One obvious area in which an effort is needed, and on which the Secretary-General insisted in the Millennium Report, is the area of information technology, which, if made accessible, has the potential to bring some of the poorest countries very rapidly into a new phase of development. This technology, as compared to previous industrial revolutions, has two great advantages. One, it is much cleaner. It doesn't crunch up a vast amount of natural resources and it doesn't pollute the environment in anything like the way that the big steel factories and so on do. Secondly and related to that, it is relatively cheap. You don't need a vast investment of financial capital, you need an investment of intellectual capital. And luckily brain power is the one form of power that is more or less fairly distributed among the world's peoples.

So the question is providing basic education, which would enable people to use the Internet and other forms of communication technology, and to actually bring it within their reach. That is something that the private sector can certainly help to do.

cuban cigars online The other area which I think is crying out for a review of investment policies is health. It is not something the private sector can do on its own, but it has a part to play. I have mentioned already HIV/AIDS which is the most acute problem, especially in Africa, and a recent report shows that it is becoming a very acute problem also in Russia and in other parts of the former Soviet block. I think we need a bigger investment in the search for a vaccine. We could certainly do with bigger investment in prevention and education programmes throughout the developing world. We also have to find ways of making treatment available to the millions and millions of people who are already infected and face a slow and agonizing death. There are treatments for those living in New York that are available to them but they are way out of reach for somebody living in slums or villages in Southern Africa. Some of the pharmaceutical companies did last year get together and announced a plan to try and make some quantities of drugs available at lower prices, but I think that this falls very far short of what is needed.

Of course, the problem is not limited to HIV/AIDS. In fact, malaria probably kills more people still in Africa, and specially children - whose deaths don't get reported, because they are unfortunately considered almost routine. They die in the first year or two of their lives. There are a range of diseases which are mainly affecting tropical countries and therefore mainly affecting poor people in poor countries, and these are getting perhaps 10% of the research budgets of the world when they are affecting perhaps 80 or 90% of the people in the world. That is something which could surely change.

The Secretary-General announced in his report some initiatives which are relevant to this problem. It would be quite misleading to suggest that they provide the solution but they may be an example of the way things can be done. One is specifically in the area of public health. Itís done jointly with WebMD and it is a health InterNetwork which is going to provide 10,000 on-line sites in hospitals and clinics throughout the developing world to enable them to get information relevant to their needs. Another is called UNITeS which is the United Nations Information Technology Service. It is in fact a consortium of volunteer groups to organize training in information communication technology for people in developing countries. Much of it is being provided by people from developing countries. I think that it is a widespread misconception that volunteers are essentially white eager idealistic young people who go out to the former colonial world. Of course there are such people and it is very good that there are, but a great many volunteers are actually working in their own countries or going from one developing country to another.

Clearly the developing countries themselves have to do a great deal more to make themselves attractive as a destination for investment. And in the specific area of information technology, too many of them still have state telecommunications monopolies that are charging prohibitive rates for band widths and thereby effectively pricing the Internet out of the reach for the great majority of their citizens. That's something that could be changed fairly easily.

They also need to lower tariffs and other barriers which are very often preventing products from circulating within regions of the developing world, and thereby they could enlarge their markets and make themselves more interesting to multinational companies . They certainly need to improve their communications and infrastructure and the transport costs which are prohibitive. They need to cut out corruption which is a terrible unstated tax on all economic life in many countries. They need to show respect for the rule of law because people are unlikely to invest unless they are confident. In the past, investors have done deals with governments which turned out to be unrepresentative and illegitimate in the eyes of their people, and the thing has subsequently blown up in their face.

So democracy, or at least good governance, is a crucial element in the mix. That now has become the main focus of the United Nations Development Programme which is helping developing countries to adopt policies and decisions that actually make life better for all their people, but also in the process make them more attractive to investors. One should say it is not only a question of foreign investment. There is also the question of mobilizing the resources of your own people. The former finance minister of Argentina said that he would be satisfied with his work the day when Argentines invested their own money in the country. These are two things that actually go closely together.

But of course, industrialized countries also have a very important part to play. I would say first and foremost in making sure, since they are preaching the virtues of the market to the developing world, that their own markets are actually open to products from the developing world. So often, when a developing country actually begins to produce something that can compete in the market of an industrialized country, it finds that there is some sort of quota or tariff or non-tariff barrier limiting its access. I think that is an important thing to change, and also the industrialized world needs to reduce or eliminate the subsidies that it gives to its own farmers, which result in the dumping of a great deal of food on the world market and actually make it virtually impossible for farmers in poor countries to make a living.

I have already mentioned the issue of debt relief. Don't let anyone suppose that that problem has been solved. I think there has been a lot of progress in the past six months or a year. It has come clearly on the agenda, there have been decisions to accelerate it for specific countries, but very often when enlightened decisions are taken, the extra resources are not provided to actually make them happen. Debt relief, to my mind, is just one aspect of the larger issue of development assistance which continues to be needed and will be needed, only it will never be the whole answer. No country is going to develop by simply receiving handouts from richer countries. But there are lot of countries that will never get to the point where they can help themselves through exports, through opening up their markets, without a considerable amount of technical and financial help.

Years ago the OECD countries all pledged that they would spend 0.7% of their GDP on official development assistance. Very very few, I think it is two or three in Scandinavia, have actually reached that level and most of them are way way below it.

So development is the main thrust of what the Millennium Report and the Millennium Declaration have to offer, because it is the biggest issue for most people in the world today. But of course development has to be sustainable. And it will not be sustainable if it simply follows the same energy-intensive polluting patterns of industrialization which brought the present industrialized world where it is. That is another reason for promoting information technology because, as I said, it tends to offer a leaner and cleaner path to growth. But industrialized countries also need to work much harder to agree on ways of reducing energy consumptions and emission of greenhouse gases. I don't feel too optimistic on that with the advent of the new administration in Washington but I think that even they may soon have to face the evidence that global warming is actually happening and it's not going to slow down, let alone stop, unless there is a radical change of behaviour by the big industrial economies.

There is in fact a much broader agenda of environmental issues which were extensively discussed around the time of the Earth Summit and in the immediate aftermath, but seem to have slipped down the international agenda, although most of them have got more rather than less worrying if one looks at the objective facts. I think that the coming year during which we will be preparing for the follow up event, "Rio+10", which will be held in South Africa, in 2002, is a very important occasion to try and bring those issues back clearly into the public eye.