Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-108)
MR PETER
HARDSTAFF, MR
MATT PHILLIPS,
MR STEPHEN
RAND, MR
PATRICK WATT
AND MR
SIMON WRIGHT
25 OCTOBER 2005
Q100 John Bercow: It may well be
that this is a case of the irresistible force meeting the immoveable
object, and, if that is the case, so be it, but, if I may put
it this way, that, from the vantage point of somebody who is keen
on freer trade and gradual liberalisation, it seems to me that
you want to object to one-size fits all when it suits you by saying
the policies of the World Bank and IMF have been deeply destructive
because they have been based on the supposition that a rigid market
fiscal probity approach must be applied in every case and on an
indiscriminative basis without regard to local or national circumstances,
but where, if I may say so, your ideological prejudice is in favour
of policy space by individual developing countries, you seem to
think that in a sense a one-size fits all perhaps approach is
appropriate. I do not in any way wish to do violence to your argument,
but could I put to you that it would be good if there were a consensus
that overall the objective should be to create a situation in
which developing countries would gradually open up their markets—for
their own benefit, not just for ours; not for some rich western
capitalist benefit but for their own benefit—fully accepting,
of course, that the pace at which that can realistically be expected
to be done would significantly vary between different developing
countries. Is there then some sort of consensus? Yes, it may have
to vary a lot, but it is surely a good idea to have some sort
of end-date in mind, because otherwise you are simply saying to
that country's domestic base, "Don't worry, you will never
face competition. You will not have to reform your practices;
you will have no incentive to become more efficient," and
in a way that seems to me an unnecessarily soppy attitude because
in the end those countries will suffer if they do not reform,
develop, improvise, innovate and become more efficient in the
way that the rest of the world will tend to do.
Mr Hardstaff: What I am advocating
is not one-size fits all. It is for policy flexibility, it is
for countries to pursue their own development path, whatever that
may be. There are countries that have gradually, in their own
way, liberalised—often under no pressure from the WTO or
the international community—because that government thought
it was a useful thing to do and in some cases that has yielded
benefits. I am not arguing against that. Those countries have
in different ways formulated economic policies, liberalised in
different ways and also regulated. I am not in any way arguing
against that. I question whether or not the WTO is the place where
the pressure has come to do that. The problem that we see with
the WTO is that generally we have arbitrary timeframes of implementation.
Developing countries must implement X agreement in ten years or
five years, and that obviously takes no account of their development
circumstances and what actually happens in the intervening period.
If a system could be constructed whereby, based on a range of
development criteria, you have countries changing their policies
over time, that is a whole different ball game. At the moment
we have an institution that imposes arbitrary timeframes, and
our own government, within the EU, is pushing for a level of liberalisation
and implementation that I think will damage these countries.
Q101 John Bercow: Within the Doha
development round, is the G20, in your judgment—and I ask
the team—a help or a hindrance to developing countries?
Whose interests do you think it is defending?
Mr Hardstaff: The G20 is, I think,
a useful development because it basically demonstrates that developing
countries are clubbing together. I do not think any organisation
within Make Poverty History would disagree with that. It is a
demonstration of developing countries coming together and putting
forward proposals and opinions. In terms of who they represent,
then the G20 represents the G20. I think that is a relatively
basic statement. I do not think the G20 would purport to represent
the rest of the developing world. G20 represents the positions
and interests that the G20 can agree to, and then other groupings
of countries come together to represent those interests.
Q102 John Bercow: I suppose really
the subliminal part of the question was whether, in representing
the interests of the 20, it is acting in a way that is adverse
to the interests of, for example, the G90.
Mr Hardstaff: It will vary for
different policies. It is impossible to say that, yes, they always
will benefit all developing countries or they will not. It is
such a complex negotiating landscape across the different issues
that you cannot really argue that the G20 either represents everyone
or is benefiting everyone or is not.
Mr Wright: We have seen some very
positive examples where middle-income countries have stood up
for the rights of developing countries to access medicines under
TRIPS agreements. Because Brazil and India have the capacity for
manufacture, then they also have an interest in supporting developing
countries to get those imported, so we have seen them weighing
in on those examples. There are positive cases.
