Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
TUESDAY 15 JANUARY 2002
MR RICHARD
MANNING, MR
ANDREW BENNETT,
MR ADRIAN
DAVIS AND
MR DAVID
WARRILOW
20. Obviously in this case the public subsidy
is through the ECGD. You have talked about country by country
need to adapt and need to strengthen local adaptive capacity.
You talked about finance ministries. Are you working with the
local academic scientific community in the 11 countries? We were
told by our advisers at the beginning of this that it was very
important to encourage the bases of local expertise in developing
countries, scientists who understood what was going on within
their country. To what extent are we helping local capacity to
forecast seasonal and longer term climate changes?
(Mr Manning) That will certainly be a feature of the
work I described in Bangladesh. Do you have any other examples,
Andrew, which you would like to bring to our attention?
(Mr Bennett) We have not done a lot specifically in
this area. We have engaged through the Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research where we are a member, along with 50 other
countries, to try to develop programmes which will be carried
out not only at the centres but working within national systems
as a means of trying to help countries better understand the likely
impacts and what they might do about it. There are various other
activities which are involved in trying to strengthen national
capacities in all fields of agricultural and natural resources
research. Nothing specifically targeted at simply the climate
change area. There is a feeling here that the general science
base and the general academic base and the research capacity in
countries, as we have described earlier, can find their way into
the energy sectors, find it into the forestry sectors and natural
resources sectors. It is important that the capacity exists in
those areas in order to cope with these consequences.
21. Would you see it as important that more
research is done by developing country economists or scientists
within those countries so they would be able to take more ownership
of what is happening within their country?
(Mr Bennett) Absolutely. I think my colleague from
DEFRA has an example from India.
(Mr Warrilow) DETR started two projects, one in India,
one in China, to look at the impacts of climate change. They both
started last year and will run for two to three years. The Chinese
one particularly has a strong element of training because the
Chinese were very keen to have links with UK institutes so a number
of Chinese scientists are actually coming to work in the UK for
three months or so as part of the training part of it. The Indian
project is an ambitious project and covers all aspects of climate
change impacts and will be executed by Indian scientists with
links with some UK scientists as well. We are looking at that
aspect from the wider climate change policy aspect rather than
development side of things. The Hadley Centre has also been preparing
a regional climate change model which can run on a personal computer,
which is being designed so that it can be run in developing countries—it
can be run anywhere actually but the main aim was to allow developing
countries to run a sophisticated climate change model themselves.
We have already been working with a few countries—DFID are
aware of this and are part of the project—with Bangladesh,
with South Africa—there is a South African scientist at
the Hadley Centre—with China and with the Indian projects
as well.
22. As the Hadley Centre is based in Norwich,
is there a cross-over —
(Mr Warrilow) It is in Bracknell.
23. Sorry. I thought there was a centre for
developing research on climate change which was based in Norwich.
(Mr Warrilow) That is the Tyndall Centre.
24. How does the Tyndall Centre fit with dealing
with the research base in developing countries?
(Mr Warrilow) I am not totally familiar with what
the Tyndall Centre are doing on this because it is not part of
our programme. I believe they do have links with some developing
countries, but I do not know the details.
25. Perhaps you could give us a note on how
the two centres work together.[9]
Certainly when I visited there shortly after set-up they saw themselves
as being the main research hub in the UK for dealing with climate
change world-wide. You have not actually mentioned the impact
of climate change on small island states. It has not been the
emphasis of what you were saying. Is there a world-wide emphasis
on the impact of climate change on small island states and what
is your feeling in terms of the balance of research which is going
on?
(Mr Manning) It certainly is a very important
issue. I mentioned the study on UK dependent territories which
we certainly think is relevant to other small island states.
(Mr Bennett) Needless to say the small
island states are extremely vulnerable, particularly the low islands.
A lot of work was done through the Commonwealth prior to the Rio
meeting where the small island states formed a group and a very
strong lobby group and they are very active in a lot of negotiations.
