Tony Giddens:

Good afternoon everybody. I'm Tony Giddens, the Director of the LSE. It's my great pleasure to welcome you all here this afternoon and to extend a particular welcome to the School to Mr Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations and naturally I can't exaggerate how pleased we are that you found time to come to visit the LSE.

Using his charm, gentle powers of persuasion and the unequalled legitimacy of his position, Kofi Annan has become universally regarded as an honest broker among world leaders, winning the respect of everyone from Colonel Gaddafi to Jesse Helms.

He has done an enormous amount to restore the reputation of the United Nations. Thanks to his commitment to budgetary, administrative and strategic reform, the United Nations has been transformed from an organisation sometimes seen as bureaucratic and hollow, into a pioneer of new forms of governance through alliances between nations, corporations, NGOs and other groups.

Jointly with the United Nations he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for rising to new challenges such as those presented by HIV Aids and for bringing new vigour to the organisation to which he has devoted his entire working life.

I believe this is his first visit to the London School of Economics, but we're doubly pleased to have him here because the LSE has a long history of collaboration with the United Nations and when I visited the United Nations recently I was quite amazed to see the number of LSE alumni who have penetrated almost all levels of the organisation.

In conjunction with this I'd just like to mention that the LSE and Colombia University are organising a State of the Planet Conference on May 13 and 14 in New York City as part of the lead up to the Johannesburg summit.

Well ladies and gentlemen now please give Mr Kofi Annan a very warm LSE welcome.

Applause.

Kofi Annan:

Thank you, Professor Giddens, for that very kind introduction.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It’s a great honour for me to speak at the London School of Economics, which counts among its alumni so many heroes of the struggle for independence and for development in the former colonial world – including Kwame Nkrumah, the founder-president of my own country.

What I want to talk to you about this afternoon is essentially the continuation of that struggle.

Independence was achieved, but development has been very uneven – especially in Africa, which since independence has fallen sadly behind some other parts of the developing world. 

I do not need to describe for you the multiple hardships to which so many of our fellow human beings are subjected, each of which makes it harder to escape from the others: poverty, hunger, disease, oppression, conflict, pollution, depletion of natural resources. 

Development means enabling people to escape from that vicious circle.

Like the struggle for independence, the struggle for development has to be carried on mainly in developing countries and by their people.  Its first prerequisites are basic security, the rule of law, and honest, transparent administration – which only national governments can provide.

But it is a struggle that concerns the whole world.  Developed countries like this one have a strong interest in the outcome – both in whether development succeeds and in what form it takes. 

They can also do much to influence that outcome.  It is to institutions like this Centre for the Study of Global Governance that we look for intellectual leadership.  LSE can play a part in this struggle no less important than its part in the previous one.

Eighteen months ago, at the Millennium Summit in New York, world leaders reached agreement on some immediate targets, the Millennium Development Goals, for halving extreme poverty in the world by 2015 by tackling both its worst symptoms and its most obstinate causes.

Those goals are ambitious, but even if we achieve them the struggle will not be won.  There will still be hundreds of millions of people lacking the minimum requirements of human dignity.  There will still be a great deal to be done.

And it will all be in vain if the achievement cannot be sustained.  So it is equally important that we achieve another goal set by world leaders at the Summit: “to free all of humanity, and above all our children and grandchildren, from the threat of living on a planet irredeemably spoilt by human activities, and whose resources would no longer be sufficient for their needs”.

I believe success depends on the answers to three global questions, each of them associated particularly with one of the three international conferences referred to in the title of my lecture.

The first question is: Will men and women in the developing world be allowed to compete on fair terms in the global market?

That question received the beginning – but only the beginning – of a positive answer at last November’s meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Doha.

The second question is: How can we mobilise the resources so desperately needed for development?

That question will be discussed next month at the International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico.

And the third question – a more complex one – is:  Can the people now living on this planet improve their lives, not at the expense of future generations, but in a way from which their children and grandchildren will benefit?

That, of course, will be the issue at the World Summit on Sustainable Development that begins in Johannesburg six months from tomorrow.

The three questions are clearly related, and the conferences should be seen as a continuum, not as isolated events.

Poor people in poor countries are not asking for a handout.  What they want is a hand up.  Indeed, the poor are enormous, untapped reservoirs of initiative and entrepreneurship, but their energies are often held in check by poverty, misrule or conflict.  They would be the first to say that trade, not aid, is the path out of poverty. 

