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Mike
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> Full
text of the speech:
UN Financing for Development Conference summit-level opening
session
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  “I
come to you with a clear and simple message: Poverty in all its forms
is the greatest single threat to peace, democracy, human rights and
the environment. It is a time-bomb against the heart of liberty; but
it can be conquered and we have the tools in our hands to do so, if
only we have the courage and focus to make proper use of them,” Mr
Moore told the world's biggest-annual development conference, attended
by more than 50 heads of state, as well as ministers, heads of
international agencies and finance and trade experts.
Mr
Moore told delegates that developing countries would gain more than
15 times the estimated US$10 billion needed to achieve the
core Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education, if
trade was further liberalized. Abolishing all trade barriers could
boost global income by US$2.8 trillion and lift 320 million
people out of poverty by 2015, he said, citing World Bank estimates.
“Poor
countries need to grow their way out of poverty and trade can serve as
a key engine of that growth,” he said.
But
developing countries need not wait until the conclusion of the Doha
Development Round, he added. South/south trade in the 1990s grew
further than world trade and now accounts for more than one-third of
developing country exports, or about $650 billion. The World Bank
reports that 70% of the burden on developing countries' manufactured
exports result from trade barriers of other developing countries.
“The quicker those walls come down, the quicker the returns to
developing countries,” he said.
In
terms of the developed nations, Mr Moore warned against market
restrictions in four key areas. These were:
- Agriculture,
which he described as the backbone of almost all developing
economies. Agricultural support payments now cost a billion
dollars a day, noting that the average OECD bound tariff rate for
agricultural products was four times that on industrial products.
The return to developing countries in this one area would be eight
times all the debt relief granted developing countries thus far,
he added. Complete liberalization in all sectors, agriculture,
manufactures and services, would amount to about eight times all
ODA.
- Textiles
and clothing, which he called the greatest export earner for many
developing countries. Mr Moore said we must ensure that the sector
is cleanly integrated as planned for 1 Jan 2005.
- On
Tariffs, Mr Moore said that even more insidious than tariff peaks
— which continue to attract high tariffs in both developed and
developing countries — is the problem of tariff escalation,
which tilts the tables against the development of indigenous
processing. If developing countries are ever to diversify their
economies away from the dependence on a few primary products, this
escalation must be rooted out, he said.
Noting
that restrictions were costly to the countries maintaining them, Mr
Moore told the conference that protection costs the European Union,
the US and Japan, from between US$70 to US$110 billion each
annually. “The net losses to the US associated with its textile and
clothing import restrictions alone amount to over $10 billion
annually,” he said.
“This
conference is about financing development in an era when private
foreign direct investment outnumbers ODA four-fold, and is
10 times the World Bank's development lending. That's why many
want an investment agreement in the Doha Development Round”.
Mr
Moore also emphasized the importance of other important development
and good governance issues, such as transparency in government
procurement, competition policy and trade facilitation. “Trade
facilitation reform will generate huge returns,” he said, citing an
Inter-American Development Bank study of two South American countries,
in which a truck delivering product to markets across two borders took
200 hours, 100 hours of which were bound up in bureaucratic
delays at the border.
“This
domestic red-tape and bad governance is costly and corrosive,” said
Mr Moore, who also observed that the poor's assets need to be
legitimised. He noted that in Latin America, 80% of all real estate is
held outside the law.
“The
extra-legal sectors in developing countries account for 50% – 70% of
all working people. In the poorest nation in Latin America, the assets
of the poor are more than 150 times greater than all foreign
investment since their independence in 1804. In one African country,
it took 77 bureaucratic procedures at 31 public and private
agencies to legally acquire land. He added that if the US were to
raise its ODA to the UN target of 0.7%, it would take the richest
country on the planet 150 years to transfer to the world's poor,
resources equal to those they already possess”.
Citing
recent WTO commitments to increased capacity-building, Mr Moore
concluded: “We should provide technical assistance to train
negotiators, build efficient customs regimes and plug porous tax
systems. We must give as much attention to building up the
intellectual infrastructures of skilled public servants as we did to
filling in potholes, building roads and dams. The Doha Development
Round, can be achieved and implemented on time. The condition for
success will be improving capacity to provide for good governance, to
enable them to participate, negotiate, conclude and implement our
agenda. This is being done. We can and we must succeed”.
> Full
text of the speech: UN
Financing for Development Conference summit-level opening session
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