They remain vulnerable. The fragility of low island states and
their freshwater lens in the coral is such that if climate change
is significant some of them will become uninhabitable. You asked
a little earlier about the issues of migration. It is already
happening. In West Africa the extent of migration out of the Sahel
from Mali and Burkina Faso into Ivory Coast is such that they
are now introducing legislation to prevent foreign nationals from
owning land. They form a significant proportion of the labour
force in the cocoa and other plantation industries and in the
construction industries. Migration is happening and if small island
states do start to dry out, there will be migration. Our Secretary
of State has been fairly active in that field. Richard, are you
familiar with the whole issue of migration?
(Mr Manning) That takes it into a rather wider area.
I have certainly seen press articles about some Pacific islands
who are canvassing their options with Australia and New Zealand
in the event that they are unable to sustain their present levels
of population.
Chairman
26. Part of this is just how urgent one considers
this all to be. Going back through this evidence, you quite rightly
have said DFID focuses on poverty, the better you can tackle poverty
the more resilient you will make the countries in tackling climate
change. The evidence we had from the Hadley Centre is pretty scary.
I do not know whether you have had the same presentation we had
but it certainly made us all sit up and take note. What they are
really saying—colleagues will correct me if I have got this
wrong—is that they expect to see greater changes in the
climate over the next 100 years than has taken place over the
previous 400,000 years. I just wonder whether there is sufficient—this
is not a criticism of DFID just generally across the scientific
and international consensus—urgency in appreciating the
potential scale of change which is going to occur over two or
three generations.
(Mr Manning) It is a very hard question to answer.
I am sure that the advice of the Hadley Centre is very well grounded
and it certainly informs the way we think about the longer term.
In a way the Department is bound to think about the longer term.
Our main targets are set for 2015 but 2015 is tomorrow in climate
change terms. The climate is not going to be radically different
in 2015 from what it is now. Naturally we do tend to focus on
things which are going to do something about child mortality,
about AIDS, about governments, about things we can do in the here
and now but we need to do it very much against a background in
which the world is going to have to cope with the biggest climate
change it has ever seen in a century when the world population
is going to peak. There will be more people than there have ever
been. This is a major long-term challenge to all of us which certainly
needs to be factored in. The question is whether we should be
doing something different in the here and now from what we are
already doing. I hope you have the sense from here that we are
certainly concerned about the issues. We certainly recognise the
need to encourage our colleagues to take more of a medium-term
perspective. What I am less certain about is whether there is
something radically new and different that we should be doing—you
are about to go to Ghana—differently in Ghana in the here
and now, given that we obviously may expect a yet drier northern
Ghana in the next 30 or 40 years. Those are the kinds of issues
on which the Committee's own thoughts will be very useful when
you have done that. I do not want to sound complacent about this
but there are many things which people need to do anyway, and
my own sense is that we really have to pursue various kinds of
no-regrets policies. If we do not have governments which function,
if we cannot get on top of a regional conflict, if we cannot get
people educated, we are not going to succeed in any of these things
so we have to go on investing in that, but we should do so, in
particular when one puts in place longer-term investment, hydro-electricity
or whatever, taking really serious account of the fact that models
based on past precipitation are going to be an increasingly unreliable
guide to the future. As we are pretty well not investing in any
hydro-electric development that is perhaps not a very operational
question for us these days.
Hugh Bayley
27. May I take you back to paragraphs 2 and
3 of your memorandum, which run through some of the difficulties
in mainstreaming environmental policy in more general policy?
You have given us some good examples of where DFID interventions
have got it right and where developing countries have managed
to tackle environmental problems effectively, but you list here
a number of problem areas: insecure ownership of resources means
that people do not safeguard them very well, you talk a little
bit about taxation, low level of public awareness. Can you give
us some examples of bad practice? Why do things go wrong? Where
have things gone wrong? What illustrates these market failures,
policy failures, institutional failures?