That’s why it’s so important that we fulfil the promise of Doha – the promise of a “development round” of trade negotiations, which will remove the unfair subsidies now given to producers in rich countries, and fully open the markets of those countries to labour-intensive exports from poor ones. 

Not only do these subsidies make it impossible for developing countries to compete.  They also do great damage to the rich countries themselves, by perpetuating unsustainable practices in farming, transport and energy use.

Powerful interest groups within rich countries will try hard to block meaningful concessions to the developing world.  They will argue that the interests of workers and farmers are being sacrificed. 

But there are other ways to help those groups that really need help – ways less costly to consumers and taxpayers in rich countries, and less harmful to producers in poor ones.  To fulfil the promise of Doha, political and business leaders in the developed world must rise above special pleading and narrow sectoral interests.

However, even if developed countries were to declare their markets fully open, developing countries would still need help in walking through the door.

Flowers Kiev, send flower to Ukraine, flowers Odessa. Many small and poor countries do not attract investment – not because they are badly governed or have unfriendly policies, but simply because they are too small and poor to be interesting markets or to become major producers, and because they lack the skills, infrastructure and institutions that a successful market economy needs.  The unpleasant truth is that markets put a premium on success, and tend to punish the poor for the very fact of being poor.

At Monterrey, leaders from north and south – presidents, finance ministers, the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, heads of private companies and foundations, and NGOs – will come together to discuss creative, practical ways of overcoming this market failure. 

They will address issues crucial to the fight against poverty and the transition to sustainability – such as debt relief, commodity prices, and the management of the global economy. 

They will seek ways to tap private investment, which is a far bigger source of money for development than official development assistance will ever be.  The question is how to tap it with the right mix of incentives, policies and partnerships.

But I hope the leaders of industrialised countries will also give new commitments of official aid – as Gordon Brown, for one, has so eloquently urged. 

I know that simply writing off debt, or giving away any particular sum of money, will not guarantee results, and that taxpayers in some rich countries have become wary of foreign aid as a general proposition. 

But I have found they are almost invariably responsive, when you present them with a major human problem and a credible strategy for dealing with it – as I think we are now doing with the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Our greatest challenge is to show that these problems are part of an even bigger problem – the problem of global poverty and underdevelopment.  Islands of treatment are a vital start; but we must also address the larger sea of misery.

There is a global deal on the table: developing countries doing more to reform their economies and increase spending on the needs of the poor, while the rich countries support this with trade, aid, investment and debt relief.  At Monterrey, let us clinch that deal!

And now I come to Johannesburg.

The World Summit on Sustainable Development is not, as some people think, simply another conference on the global environment.  The whole idea of sustainable development, reflected in the Rio Earth Summit ten years ago, is that environment and development are inextricably linked.

Much was achieved at Rio.  Agenda 21, adopted there, remains as visionary today as it was then – and local authorities and civil society in almost every part of the world have been working to implement it.  Moreover, legally binding conventions on climate change, biodiversity and desertification have been added since then, as well the action plans adopted at United Nations conferences throughout the 1990s, now brought together in the Millennium Development Goals.

And yet there is a feeling of loss of momentum. 

As our attention has been focused on conflict, on globalisation, or most recently on terrorism, we have often failed to see how these are connected to the issue of sustainability.  That word has become a pious invocation, rather than the urgent call to concrete action that it should be.

Prevailing approaches to development remain fragmented and piecemeal; funding is woefully inadequate; and production and consumption patterns continue to overburden the world’s natural life support systems. 

Sustainable development may be the new conventional wisdom, but many people have still not grasped its meaning.  One important task at Johannesburg is to show that it is far from being as abstract as it sounds.  It is a life-or-death issue for millions upon millions of people, and potentially the whole human race. 

Let me try to put some human faces on it.

One of them might be that of a woman in a rural district – it could be in India, or almost any African country – who, year by year, finds she has to go further and further in search of water and fuel. 

Her back aches from the long journey carrying a heavy load, but her heart aches even more from the fear that failure will expose herself and her children to hunger, thirst and disease.  How much longer can her way of life be sustained?

Another face might be that of a son or cousin of that woman who, precisely because that rural way of life was no longer sustainable for a growing population, is now living in an urban slum or shantytown.  He has no work – or rather, he lacks the training and resources needed to start work, though his community desperately needs the contribution he could make. 

