Brown: Moral duty to aid world’s poor
Britain will use next year’s presidencies of the G8 and European Union to push for greater debt relief for the ravaged countries of Africa, Gordon Brown pledged on Sunday.
Ahead of his trip to America this week, the Chancellor of the Exchequer said he was “optimistic” the Bush administration would support plans for 100 per cent debt relief.
Speaking on ITV’s Jonathan Dimbleby programme, Mr Brown said the UK and the US both had to do more to help the world’s poor in Africa.
“I think there is an understanding that for enlightened self-interest, but also out of Christian morality, a great deal has got to be done,’ Mr Brown said.
“All of us share in one way, a moral sense that human dignity requires that we do something about either the debt, or the poverty, or the unfair trade that means that so many people have not even got a first chance in life.”
Mr Brown is to travel to the US to outline his brainchild – the international finance facility.
The IFF envisages the doubling of monies available for debt relief – up to $100 billion – owed to the G7, IMF and World Bank.
The IFF works by selling government-backed bonds on the international capital markets.
Mr Brown is behind the push to raise aid spending in the world’s leading industrial nations to 0.7 per cent of national income. Britain plans to do so unilaterally by 2013.
He said he would be expounding his version of the World War Two “Marshall Plan” to the Bush administration.
Pumping money into Africa was an investment not only in the short term but for the future, he added, with a view to expanding trade globally, “making Africa part of the global economy, then we actually benefit each other”.
As such, he made the case for the repeal of subsidies on goods exported from Europe which “harm’ the poorest countries.
“I believe that the moral and intellectual arguments have been won,’ said Mr Brown.
Poverty and terrorism were closely linked, he argued, and social justice was necessary, globally, if terror and poverty were to be jointly defeated.
“Poverty can never excuse terrorist activity. But we have got to understand that where there is poverty it breeds hopelessness, it breeds despair, and it makes many people pray to terrorist extremists,” he said.
Mr Brown said 2005 would be a “make or break year” in the fight against global poverty.
“If it doesn’t happen in 2005, I think it will be difficult to persuade the developing countries that the richest countries of the world will keep faith and can be trusted to keep their promises,” he said.
Mr Brown is pencilled in to speak on development at the United Nations and Council for Foreign Relations in New York on Friday.
He will then meet with US treasury secretary John Snow in Washington and representatives from the World Bank and IMF over the weekend.