(Mr Manning) I will ask my colleagues to be thinking,
as I give a first response, of one or two other examples they
could pick on. There are some very interesting ones in what has
happened to pastoralists in Africa, what has happened to forests
in many areas. The example I reflect on sometimes is the danger
that people reach for technical solutions when in fact the issue
is a wider one. In particular, after the very severe flooding
in Bangladesh around the end of the 1980s/early 1990s there was
a big international effort, led unusually by the French, to see
whether there was some way of corralling the major rivers of Bangladesh
and making Bangladesh less vulnerable to flood. It started off
with a rather naive idea in some people's minds that you could
pour a lot of concrete and you could pretty well canalise the
world's largest rivers and construct something which looked hugely
attractive to major construction companies. When this was looked
at seriously, it became evident the more it was looked at—and
I remember going to meetings with people from the Mississippi
River Commission who had worked on this sort of thing for years—the
more it was apparent this was completely the wrong approach and
that one had to allow water to move across the face of Bangladesh,
being a delta. Instead you had to help people cope with it. In
fact a number of very low-tech and uninteresting-to-construction-companies
things could be done which were definitely worth doing and which
I understand to a large extent are being done in Bangladesh. You
do have to beware of one-size-fits-all solutions to these problems.
You have to look at everything very much in terms of local specifics
and you have to understand—this is crucially important—the
social dimensions of these problems, why people act in the way
they do. As we said in our target strategy paper and elsewhere,
on the whole it is not the poor who cause environmental damage
and when they do cause environmental damage, it is often because
of the way the local system is rigged against them: difficulties
of common property access, difficulties of breakdown in traditional
systems which were sustainable, of handling common property resources.
May I invite Andrew to give a couple of concrete examples where
the world may have got it wrong and where we could do better in
future?
(Mr Bennett) There are some examples of where it was
got wrong and then got right. If you look particularly at issues
of tenure and ownership and management, in Nepal they nationalised
all the forests. Net result: it was open season on the forest.
They denationalised the forest, communities took over and the
forests are much better managed and those community groups have
not only become better at managing the forest in ways different
to the ways of forest departments—they are not managed for
timber, they are managed for all the other goods and services,
fodder and other things—they have gone on beyond that to
start looking at water management and other asset management.
There is an example of where there was a failure of policy, but
a redemption largely because the Government of Nepal let it happen.
A lot of the destruction of the world's forests is not being done
by people who live within them and depend on them, they are being
done by external forces often outside the laws of the land. There
is considerable corruption and incompetence going on in many parts
of the world. In a country like Indonesia they suddenly—as
a result of a study done by EC and ourselves—realised the
massive amounts of income they were losing from the fact that
the forests were being exploited but the income was not coming
in. There we have embarked upon a process of governance reform
where increasingly responsibility and ownership and regulation
of forest is being devolved back into communities. There is another
example of where tenure is important; the land tenure in many
parts of the world becomes an increasingly important area. You
have other areas where environmental damage has been done. Take
Thailand about 30 years ago when the price of cassava went rocketing
up and all the land was taken out of forest and other products
and simply put into cassava chip units. Fortunately the market
for cassava chips collapsed and people went back into better land
management. One is often seeing at a community level that when
environments are being managed for the benefit of those communities
they are often managed better and more sustainably. It is when
external forces come to bear either through corruption or changes
in tenure or weak governments that you start to see damage coming.
(Mr Manning) One other thing relative to this is that
one has to look at the perverse effects of subsidies and often
our own policies. The cassava example in Thailand took place solely
because of a particular quirk of the Common Agricultural Policy
which created a very strange incentive to send cassava to feed
the cows in Holland. Similarly the Committee might well want to
reflect on the way in which the fisheries policy of the European
Community is in some ways inimical to the sustainable management
of fisheries in several parts of the world, particularly to the
interests of poor artisenal fishermen. There are areas where we
need to look quite carefully at the policies which we in the European
Community adopt and make sure we are not putting in place subsidies
and other distortions which lead to unsustainable exploitation.
28. Would that be Namibia you are thinking of
in respect of fishing?
(Mr Manning) There are several countries.
