Millennium Development Goals

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 7th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, last month’s meeting in New York said most of the right things but it is legitimate to ask whether the right actions will follow, and that is why the debate introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, is so timely. After all, those actions have not done so in the past, and the recession has taken its toll on the willingness of many countries to implement the commitments that they entered into, most importantly at Gleneagles and at the UN summit in 2005.

Some of those who endorsed the warm words agreed in New York last month are not fulfilling those commitments now and have shown no sign of doing so in the future. Russia, France and Italy are examples of that tendency. I should like to know what the Government are intending to do to make the monitoring of commitments in the EU and the G20 and at the UN more effective during the last one-third of the journey than it has been in the past two-thirds. It is good that we are sticking to our commitments, but the UK is only a modest part of a global jigsaw and, if we cannot carry others with us, progress towards achieving the millennium development goals will flag.

This issue of the consequences of the recession and of the current problems over government spending has to be confronted fair and square. It needs to be recalled that the global recession and the particularly sharp slowing of growth in the main developed countries—which are also, of course, the main aid donors—has already levied a substantial hidden tax on the resources being made available to the developing world, as many of the commitments entered into were expressed as percentages of donor countries’ gross national income, and the growth of the GNI of those countries is markedly lower than was expected at the time the commitments were entered into.

A second consideration is that the 2008 financial and economic crisis was in no conceivable way attributable to the policies or actions of developing countries. Therefore, it would surely be aberrant and immoral if they were to be directly punished for events which are already taking a toll on their economies.

Thirdly, it is not in our own interest that developing countries’ health, education, climate and other development policies should be hobbled, with the inevitable increase in global insecurity which would follow. Therefore, I strongly commend the coalition Government’s decision to honour our commitments and to sustain the aid budget.

It is not too soon, I suggest, to be thinking now about the post-2015 scenario for the MDGs. The problems that they were established to address will not have disappeared by then, although one can hope that they will have been much reduced. An instrument a bit less blunt and all-embracing than the MDGs could serve better in the future. It is now widely recognised that global MDG achievement figures conceal as much as they reveal. Thanks to the rapid economic growth in Asia, the below-average performance of many weaker developing countries in other parts of the world is hidden and often not properly addressed. The problems of failed and failing states are simply not on the development radar screen at all. We surely need in future an instrument and approach which focus much more clearly and effectively on what Professor Paul Collier of Oxford University in a striking phrase called “the bottom billion”. The fate of those countries whose populations make up that bottom billion have serious implications not only for the world economy but for international peace and security.

We also need to think hard about the role that can be played in the future by the most successful countries emerging from the developing world—countries such as China, India and Brazil. I do not believe that we should expect those countries to match the same degree of spending as the developed countries but they have gone through this experience themselves and pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps and they have a lot of lessons to teach us. Therefore, to ignore the contributions that these countries can make to shaping and participating in future development work would be foolish and entirely contrary to the rationale of establishing the G20 as the primary body for co-ordinating global economic policies. After all, these countries have shown how it can be done—how rapid progress to achieving the MDGs can be made. Therefore, I should like to suggest that in cases such as China, Brazil and India, the Government should be thinking of how we can work with them in the future and co-operate with them in seeking to achieve the goals. I hope that when he replies to this debate the noble Earl can say something on the Government’s intentions in that respect. I heard the Secretary of State for DfID speak about that on television only two days ago and it would be very good if we could hear from him.