Political will is the key to tackling world poverty

WORLD VIEW: 'Make poverty history' is an excellent slogan. But how? It is used for a conference in London this weekend coinciding with a meeting of G7 finance ministers chaired by Britain to consider how to promote world development

Britain has attracted support from France, Germany and Italy for a scheme to double annual aid flows to $100 billion by selling bonds on the world's capital markets.

There is a related scheme to halve debt levels as a contribution to realising the Millennium development goals for 2015 agreed at a UN conference five years ago.

The goals are ambitious in relation to current achievements but concrete and modest if looked at in terms of what should be possible with political will - and in relation to growing world inequalities.

The outgoing chairman of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, explains the self-interest that ought to drive the developed world in tackling them: "My hope is there is a recognition now on behalf of the rich world that they cannot continue to be rich if the world is destabilised by poverty."

They include: halving extreme poverty; providing universal primary education; reducing infant mortality by two-thirds; halving the incidence of HIV-AIDS; halving the number of people with no access to drinkable water and sanitation; promoting gender equality and empowering women; and reducing maternal mortality by three-quarters.

These objectives must be put in the context that a quarter of the world's population (1.3 billion people) is estimated by the United Nations Development Programme to live in severe poverty; more than 840 million people are illiterate; nearly 800 million (and one third of the world's children) are malnourished; 93 per cent of the 23 million people with AIDS live in developing countries; and that 1.2 billion people live without access to safe drinking water. The annual UNDP Human Development Reports provide running statistical series on them.

The objectives must also be looked at in terms of comparative cost. Eradicating poverty would take a mere 1 per cent of global income; debt relief to the 20 poorest countries would cost $5.5 billion; and giving universal access to basic social services and money to relieve basic poverty would cost $80 billion. Existing North-South aid flows are running at about $65 billion, while the current annual UN budget runs at about $14 billion. More ambitiously, the overall cost of wiping out the worst forms of poverty and environmental destruction would be $225 billion per annum.

The British want to focus international attention on Africa during their G7, since that continent will benefit especially from the mix of debt relief and aid flows they have in mind. There is a welcome urgency in their planning and a determination to bring the United States along with the initiative, which is being compared to the post-war Marshall Plan that revived Europe and was intended to insulate it from communism during the Cold War.

In the same way, Gordon Brown said this week: "If the US wants to separate the extremists from those they are trying to influence, it makes good sense to show how industrial nations can implement a Marshall Plan for developing countries."

But Wolfensohn warned that rising defence spending in the US, the need to mend its budgetary deficits and congressional hostility would make it difficult for the US to go along with these plans.

Nor have the British had it all their own way in setting this development agenda. At the Davos conference President Jacques Chirac of France also responded to it with several imaginative ideas of his own. They draw on an intense debate in France over recent years about how the suggested Tobin Tax on speculative foreign exchange transactions could be adapted to current global needs.

It was originally proposed by the Yale economist James Tobin in the 1970s as a way to protect real economies based on cross-border purchasing of goods and services (accounting for 80 per cent of this activity in 1975 compared to less than 2 per cent now) from the devastating impact of such financial flows.

The idea was taken up by French critics of globalisation during the 1990s, becoming the basis of a mass movement which fed into the post-Seattle movements in 1999 and since. Lionel Jospin helped to put it on the EU's agenda in 2000.

Chirac saw in it an attractive way to develop an alternative multipolar agenda to that of the Bush administration and set up a commission chaired by Jean-Pierre Landau to research its feasibility, which reported last year.

Arising from that, Chirac suggested at Davos that an international solidarity levy of say $10 billion a year be set up by: a very low (0.001 per cent) tax on international financial transactions; a contribution by countries which maintain bank secrecy to compensate for the tax evasion they encourage and facilitate; an environmentally sustainable tax on the use of fuel in transport by air and sea; or a $1 levy on the three billion plane tickets sold each year worldwide.

One cannot separate geopolitical competition from the trade in ideas during this period of major transition in international affairs.

Chirac's proposals, if implemented, would mean extending the UN's capacity, authority and budget, which would not be acceptable to the Bush administration.

British critics raised some of the traditional objections to the Tobin tax - that it would reduce liquidity and therefore the efficiency of financial markets and require all governments to co-operate in levying it. Swiss and transport sector critics spoke from their special interests.

But Brown and Blair did not dismiss Chirac's ideas outright, vowing to frame a more coherent approach during the British EU presidency later this year.

Chirac referred to the "silent tsunamis" of famine, infant mortality and HIV-AIDS and spoke of a new planetary awareness and a sentiment in favour of world citizenship arising from the Indian Ocean disaster. However limited these ideas are compared to the pressing needs involved, they do show how plans originating on the radical political margins can with determination be brought more to the centre of the world's political agenda - and how they must be kept there.