(Mr Bennett) We could send the Committee details on
a programme we are involved in across the whole of West Africa
on the better management of the fisheries of West Africa and strengthening
governments not only to manage fisheries for themselves but also
to try to resist some of the predatory habits of distant water
fishing nations in those areas.
Hugh Bayley
29. One of the things we should like to see
is DFID leading or participating strongly at least in an international
discussion about these issues. We are better able to do that if
our own performance is good. Perhaps you could send us a note
about the cassava, just a couple of paragraphs, starting from
the DEFRA angle and why in agricultural terms this seemed a sensible
thing for the EU to do and why there was no audit of the consequences
further away.[10]
This was some time ago and hopefully things will be better and
you could perhaps show that a lesson was drawn from that. One
of the things which you stress it is important to do is to improve
public awareness of environmental issues and to encourage people
to think longer term, which is extremely difficult for people
throughout the world. You think about the here and now and the
more marginal your existence the more immediate your concerns.
I was very struck by a comment in your paper that a greater proportion
of the burden of disease in developing countries is associated
with environmental factors, poor air quality, poor water quality
and so on than as a result of malnutrition. It did strike me that
maybe health, which is something which has a more immediate impact
on people, could be used as a public awareness vehicle for linking
environmental problems with human consequences. Do you agree and
if so how would you use it as a vehicle to make people focus on
the importance of having cleaner air in urban areas, cleaner rivers
and so on.
(Mr Manning) It is certainly one of the
key factors which people relate. We have done this work on what
people themselves feel about the environment. The World Bank did
a kind of voices of the poor study which we helped finance for
their world development report last year and we did a kind of
follow-up on the environment. It demonstrated how important the
poor people consider their environmental factors are and certainly
includes clean water and access to water along with many other
things. There is controversy about the extent of some of these
things. There is more than one view as to exactly how significant
indoor air pollution is but there is no question that environmental
factors are a very significant part of the total disease programme.
We probably could do more to encourage that to be highlighted.
Another thing which may help us here is the Internet and all that
goes with that. Getting information is a rapidly changing field.
We are looking quite seriously at better use of things like community
radio linked into the Internet as a means of getting messages
around. Health and environment are good examples of what might
be done there. There is a UN task force on ICT and I am going
to attend their next meeting to see how useful some of this is.
They are certainly looking among other things at the way in which
information technologies can be better used in the health field.
We shall see how far that takes us. Certainly the whole question
of awareness raising is very important to this. Andrew and I both
having lived in Thailand at different times have seen the way
in which, as you gradually develop more of a middle class that
can reflect on these things, some of these issues move up the
local domestic agenda in a way which was not the case. It is very
difficult for poor people who are struggling from day to day to
have that kind of leverage. As societies change, and societies
are changing very rapidly in developing countries, you do see
greater coalitions of people who are interested in environmental
matters and are increasingly trying to hold their governments
to account for some of the more difficult environmental issues
in their countries.
30. To what extent are mitigation policies and
adaptation policies integrated? How can local livelihoods approaches
both in relation to adaptation and mitigation be linked with national
strategies and policies?
(Mr Manning) This is a very important conundrum, particularly
the second half of this. At local level we are becoming better
at looking at how livelihoods can be improved, but feeding that
back into central government policy is a big challenge. It is
one where donors such as ourselves have a particular role to play
in helping to highlight these things. A lot is going on. In a
country like India there is a long tradition of a lot of community
action and community activists who in some ways highlight these
things quite effectively. That is less the case in many other
countries. Well considered donor supported interventions can help
inform central policy, but there is a lot of work to do in this.
I would not claim that we are more than at the start of that agenda.
An area where it is being tested more than most would be for example
forest policy in Brazil, where it is obviously a very important
national issue and where the British contribution to the whole
debate about Brazil's forest has been very much about how to manage
the interaction of people with the forests and that has perhaps
been the area we have focused on. Andrew might want to say whether
he thinks we have been in any way effective in feeding back the
results of what we have learned at field level to Brazilian Government
policy.
