International Development

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 3:47 pm on 1 July 1997.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Clare Short Clare Short Secretary of State, Department for International Development 3:47, 1 July 1997

It is the truth. It should not be thought that such a tiny contribution, perhaps prompted by social guilt, is enough to provide for all the people in the world.[Interruption.] I shall get on with serious discussion of these serious matters.

All the conditions to which I have referred mean that this is an ideal time for the creation of my Department as a separate Department of State, headed by a Cabinet Minister. My Department's job is development, and nothing else. Commercial and political considerations are the perfectly proper work of Government, but export promotion and short-term political relationships are not the work of my Department. We have been given the most noble and honourable work that anyone could be asked to do—but this is not work just for soft hearts; it is also work for hard heads. There is no decent future for the world if we do not succeed.

Clearly, every generation has had the moral duty to reach out to the poor and needy, and to try to create a more just world. The present generation, however, must rise to the challenge; otherwise, global warming, population pressure, spreading deserts, polluted and over-fished oceans and water shortages will create catastrophes that will endanger the lives of all people and countries—rich and poor, northern and southern, developed and developing.

There is no privatised and purchasable solution to those problems. The grandchildren of the richest people in the world need a healthy planet as much as the hungriest street child living on the margins of existence. We must solve the problems together—and benefit everyone—or they will not be solved at all.

The United Nations special session on sustainable development has just ended in New York, five years after the Rio summit. Rio, and the process leading up to it, undoubtedly constituted an important moment in history. A good deal has been achieved as a result, in particular the mobilising of opinion—especially among young people—about the need for sustainable development and the importance of protecting our global and national environment. Binding conventions have been established for some global environmental issues. The outcome of the New York meeting was positive but limited, partly because the Governments of the developed and developing world see their interests so differently.

The process that started at Rio was about the rich countries collaborating with poor countries to help them to achieve sustainable development and reduce poverty. The global environmental facility, which exists to help poor countries to meet the extra costs of protecting the global environment as they develop is important, and we are committed to a further substantial replenishment later this year.

However, at Rio we also promised additional help to assist with the development of poor countries more generally, and the rich countries have not delivered. As a result, the developing countries think that we are more concerned with protecting our own way of life than about their development. If they think that we have created our riches by using up the world's resources, and that we are now imposing rules to protect our riches and prevent their development, they will, quite reasonably, refuse to co-operate. That was the mood at the beginning of the UN special session.

One of the Government's actions in New York was to reassert the basic Rio message that tackling poverty and protecting the environment are inextricably linked, and that eliminating poverty is essential to caring for the planet and is the bridge that unites the interests of north and south. An important part of the Prime Minister's speech at the General Assembly, which was universally warmly welcomed, was to commit the UK to helping towards the important over-arching goal, of which I spoke earlier, of reducing by half the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by 2015, and to reverse the decline in British development assistance.

Politicians often pretend to know everything. Conservative Members will know about that. Vanity is the occupational disease of politics, but, of course, politicians do not know everything, and the good ones have to understand that it is their duty to listen to people's fears and worries, find the ideas to create solutions, and mobilise action to implement those ideas. That is the second reason for this being the ideal time for the creation of my Department. The ideas are in place, and our job now is to mobilise enough political will to ensure that they are implemented.

There are two documents which everyone should read. The first is from the development assistance committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and is called "Shaping the 21st Century". It reflects the collective views of Development Ministers, heads of aid agencies and other senior officials who are responsible for development co-operation.

The report reflects on the lessons of such co-operation over the past 50 years and proposes strategies for the first part of the next century. It proposes a global development partnership effort that focuses on a limited number of key success indicators that are drawn from the conclusions of the great UN conferences of the past decade or so.

The over-arching goal is that of reducing by half by 2015 the proportion of people living in extreme poverty. There are several key social development goals feeding into that aim. They include universal primary education in all countries by 2015; progress towards gender equality and the empowerment of women; and improvements in health care systems and mortality rates. They also include targets for implementing national strategies for sustainable development in all countries by 2005. That is to ensure that current trends in the loss of environmental resources are effectively reversed at both global and national levels by 2015.

The second document I recommend is the United Nations human development report 1997, which has just been published. That report, like the OECD development assistance committee report, bases its judgment that the elimination of poverty is feasible in part on the progress and lessons of the past 50 years. It notes that, since 1960, in little more than a generation, child death rates in developing countries have been more than halved. Malnutrition rates have declined by almost a third. The proportion of children who are out of primary school has fallen from more than half to less than a quarter, and the proportion of rural families who do not have access to safe water has fallen from nine tenths to about a quarter. The report also notes not only that there have been substantial advances in income in many countries, but that there has been great progress in life expectancy and in access to basic social services.