Q103 Mr Hunt: I would like to move,
if I may, on to HIV/AIDS. Obviously it as one of the great breakthroughs
of the G8 summit that this 2010 goal was announced. Do you feel
that DFID and the other G8 countries have any real understanding
of the logistical challenges of getting anti-retroviral treatment
out, particularly to Africa, and the fact that it is not just
getting medicine out but you need to have a proper nutrition regime,
a proper testing regime. Even that is difficult in a country like
Kenya, but when you go to countries with less stable regimes it
becomes even more of a challenge. Do you have confidence in UNAIDS
as an agency that will be able to deliver on that? Do you have
any sense about when they are going to publish their report and
as to how they are going to get there?
Mr Wright: I meant to jump in
earlier really, when we were talking about the clear tangible
successes from the G8 and those where certainly the campaign had
contributed to their achievement. I think the commitment to AIDS
treatment from the G8 was exactly that. It is something that was
not strongly on the agenda before the campaign; at the end of
the G8 it was there as a very strong commitment. That commitment
has carried through. Some of the US amendments to the Millennium
Summit Declaration appeared to try to take that out but it ended
up in the final communique«, which was very good. Clearly,
it is a very, very ambitious target and I think it is right to
have set that ambitious target. One of the reasons why we could
have some conflict about it has been that the "3 by 5"
initiative from the World Health Organisation showed that it is
possible to dramatically increase treatment access. It did not
achieve exactly what it was working for—and we will find
out at the end of this year exactly what their analysis of the
year is—but the massive increase, particularly in sub-Saharan
Africa, in people having access to anti-retrovirals has been very
successful and it has changed very much the whole environment
of the debate. I did some work for this Committee about five years
ago when it did an inquiry into HIV and the language we used about
treatment then was entirely different. There was no conception
that these life-saving medicines which were working in rich countries
could possibly work in poor countries. Now it is very strong.
The issue is about what they have put in place to make sure that
the delivery follows that. We would see ownership coming from
the World Health Organisation and from UNAIDS, but we also want
to see the British Government carrying on the spearheading of
this. It was a very important piece of work by the UK to make
sure that it was in the G8 communique« and we would be concerned
if we felt that maybe DFID were not continuing to take a very
close interest in it. There is a blueprint being developed by
WHO at the moment. They met last week and we would say that DFID's
participation in that meeting was not adequate, it was not of
the right level, it would not have shown the right interest in
that meeting. There are a lot of questions. We are looking at
funding, of course. We said the first test of that G8 would be
the Global Fund Replenishment Conference held here in London at
the beginning of September. Our view would be that that conference
failed because it did not deliver the money that is needed, and
is needed now, to set up the systems, to support healthcare infrastructures,
in order to deliver that target. We have concerns about whether
the G8 countries are going to follow through with that commitment
and our campaigning is going to continue to push with that. You
asked a question about UNAIDS and UNAIDS capacity. Particularly
on treatment, it has been the World Health Organisation that has
done a lot of the running on that—and that is probably right,
that WHO take a particular interest in treatment. It must fit
within a much wider package and UNAIDS from our point of view
have given very good leadership, particularly on prevention, particularly
on providing the evidence base for what works and the right approach.
There are of course concerns at the moment that that consensus
that existed for a long time about using evidence, about "harm
reduction" approaches that were realistic about people's
lives, is slipping somewhat under the influence of the US and
what they call the PEPFAR[2]
scheme, which has a lot of conditions attached to it for the 15
countries that have been identified as recipients of PEPFAR funding.
We are starting to see some very worrying developments in particularly
African countries that are responding to the very censorious moral
agenda coming from the US around condoms, around sexual behaviour,
the pushing of the idea of abstinence in a very simplistic way.
What is worrying me most about that is that we are starting to
see a response to that from African countries and African leaders
who previously were listening to the UNAIDS consensus and we want
to make sure that the British Government and the Europeans, along
with other key allies, are continuing to be a counterbalance to
what the Americans are doing through the international system.
But the UNAIDS approach is one that we would back strongly, but
I think they need support. Particularly for the treatment target,
WHO will need funding from the donors, and they will need it put
in place very early if the treatment target is going to be achieved.
Q104 Ann McKechin: You mentioned
your concerns about US policy in terms of prevention. Do you have
a concern that the focus of the summits this year is on treatment
rather than prevention? Could you give some comment about whether
you think donors and also African nations are doing enough to
tackle the gender issue in terms of sexual health.