(Mr Bennett) It is very interesting working on the
livelihood side. Once you start to try to go through the cycles
between what people's assets are and what their options are and
where they would like to be in a few years' time how often we
come back to central institutions legislation and regulation and
how often the ways in which governments ise organised is not necessarily
perfectly structured in order to deliver a multiple range of goods
and services to people whose attitudes and aspirations are changing.
In terms of Brazil, the first task was creating effective links
between the central government and the governments of the individual
states and putting in place the means by which those two could
relate to each other and in turn then relate to local communities.
Often you cannot come up with a nice grand design at the outset
but you have to start doing things to identify where the gaps
and where the problems are. One thing which comes out of a livelihoods
analysis is how important it is for societies and communities
to get into the business of asking what they want from others.
If you take a country like Uganda, where the government has accepted
this as important, it is actually putting money into the local
communities to buy what they want in terms of research and rural
services back from central government. This is a rather interesting
approach to recognising how important it is that local communities
are engaged in the process. To answer the first part of your question
between mitigation and adaptation, when you are dealing with different
communities, you actually find they are in rather different parts
of that agenda. For example, in terms of mitigation there is land
use and land protection and where they get their energy from and
how they get it. In terms of adaptation it is how they cope with
drought, temperature and various other things. In terms of getting
the balance right, if you start with the communities, often in
many parts of the world in which we work water is one of the limiting
issues and the first thing they want is reliable water supplies,
not only to drink but for their crops and their livestock. Land
and water management issues become a priority. Improving land
and water management actually increases the vegetative cover,
which in turn helps to absorb carbon. It is funny that once you
get into the realities of the day-to-day doing how many of these
things are interwoven.
31. Given that the focus of our inquiry is on
climate change rather than a wider environmental agenda, measurability
of many environmental factors and considerations is extremely
difficult but in relation to climate change it is probably easier,
is it not, in that you could select two or three measures, for
instance energy use is one mentioned earlier, possibly certain
agricultural practices? I was very struck by an American paper
which said that in a two- or three-year period recently China
had achieved 15 or 18 per cent growth but with a negative growth
in energy consumption. Could you not use measures of national
energy consumption simply as a measure of whether development
policies are sustainable or not?
(Mr Manning) Certainly energy intensity of GNP is
a very useful indicator to track. You have to recognise that clearly
countries in different parts of the world and countries' different
resource environments will come up with different points on the
scale but you can certainly see movement. I do not know, David,
whether there is any internationally recognised set of indicators
that you would particularly advise the use of.
(Mr Warrilow) I believe there is but I am not familiar
with it. One thing worth pointing out is that each country under
the UN Convention on Climate Change has to report a whole range
of issues to do with greenhouse gas emissions and so on. There
is probably quite a lot of data now coming together which you
could use to assess impacts of other activities.
(Mr Davis) As a sub-set of the IBRD's world development
indicators over the last two years they have been producing a
little green book which lists environmental indicators in all
the countries. We will give the latest copy to the Committee,
if that would be helpful.[11]
They are tracking these kinds of issues by each country.
Hugh Bayley: My final thought to leave
with you is that maybe you ought to winnow out of these various
statistics some which would be appropriate measures which you
should feed into your country strategy papers or your road map
so that they are things with which you monitor your development
spending against countries' performance on energy use or agriculture,
methane production or whatever might be appropriate indicators.
Mr Robathan
32. I want to take you back to the issue of
agriculture and the impact of the developed world's agricultural
policies and fisheries policies on the developing world. This
was brought up by BOND when we interviewed them and they said
that the one issue which really concerned the developing world
was the liberalisation of agriculture. We have just had the Doha
meeting. How confident are you that the issue you raised of the
CAP and the common fisheries programme will be addressed? What
input does your Department have into these discussions on those
specific issues?
(Mr Manning) You have seen the Doha text on this which
went to the wire and was very carefully considered. It is quite
clear that agriculture was one of the main subjects being discussed.
