A few months ago I quoted a century old phrase saying “The arc of the moral universe is long but it does bend towards justice”.

This was not an appeal to some iron law of history, but to remind people in the words of at least one US President who said, “The history of free peoples is never written by chance but by choice” - that it is by the actions of people of compassion and goodwill, which can and do change the world for good.

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Article edited by Norman Ingram.
If you'd like to be a volunteer editor too, click here.

This is an edited and abridged version of the speech International Development in 2005: the challenge and the opportunity by the Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer at the National Gallery of Scotland on January 6, 2005. It is Crown copyright.



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About the Author

Gordon Brown was appointed as Chancellor of the Exchequer on 2 May 1997. He has been MP for Dunfermline East since 1983 and was Opposition spokesperson on Treasury and Economic Affairs (Shadow Chancellor) from 1992.

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