What is worse, although he himself does not know it, he is infected with HIV, and has passed it on to his wife.  How much longer can this way of life be sustained?

A third face might be that of someone who looks much better off than the first two.  He lives in a house or apartment, owns a car and has a job in one of the rapidly growing East Asian cities.  But at this moment he has been sitting in that car for an hour, and it is not moving.  He is eager to get home to his wife and children but he is stuck among thousands like himself, all pounding on their horns and still running their engines.  

He also has a respiratory disease, caused by toxic chemicals in the factory where he works; and his children suffer from asthma. 

He wants to get away from this environment, and he is saving money to pay for false travel documents so that he can join his brother in Europe or North America.  What he does not realise is that his way of life when he gets there may not be so very different.  The more “development” follows this pattern, the less sustainable it is going to be in any part of the world.

Indeed, the fourth face may be that of any of us in this room. 

We lead immensely privileged lives, compared to the vast majority of our fellow human beings.  But we do so by consuming much more than our share of the earth’s resources, and by leaving a much larger “footprint” of waste and pollution on the global environment.  Moreover, our way of life is highly visible to many who cannot share it, but who see it in glamorised form on flickering screens in those slums and shantytowns.  It is, one could say, flaunted before them as the model of “development” to which they should aspire. 

But is it sustainable, and if so, for how many people? 

Certainly not, in its present form, for all the six billion who already inhabit this planet – let alone the nine, or twelve or fifteen billion who will inhabit it, depending on which scenario you adopt, in the decades to come.

Our way of life has to change, but how, and how fast? 

Agenda 21 and all that flowed from it can be said to have given us the “what” – “what” the problem is, what principles must guide our response. 

Johannesburg must give us the “how” -- how to bring about the necessary changes in state policy; how to use policy and tax incentives to send the right signals to business and industry; how to offer better choices to individual consumers and producers; how, in the end, to get things done.

Far from being a burden, sustainable development is an exceptional opportunity – economically, to build markets and create jobs; socially, to bring people in from the margins; and politically, to reduce tensions over resources that could lead to violence and to give every man and woman a voice, and a choice, in deciding their own future. 

One thing we have learnt over the years is that neither doom-and-gloom scenarios nor destructive criticism will inspire people and Governments to act.  What is needed is a positive vision, a clear road map for getting from here to there, and a clear responsibility assigned to each of the many actors in the system. 

Johannesburg must give us that vision – a vision of a global system in which every country has a place, and a share in the benefits.  And it must give us all a clear sense of our share in the task.

As Tony Blair has said, "there is no answer to any of these problems except one based on mutual responsibility."  Governments have their responsibilities, but so do corporations, civil society groups, and private individuals.  I hope at Johannesburg we shall see them all come together in a new coalition – a coalition for responsible prosperity.

In an era of rapid change, it must mark a break with business as usual. 

In an era of great wealth, it must show how wealth can be shared by all those living, and preserved for those who come after. 

And in an era of insecurity, it must offer the prospect of peace through hope – hope that life tomorrow will be better – safer, fairer, more enjoyable – than it is today.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Will these three conferences – Doha, Monterrey, Johannesburg – find a place in the history books?  It depends on us.  If we do not fulfil their promise, they will disappear into the dryest of footnotes.  But I like to think that they will merit a chapter in themselves – a chapter that can be summarised like this:

 “Challenged by the goals its political leaders had set at the Millennium Summit, and shocked into a stronger sense of common destiny by the horror of 11 September 2001, during the following twelve months the human race at last summoned the will to tackle the really tough issues facing it.  In passionate debates, held in the meeting-rooms and corridors of three great world assemblies, it painstakingly assembled the tools, thrashed out the strategies, and formed the creative partnerships that were needed to do the job.”

That’s what I should like to read in fifteen years’ time.  Let’s resolve to make it come true!                            

              Thank you very much.

Applause

Lord Desai:

Thank you very much, Secretary General. That was a splendid speech. It reminded me of something that Mahbub ul Haq, who gave a lot of his life to the UN once said, ‘sustainable development is a question of quality of life for the rich countries but is a question of life for the poor countries’ and we have to remember that.

We are very, very grateful that you have actually made us aware of the really serious problems the world faces, rather than just those that which make the headlines. Now I invite questions about the lecture. Who would like to ask questions? Let’s take four or five questions at once. Gentleman at the back there.