It is already being discussed as part of the built-in agenda at
the Uruguay round and various deadlines are built into the Doha
agenda which we will need to work to. There is no question: these
issues will be discussed but people still have their negotiating
cards turned into their chests at this stage. On the second point,
I personally regard the way in which the CAP reform does or does
not take place as being one of the key issues for us as a development
department and we shall certainly be working very closely with
our colleagues in an effort to ensure that the development dimension
is fully integrated into British Government policy.
Tony Worthington
33. One thing puzzles me and that is that no-one
is mentioning UNED at all. Is this considered a relevant body
to this whole area?
(Mr Davis) UNED UK is an NGO which has looked at WSSD
in particular and has a track record there. It has both an international
and a domestic dimension in raising awareness. We have given them
some money to facilitate attendance by southern NGOs at international
meetings but we do not have a strong relationship with them. They
mainly relate to DEFRA on WSSD issues. From our point of view
they are a UK NGO.
Mr Colman
34. I do not believe we have covered the direct
results of COP7 Marrakech and the Kyoto Protocol. You mentioned
the clean development mechanism and how that was working in Bangladesh
potentially. Within the Kyoto Protocol there is the framework
for building adaptive capacity for developing countries and countries
with their economies in transition. Do you believe that the frameworks
which are within the Kyoto Protocol are adequate and how do you
see DFID being involved in implementing the framework coming from
the Kyoto Protocol?
(Mr Davis) It is early days. There are three funds
specifically set up under the Kyoto Protocol and the convention.
The global environment facility has been tasked with working out
rules and procedures for those. It is on the agenda for the next
council meeting in May. The emphasis on what we have been saying
about the need to integrate suggests to us that our response to
climate change should certainly be an amalgam of both the bilateral
and the international responses. In terms of adaptation, if you
talk about adaptation as being looking at resilience of an economy,
the need for a separate fund is perhaps less obvious that it might
be. There is the opportunity to meet our commitments under these
funds by increased bilateral spending as well, so there is a mixture.
We would want to use those as a further encouragement for our
country programmes to take account of adaptation issues. It is
too early to decide how these funds will work and what they will
finance—the additionality in terms of resources is clear—in
terms of how they will complement the existing activities of the
global environment facility, for example, and what bilateral donors
are doing generally.
35. And the clean development mechanism?
(Mr Davis) There is a meeting today and yesterday
of the executive board of the clean development mechanism to which
we have agreed to contribute £20,000 to get them started.
The clean development mechanism, as the DEFRA memorandum makes
clear, is the only one which can start promptly and which developing
countries can benefit from. The likely benefits from the CDM are
lessened by the fact that the US are not participating, so that
has rather reduced the attractiveness. Nevertheless it is attractive
to developing countries. Various issues about equity, whether
all CDM projects will go to China, India, Brazil, whether there
will be a better spread, are now going to be worked out over the
next four to six months.
Hugh Bayley
36. The UK is arguing for an increase in funding
in the third replenishment of the global environment facility.
How are those discussions going? What do you think the outcome
will be? If there is increased funding, what would DFID want to
use it for?
(Mr Davis) We argued for a significant increase in
the third replenishment of GEF because we saw the global environmental
trends had been deteriorating, because collectively the world
had asked the GEF to do other things like deal with the effects
of persistent organic pollutants and desertification and more
intensive work on capacity building. We thought this needed to
be backed up by a collective determination that we should give
more money. There have been two replenishments: the first of $2
billion, the second $2 billion. We argued for $3 billion and we
have consistently argued that. We were supposed to agree on our
final figure in our meeting at the beginning of last month, December.
We did not do so and there is now a further meeting at the end
of February in Paris and there will probably be an additional
meeting. We hope that the meeting at the end of February will
agree the indicative figure. The reason we have not been able
to make progress is that the two countries which together account
for about 40 per cent of the GEF have not been able to make the
position clear, the US and Japan. Japan is also waiting for the
US, so the US is the key country. The US has not said anything
about its attitude to the third replenishment but more importantly
has not said anything about its position on arrears to the second
replenishment. The US is two years, or $220 million, in arrears
on the GEF. We are promised that something will materialise in
the course of this month which will make the February meetings
easier, but the key issue at the moment is what the US is going
to do. At the moment Japan, I guess partly for domestic political
reasons but also there is a point, is exploring and asking the
GEF council and secretariat to think about issues of procurement
restrictions. This is a repetition of some of the discussions
which were held in a previous IDA replenishment where procurement
restrictions were enacted. I do not think it will actually get
to that stage but we see it as useful in keeping up the pressure
on the US. So far there has been no sign that the US will make
the same kind of gesture to the GEF as it has done to the UN where
it paid off all its arrears in one fell swoop. Again it is an
education process. It is because they probably see the GEF as
a Kyoto Protocol mechanism despite the fact that that is not true.