Mr Wright: I have mentioned this
Committee's report[3]
that was done five years ago. For a long time the consensus was
that the only thing that is cost-effective, that is possible to
be done, is prevention, that the only thing is to try to keep
the next generations free from infection and that is all that
can be done. Since then, there has been a worldwide movement for
treatment, led on the whole by people with HIV in developing countries
and responded to, perhaps quite slowly, by some of our organisations,
but taken up in time, and a recognition that in countries where
we are talking about perhaps one-quarter or one-third of the adult
population being infected and therefore going to fall ill in the
next few years, and countries where life expectancy has plummeted
as a result of HIV, to ignore treatment would be a massive failure
and would also damage the ability of communities to withstand
poverty, to find the strategies that have kept families and communities
going. So I think the shift in emphasis this year—and it
did need a strong push around treatment—was absolutely right.
I hope we are going to be in a situation where we can start to
say now that there should not be any false dichotomy between the
two, because it is not a case of either or. Prevention does not
work unless you have the possibility of treatments to make people
come forward for testing, to give people some kind of reason to
disclose that they have HIV, rather than the kind of silence about
it that drives the epidemic in so many countries. Similarly, treatment
will not work unless it actually has a prevention element. If
we are going to continue to have a number of people infected and
keep people alive, then that becomes unsustainable in the long-term.
I think the balance is right. We need to look at what is coming
out of international institutions, out of DFID and the UK Government,
to make sure they are taking account of that balance. If there
is going to be an EU Development Minister statement coming soon,
we want that to be very strong about a European evidence-based
approach to prevention but it must also make a commitment to Europe
playing its part in the delivery of the treatment target.
Q105 Hugh Bayley: I think we have made
some important progress this year on aid and on debt. But what
we have are pledges, and it is important to turn the pledges into
action both from donor countries and in the South; compliance
with the NEPAD Programme; making sure the Peer Review Mechanism
is a useful tool to improving development success. If I have a
criticism of Make Poverty History it is that it all seemed so
simple: it was only a lack of commitment or will on the part of
western leaders that was stopping poverty being made history,
and, yet, if we stop to think about it, even if we had achieved
everything we wanted from the various meetings this year, it still
would have been a 20-year haul to make poverty history. One of
the things we need to do as politicians is to campaign, to go
back to the lobbying, saying, "If you really want to make
poverty history, you are in it for 10 or 20 years." I am
interested in how we create mechanisms which hold the feet of
our governments in the North, and of the developing countries,
African governments, in the South, to the fire, to make sure they
deliver on what they have promised. The executive branches' forum
is the Africa Partnership Forum and I am not sure it has the teeth
to hold governments to account, but it is the vehicle we have
to build on and strengthen because it is the one that is there.
What would you like to see the forum doing in terms of reporting
and publishing information in its annual report which it says
it will produce? What role do you think parliaments North and
South should have in calling debates and holding their own ministers
to account for performance in relation to the goals set? What
role can your organisations play, particularly in developing countries,
to build the capacity in African parliaments to get these debates
happening more often than they do now. Some countries in Africa
are doing a good job, but others really have a long way to go.
Mr Phillips: That is quite a rich
question, with quite a few angles in it.
Chairman: You need not pick up on the
first half, because we have had that discussion already.
Hugh Bayley: I beg your pardon.
Mr Phillips: Yes, we did talk
about that.
Hugh Bayley: Starting from what should
be required of a partnership forum and what role can parliamentarians
play in strengthening that.
Mr Phillips: We are coming from
a perspective of requiring governments to be held to account,
and that is by both civil society and by representatives such
as parliamentarians. That is our starting point. With my Save
the Children hat on, we are dealing with empowering children to
be part of that process. Children are very much excluded routinely
from those kinds of processes—indeed, there are very few
children who are parliamentarians: I do not see any around the
table here!
Hugh Bayley: We just behave like
that!
