Brown calls for new ‘Marshall Plan’ for developing world
The international community should wipe out third world debt, dismantle its trade barriers and give an extra £50 billion in aid as part of a new plan to help the developing world, Chancellor Gordon Brown said today.
Speaking in New York, Mr Brown said the world needed a new version of the Marshall Plan, a post-WWII initiative that saw America give one per cent of its national income to help the war-ravaged economies of Europe.
A plan “as bold” was needed to fight the “hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos” in the developing world and to fight terrorists by separating them from the people they seek to exploit, he added.
In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, a leading US think-tank, the Chancellor said the world’s rich nations needed show greater political will to build “a global alliance for peace and prosperity”.
They must make the developing world an offer that would allow them to pursue corruption-free policies, develop their own poverty reduction plans and reform trade “at their own pace”.
To do this, the developed countries should pledge to wipe out 100 per cent of all debt deemed to be unpayable; dismantle trade barriers so that the poorest countries could enter their markets; and offer an extra £50 billion a year to meet the Millennium Development Goals.
Mr Brown told his audience: “It is an offer made for security, economic and moral reasons. It is an offer that requires accountability and transparency from the poorest countries to justify development aid.
“Out of this I believe we could achieve not only a major assault on poverty in the poorest countries but pave the way … for greater trade and higher and longer-term world economic growth benefiting us all.”
He said debt relief was essential, but was not enough by itself to lift developing nations out of poverty. The rich nations must do more to encourage a “virtuous cycle” of investment and economic growth.
That meant tackling the “scandal and waste” of the Common Agricultural Policy, allowing developing countries to “carefully design and sequence trade reform” in their own way, and helping them take greater advantage of world trade opportunities.
This last proposal could be the key to restarting the stalled world trade negotiations, he added.
“2005 must become the year when through the world trade talks, we release the poorest countries from unfair trade barriers.”
Mr Brown also repeated his proposal that Britain, the US, and allied European and American countries should meet in a regular economic forum “to examine shared economic challenges”, and that the international community should contribute to an International Financing Facility.