I would say charitably at the moment that we are waiting to see
what will happen. If you want a personal impression of what I
think the outcome will be, I do not think we will get $3 billion.
I think we will get somewhere in the range between $2.5 and $2.7
billion, which is an increase but in fact if you take into account
inflation, take into account extra activities, it will be seen
as a sort of minimum outcome.
37. As I understand it, GEF is used to build
in environmental sensitivity to development projects, typically
big infrastructure projects. How feasible will it be to build
in a sustainability dimension to the poverty focus work which
you are doing? In other words, how useful is it for things other
than large infrastructure projects? I understand that there is
a considerable gap between allocation and disbursement of GEF
funding. Why is that?
(Mr Davis) On the latter, there is no big gap. Commitments
are about $3 billion, disbursements are about $1.1 billion. It
started from a standing start about eight or nine years ago and
they financed projects and projects have five-year cycles and
there are not many comparable organisations which started eight
years ago. Any development organisation has a significant time
lag between commitments and disbursements and I do not think GEF
is out of line, in fact disbursement is picking up. On infrastructure,
the basic raison d'être for the GEF was to add a
global component to a project to add on to projects which countries
were doing anyway something which would deal with global issues.
On climate change, it has been concentrating on the promotion
of renewable energy, reducing market barriers to entry of firms
to try to encourage them to get into climate change work. It is
moving as it becomes more mature—and this is one of the
things we and others have been pushing in the replenishment—away
from infrastructure projects per se to much more programme
lending and dialogue with countries like Mexico, China, India,
to a kind of global programme loan, to looking at global issues
and to integrating global issues. We have encouraged the GEF to
look at the links between global environmental issues and poverty
reduction and all the things we have been talking about today
suggest that work on climate change, work on global issues, on
the preservation of biodiversity will help in poverty reduction,
but that is probably not its primary purpose. That is slightly
recognised by the fact that not all of our contribution to the
GEF is counted as aid, it is about 75 to 80 per cent. Nevertheless
it is a very valuable part of the international scene and we think
it should be supported.
Tony Worthington
38. I just want to be clear. You used the term
"procurement restrictions". Are you talking about the
Japanese insisting on a form of tied aid?
(Mr Manning) No, what we are talking about is that
the Japanese are saying if the Americans are in arrears then American
firms should not have access to the procurement.
(Mr Davis) It is mainly consultancies.
(Mr Manning) This has come up in the World Bank context
before. When the Americans get into arrears, and the Americans
famously do get into arrears, people wonder what to do and one
of the few levers you can pull is to say that in that case America
cannot benefit from this until they have paid up.
39. A sort of reverse tied aid.
(Mr Manning) Yes, that is right. It was done. It was
done ten years ago in an IDA replenishment. Whether it is effective
is something people debate a lot.
Chairman: Thank you very much for all
your help this morning. It may well be that when all of us have
had an opportunity to look at the transcript, we may have a number
of other technical questions, and Tony Colman may have one or
two, which we will feed through our Clerk, so that before our
meeting with the Secretary of State we can clear as much policy
undergrowth as possible and when we see the Secretary of State
focus on a limited number of mainstream policy issues. Thank you
very much, it has been extremely helpful. Thank you for giving
us so much time this morning and taking a range of rather complicated
questions. Order, order.
9 Ev 35. Back
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Ev 35. Back
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The Little Green Data Book, published annually by IBRD/
The World Bank. Back
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