Q: Secretary General, thank you very much for a wonderful talk. I speak as someone myself born in Africa, born in Burundi and brought up in Kenya and I’m so glad you mentioned what is a hot potato and the thing about the LSE is that we are prepared, I hope, to tackle hot potatoes but you only just mentioned it and that’s the hot potato of population of human numbers. You mentioned it in a way that so often it is mentioned by economists and sociologists as a kind of constant to which we must somehow try to adapt rather than something amenable to voluntary non-coercive modification. There are eighty million extra people as you know coming on the planet every year at the moment and we could go up to fifteen billion, as you say. The only way out of poverty is development and development must be done by damaging the environment, mustn’t it? - You’ve got to have a minimum amount of energy consumption and pollution and resource consumption. With three billion people already needing that help and eighty million a year arriving also almost all needing that help how can we do it Secretary General without implementing the Cairo agenda and let’s have more money. Cairo called for seventeen billion dollars a year to go to reproductive health. Will the UN make sure that this happens? It’s only five billion at the moment.

Q: Thank you. We find ourselves trapped in the notion that it’s the responsibility of the rich countries to help finance development in the poor world, and yet in the face of major global environmental problems like climate change, the severity of global disturbance of the atmosphere actually posits the situation that we might be living in a phase at the end of human development. We’ve seen how a single extreme weather event can put back social development in say central America by three or four decades. I’d just like to ask a question about whether we can move forward without acknowledging the fact that rather than the rich countries financing development in the poor countries, it’s actually the poor countries through lending us their own environmental space who finance development in the rich countries and if we were to put a price tag on that we’d see that the kind of flows of concessional resources going to developing countries from the rich world are a tiny fraction of a percent of the way in which it’s the developing world who have been supporting our lifestyles.

Q: Hello Secretary General, David Bull from UNICEF. There was one other conference which should have taken place last September but was delayed unfortunately by the events of September 11^th and will now be happening in May, the UN General Assembly Special Session on Children and I wonder how that fits into this journey around the world which you’ve described and the role which our young people must play if the future vision which you’ve painted for us is to become a reality. Thank you.

Kofi Annan: On the question of reproductive health I think you are quite right that it is essential that we control our population growth and I think we’ve also noticed there is a direct correlation between the level of development and the rate of population growth and as societies develop and open up you will notice a drop in the population rate. And therefore we should really be intensifying those efforts.

You are asking me if the money will be available, if the UN can raise the money but the UN is the member states.  In fact, in the discussions that we are having and in my own contacts with leaders almost on any of these issues, apart from sensible plans, apart from the poor countries making the efforts to strengthen their institutions and regulatory systems and create the right environment, we have also appealed to the developed world  to make its contribution.

Whether it’s AIDS, whether it’s health and development, whatever it is on population control, additional resources are needed and this is one of the important aspects of the conference we are going to have in Monterrey where Gordon Brown for example last indicated we should try and set up a Millennium fund which will require fifty billion dollars a day to tackle some of the issues – a year, fifty billion dollars a year. You were very polite. Nobody reacted to fifty billion dollars a day until I corrected myself. That would be nice.

Fifty billion dollars a year. Of course this would be a collective effort, I don’t imply that it must all come from the United Kingdom (so you tax payers don’t get overly worked up about it). But it will take resources and the resources will have to come from governments. We can play the advocacy role, we can work with governments to understand the issues but the money will have to come from the governments and you here in this hall can be good advocates in explaining the issue and getting governments and policy makers to respond. 

On the question of responsibility of the rich for the poor I think you make a good point, and by the way let me say that I think there has been a shift. No one in the development business or the UN today is insisting that the rich is entirely responsible for the poor and the poor need not make an effort, in fact we are encouraging and working with the poor to make their own contributions to take a look at their own societies and to create an enabling environment that will release the creative energies of their own population with the north or the developed countries helping.

But I think on the question you raised about consumption and the price tag that could be put on the environmental space of the poor, I could agree with you but how do we get policy makers and governments to accept that proposition? I think it is a real issue and in fact when you attend these conferences from Doha to some of the meetings that we are going to hold, today I’m not sure any government is going to be ready to accept that responsibility, but it is something that we need to look at and I think as we look at the consumption patterns and we begin to question the environment and the threat it poses for all of us we will need to put greater value on it, not just in the developing world but even in the north and the way we are exploiting the resources in an unsustainable manner. 