Mr Phillips: There are points
about those who are not included through traditional structures
who also have to be part of scrutinising governments in the South,
as well as here, about the commitments that they have made. We
definitely see that implementation gap between the high-minded
paper commitments and the actual delivery. We do not look at the
G8, for instance, as having a very strong track record of delivering
their policies. We saw a whole debate opening up about the MDGs
in the course of this year and have not seen an action plan which
is going to be sufficient to achieve those goals. That is a real
key implementation issue. Our whole purpose from the campaigning
point of view has been to mobilise people to hold governments
to account, and to press them to move forward as they need to
on poverty eradication. Whether all those answers are going to
be wrapped up in the Africa Partnership Forum, I very much doubt,
frankly. That may play a specific role in terms of the specific
components of what the G8 talked about, the Commission for Africa
talked about. We will keep an open mind on that. If we are part
of the process of civil society North and South, alongside parliaments,
working with parliaments and challenging parliaments, if we are
in there being part of that scrutiny and part of that is the report-back
process, then we will have a lot more confidence in it than if
we are not. We will be able to expose it to the light of public
scrutiny and get communities to hold their governments to account
much more closely if we are part of the process and part of the
process of transparency. That is really one of the big asks of
civil society in the South, that money flows from the North, that
decisions that are taken North and South are in the end exposed
to their ability to hold their governments to account and our
ability to hold our government to account. As organisations, we
are not going to go away. Make Poverty History is a very diverse
set up, made up of unions, faith groups, NGOs, youth groups. A
whole range of organisations are involved. Some organisations
are present in the developing world; some are just acting in solidarity
and partnership with the developing world. That leaves us a great
deal of ability to exchange views, to keep track of what is going
on. We are part of the process of holding to account and we certainly
are going to be here for the long-run. But we do need to see real
solid mechanisms coming from governments, and governments introducing
those kinds of mechanisms which really are scrutinising progress.
Q106 Joan Ruddock: Obviously you
are talking about being around for a long time, but, if we think
about next year, 2006, what would be your top five things that
DFID ought to do and what might be your five top things that you
ought to do?
Mr Phillips: Perhaps I might ask
colleagues to intervene on this as well. There are a number of
key points. We have not yet had the big progress that we need
on the trade issue. We have got the big ministerial coming up.
We have yet to see what progress will or will not be made on that,
so there is bound to be a whole range of issues around government
approach to trade policy and about what the EU does in terms of
trade policy and about what international progress is. I think
that is going to be a package of issues which is going to come
out there. In macro terms, looking at the financing side, we have
not seen enough money in the course of this year being pledged
and therefore the money that has come through has to work incredibly
effectively for poverty eradication. If DFID now starts to concentrate
wholeheartedly on pulling together international consensus on
making aid much more effective, on tackling issues like conditionality
issues, then it would be making sure that the resources that are
there can be used effectively for poverty eradication and we can
start to get that investment package in place to allow developing
countries to have sufficient numbers of their population who are
literate, healthy, able to be productive members of international
business and so on and so forth. We will see progress made through
the investment package coming through. We are going to need that
strongly focused on effectiveness. I think there are going to
be other macro issues in terms of looking at what could be done
now, given that the international community has not pledged the
policy change and finances sufficient to deliver the MDGs. That
is going to be quite a big structural issue that we will want
to look at. Perhaps I could ask for one key thing from each of
my colleagues.
Mr Watt: I am not sure how far
we are towards five things for DFID to do and five things for
us to do. However, one thing DFID could do—and it has taken
the lead so far, but it has not really managed to secure the backing
of a lot of the other major donor countries—is to build
momentum and give teeth to the aid effectiveness agenda in the
OECD DAC[4].
There was a series of commitments for the year 2010 made earlier
this year—to improve aid effectiveness on a range of issues,
from aligning aid with country budgets and procurement systems,
to better coordinating aid, to untying aid—but those targets
at the moment lack teeth. We have to move forward on that agenda
in terms of tightening up the targets, ensuring that there is
effective monitoring of those targets, and the data is published
in a disaggregated way that enables civil society to hold donor
governments to account for what they are doing in terms of the
quality of the aid they are providing. I think that is going to
be doubly important in the coming years, that if we do see an
increase in aid, that we have an aid system fit for purpose that
can ensure that aid gets to the right destination.
Q107 Chairman: More aid effectiveness?
Mr Watt: In terms of what we should
do, I would suggest that we need to do more work in terms of building
the campaigning capacity of the partners of the South, working
with the partners in the South to ensure that there is a very
strong campaign in countries, particularly in Africa, to hold
governments and donors to account.
Mr Rand: I am going to cheat,
because my one point is that we need to make more progress on
debt, and then I can very quickly list what that would mean. It
means delivering the current aid; extending it (more creditors,
more countries, more debts); ending economic policy conditions;
a new process for dealing with debt for the future which takes
human need into account rather than financial criteria; thinking
about issues about odious debt and the repatriation of stolen
assets needs to be moved on. Those are all in my one.
