Trade and Development for Poverty Eradication and Food Security
Deva
(PPE-DE). – Mr President, we meet here as the World Summit on
Sustainable Development is meeting in South Africa, following the
ground-breaking meeting of the WTO in Doha last year. It is also the day
that the new Director-General of the World Trade Organisation takes
office. Dr Supachai Panitchpakdi is the first Director-General from a
developing country. We wish him well and also acknowledge with thanks
the hard work done by Mr Mike Moore, the departing Director-General.
Let us remind ourselves of the United Nations Secretary-General's report
on globalisation to the Millennium Assembly. He said that inclusive
globalisation must be built on the great enabling force of the market
and market forces alone will not achieve it. It requires a broader
effort to create a shared future based on our common humanity.
This report is an attempt to bring the Secretary-General's hopes into a
legislative framework here in the European Parliament. It is trade, not
aid, that will eliminate world poverty and accelerate sustainable
development. It is trade, not aid, in partnership with the global
business community that will increase industrial, intellectual,
educational and infrastructural capacities in developing countries and
repeat what is now called the Asian miracle, which I am told is alive
and well in China. It is trade, not aid, that will drive the solutions
to food security, clean water, housing, sanitation and information
technology through foreign direct and inward investment.
Over the past 50 years, world trade has increased 19-fold. Production
has more than quadrupled and world per capita income has doubled. But
unfortunately the human development report shows that the spread of
technology, trade and wealth has not been equal, with the world's
richest nations accounting for 20% of the world's population but 86% of
the world's GDP, 82% of exports, 68% of foreign direct investment and
93% of Internet users. 64 countries are categorised in this group but
the biggest proportion of the world's people are in the medium
development category, including India, China and Indonesia and so on.
These people are having severe structural, infrastructural,
environmental and population problems. There are 51 chronically
low-income countries, mainly in Africa but also in Asia and Central
America, which depend entirely on aid because there is very little
direct foreign investment.
We have to look at the world as it is, not the way we think the world
should be. In the world as it is, the combined gross national product of
182 developing countries is less than the global turnover of the top 200
of the largest multinational companies, the transnational corporations,
of which there are 65 000 in all. There are 200 chairmen of
transnational corporations whose combined turnover is bigger than the
combined GNPs of presidents and finance ministers of 182 countries,
encompassing probably the largest population groups in the world.
But my report proposes that the people who are running these huge
multinational corporations are brought into the development process,
first by encouraging them to accept good governance and corporate social
responsibility as enunciated by the United Nations Secretary-General. We
must create a framework in which the European Parliament, members of
national parliaments and the directors of these companies can come
together in a forum regularly, twice a year, with the rotating
presidency of the EU to discuss matters of development and
sustainability, not once in a blue moon as in Johannesburg or in Rio,
but in a continuous dialogue.
As part of this, I have proposed in my report that they set up something
called an ethical investment committee on the lines of remuneration
committees and other committees in boards of directors. The committee's
job would be to identify development investment, investment as offset
investments in developing countries. About 0.7% of their turnover in
that country would go into investment projects to build intellectual,
educational and infrastructural capacity in developing countries. That
way everybody gains: the company because it gets a more skilled labour
force and the country because it improves its capacity. I hope that
Parliament will approve my proposal unanimously.
May I thank the many people who have helped me with this report and
express the hope that it will be passed tomorrow without any dissension.