On the Children’s Summit, yes it will be in May. The preparations are going ahead in New York. We expect to have quite a few Heads of State attending that meeting and I think UNICEF has done a great job preparing the conference and raising awareness and what I’m talking about affects the children perhaps the most. We are talking about the future. We are talking about the leaders of the 21^st century. How do we prepare them in terms of education, in terms of giving them healthy lives, making sure that we leave them a healthy planet? So the children fit in very much here. If I did not mention them I did not intend to imply that they are irrelevant in the scheme of things. In fact they are at the centre of it and should be seen as such and on occasions like this I like to quote an African proverb which says that ‘the Earth is not ours. It’s a treasure we hold in trust for our children and their children.’ I hope our generation will be worthy of that trust. Sometimes I wonder. Thank you.

Q: Hello. Secretary General I was at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban and one of the comments you made there was the importance of the new global civil society which was very evident in Durban and one of the things I observed in Durban was the way in which civil society, especially with the help of South Africa and their experience, to some extent started taking over the conference at lots of different levels. The meeting that’s happening in Johannesburg will not have the same facilities that we had in Durban, how can you ensure that civil society has the same ability to negotiate and to relate to the leaders in Johannesburg that we had in Durban?

Q:  Hi, Secretary General. You described the routes to sustainable development via Doha and the free international trade, but do you believe we can really ever reach sustainable development or achieve sustainable development by a path that involves more and more transport of goods and resources around the globe and so contributes to climate change?

Q (Tony Benn): Secretary General, you spoke of your work in a post colonial period, but is it not a fact the greatest empire the world has ever known is now growing? That it has set out as its objective full spectrum dominance of land, sea, air and information? Is engaged in a massive rearmament programme and has announced its intention to change the regimes of some countries by force? How does that fit in with the development project that you have in mind?

Q: Thank you Secretary General. I was going to ask a similar question more directly which is how do you deal with the America problem? In your tour from Doha to Johannesburg you’re full of hope and I think we all have to have hope, but to make that hope a reality we’ve got to have some change of heart in the United States. In the preparations for Monterrey there doesn’t seem to have been a new opening up, there doesn’t seem to have been that new dawning of realisation that you hoped for in your press release. Their delegates to the Prepcom for Monterrey were hermetically sealed to any prospect of further debt relief, to fairer trade and to levering up their miserable aid to the Third World. How do you feel that the rest of the world has to relate to the United States? How do you see your role to enable the United States to become less introverted, more open and generous to the rest of the world?

Q: Secretary General, first of all thank you very much for your talk and secondly what, if any, is the UN’s support to the NEPAD initiative by African governments and African states and do you think that they can go it alone? That is, if there is no support from outside can African countries go alone? Thank you.

Q: Secretary General, thank you for your very inspiring address. For those of us who were at the World Trade Organisation ministerial meeting in Doha I think we would say that the starting point for this journey perhaps gives cause for concern. What we saw was the rich countries there, not only the United States but also the European Union, were pressing ahead with their own agenda while using a rhetoric of development but frankly out of Doha what emerged was an agenda that was profoundly in the interests of the European Union and the US and actually made no progress on making trade rules fairer to the poor. There is in this country a campaign starting up called The Trade Justice Movement which we anticipate will involve many thousands of people campaigning for fairer trade rules. What advice could you give people in the north about ways to use their influence in order to make your agenda happen? Thank you.

Kofi Annan: Thank you very much. On the issue of civil society you’ve posed a question comparing Durban to Johannesburg and asking if civil society will have the same influence and the same power in Johannesburg as it did in Durban and if the conference is structured in a manner that will allow their voice to be heard.

I think the conference will be structured in a manner that the voices of all stake holders, civil society, the private sector, foundations and others and governments and international organisations will be heard, but I hope we will not see what happened in Durban happen – you yourself said, civil society almost took over the conference. We are going there to exchange ideas, we are going there to discuss a common problem and work together on a common programme and I hope we will all come with an open approach and not a determination by one group or the other to take over. And the governments and the international organisations must be open and they must be open to the impersonal advice from civil society and others and I think if we all work together we will have a very, I hope, a successful conference. 