Mr Hardstaff: Matt has summed
up very well on trade policy and all conditionality. In terms
of a sub-set on trade policy, hopefully this year, but if it carries
over to the next year, the key thing is to drop the European Union's
proposed benchmarking proposal in GATS and also greater flexibility
in industrial tariffs in poor countries. In terms of what we should
do, obviously scrutinising the UK Government as we have already
tried to do, and then, as Patrick has mentioned, working with
campaigners in the Global South.
Mr Wright: Particularly for HIV,
apart from playing a role in sorting out things like TRIPS[5],
I think DFID need to balance their present country ownership with
the extent to which they could be accountable for delivery of
internationally agreed targets. It would be wrong to see DFID
saying, "We got the target and then we handed it over to
international institutions and you cannot judge us by its delivery.
We will play a part." DFID is very, very powerful, very influential,
and, particularly on the treatment target, because it is so new
and so ambitious, it needs to get behind it, bring all the UK
Government behind it, to try to make it deliverable. For us, it
is what has already been said really: we need to keep taking the
campaigners with whom we can communicate on a journey that deepens
their understanding about how development must be achieved, how
the changes can be achieved. They are not quick wins. At the end
of this year poverty will not have been made history, but steps
are made, steps will be made next year, and we need to take them
further and keep them engaged, rather than it just being a fashionable
one-year "white band" thing.
Q108 Hugh Bayley: Chairman, may I go
back to my question because I do not think there was any answer
at all. The question was: What role should parliamentarians North
and South play in progress chasing? Could we look, perhaps, just
at the South. I am slightly surprised at your agenda but you have
not mentioned parliamentarians at all. They are the people elected
to represent the people of these African countries. What role
should parliamentarians in Africa be playing to check on how aid
is used; to check at whether it is used effectively; to look at
conditionality, whether these are appropriate conditions or not?
Mr Phillips: I am glad you reminded
us on that, because I put a note down and forgot to answer it
directly. In the North, one of the key things we would like to
see is the continued momentum of parliamentarians behind the campaigning
and using the platform that campaigning represents to keep the
issues high and to keep the pressure on what the rich countries
and donors can do. You as parliamentarians supported Make Poverty
History in unprecedented numbers, frankly, in the period before
the election, for which we are hugely grateful. One of the key
things we would really like to see happen is for parliamentarians
to be working with other parliamentarians, working together to
demonstrate to the governments that parliamentarians are talking
to each other and strategising with each other and holding them
to account and sharing information. Those kinds of things are
really crucial. Secondly, it is linking with civil society and
making sure that civil society voice has the opportunity to get
through, so that the parliamentarians make sure that the voices
of the poor get heard in the debates in their own countries and
that those voices are facilitated through their parliamentarians,
getting directly through, and that those parliamentarians actually
listen to those voices and they hear the incredibly strong weight
of mass popular opinion that has been expressed in the course
of this year. If it does not happen every year, you are not allowed
to forget it. You are allowed to say, "In 2005 we heard this
voice and that sustained us for an extended period," because
it takes an awful lot of effort to get this number of people who
have heard their voice expressed this year mobilised in a coherent
way. We cannot do it every year, it has to be something exceptional,
but we want you to continue using that and we want you to be building
those links in connection with others. We do see parliaments as
having an absolutely fundamental role in scrutinising in particular
and in holding governments to account. We want to reinforce that,
but we want to make sure the civil society voice is in there along
with it, that they are not a forgotten part of the population,
like children, whose voices get ignored in the course of the adult
politicking.
Chairman: It is the job of this Committee
to ensure that it does not end at the end of 2005, and we do not
intend to let it. We have had some fairly robust exchanges. There
is agreement in this Committee that we want more aid and we want
it to be more effective and we want to get solutions, but there
is a clear need to ensure that we understand the mechanisms and
the arguments and the intellectual rigour and the follow through.
I think this exchange has been helpful to us. One particular thing
I pick up from this is that you want us to put more pressure on
DFID to put more pressure on international institutions to follow
the lead that this government has initiated. I think that is something
that we will want to take forward. Certainly when we are visiting
these institutions I rely on my colleagues in this Committee to
take some of your arguments to them and either get answers or
get signs that we are helping to shift where we think it is relevant.
The exchanges we are having with you and I am sure we will continue
to have are really important to add into that. Could I say thank
you all very much indeed.
2 The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief Back
3
International Development Committee, HIV/AIDS: the impact
on social and economic development, Third Report, HC 354-I
and II, Session 2000-01 Back
4
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development: Development
Assistance Committee Back
5
Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Back
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