On trade,  the question has been posed will it be viable to keep producing goods and transporting them around the globe and not harm the environment? But I think this is also one of the areas where we’ve all talked about the green revolution and the fact that we should be able to come up with approaches that will not pollute the air as much. On the other hand we have to be quite honest. If we do not move goods around, take food for example, there are parts of the world which are not able to feed themselves. There are parts in the developing world which does quite a lot of trade in commodities and other things, and they should be able to move them out. The question is not moving out the goods but how you move them out and what means you use and what sort of transport and equipment and what type of technology you develop in the future so that you don’t keep on polluting the environment and I think this is where we challenge scientists to come up with more green technology and in the developing world if I may add I also challenge the scientists to come up with other sources of energy and sources of energy for the poor so that they don’t have to cut the trees to warm their water and to cook and all that.

On the question of the US policy I think I had two questions, one from the Honourable Tony Benn and the other question about how we can influence US policy. Let me say that I don’t speak for Washington. I represent the United Nations and our approach on policies are often quite different. Take the issue of Iraq which in a way you alluded to. My mandate as Secretary General of the UN is to help oversee implementation of Security Council resolutions. On Iraq the Security Council position is clear. Iraq must disarm and if it fails to disarm economic sanctions will remain in place.  There is nothing in the Resolution that talks about using military force to get Iraq to comply. If the Security Council were ever to take that kind of decision then it will be my problem to deal with. I’m on record as saying that I personally believe that it would be unwise for the US to attack Iraq at this stage.

The question has been raised as to what I can do and the rest of us can do to influence US policy and the US approach to debt relief and aid. I think it’s a question of engaging them, it’s a question of dialogue and lots of governments are talking to the US. There are discussions going on between Europe and the US and I’m talking to policy makers in Washington. There is a question of how do you increase development assistance. The US has proposed 50% of World Bank loans should be converted into grants. Other governments worry about this idea because they believe it will deplete the resources of the Bank which has been giving concessionary loans to governments and the payments rates are very high. They keep repaying the debt so it replenishes itself. If you give the loans away or 50% of it away, will the governments keep replenishing the World Bank coffers or will we allow the World Bank to run out of money and eventually shut down? So there is a debate going on. Some governments I hope at Monterrey will announce major new initiatives and increases in their developmental assistance and challenge others to do the same thing. I hope the US would also be there with concrete proposals. President Bush has indicated he is coming to the conference which is good news because it is an important conference. What specifically they will put on the table on the aid issue and some of the other issues of the conference I cannot say, we will have to wait and see what happens, but what I can assure you is that there are quite a lot of discussions going on and attempts to work together and to influence each other in a positive and constructive way.

On the issue of NEPAD let me say that the UN, and I personally, have been working with the African governments and also working with the G8. The G8 launched the NEPAD proposals in Genoa with the invitation to five African leaders who attended the meeting, but I have also reminded the G8, and Canada which is carrying the ball forward, that when it comes to development of Africa and focus on African development we have to be careful not to create the impression that it is an issue for the G8 alone. There are governments outside the G8 which are much more generous. The Scandinavian countries,  the Netherlands, and others that we need to pull in, and I think that is happening. What the UN has done is to offer the facilities and the capabilities of the Economic Commission for Africa to do the technical work and work with the African leaders and the G8 group in preparing concrete ideas for moving NEPAD forward. And I do welcome the emphasis on Africa and the attempts by the leaders to work jointly to improve economic conditions and the lot of the African people.

The last question was the issue of Doha where the rich pressed through their own agenda and our questioner had the sense that they were paying lip service to the needs of the poor.  I think those who have privileges and advantages do not always give it up easily. You often have to pressure them to do it and I think the developing countries themselves are this time better organised than they were in the Uruguay round. I think they are going to be insisting on implementation of some of the agreements of Uruguay as well as the new proposals on the table. I hope your group, the Movement for Trade Justice, can also add its voice and there are other influential people who can add their voice to this and we need to get the message around and I hope 11^th September drove it home to us that we cannot be indifferent to problems in other regions of the world and that it may come back to haunt us. I think if when the Russians left in 1989 we had paid attention to Afghanistan and really helped them come up, helped them to build up their economy and done a bit of nation building, a phrase which is not always popular, we probably would not have lived through the nightmare and the anxiety that we are all going through now and I think it is important that we take steps and assist nations if not for anything else not to create future Afghanistans. But I think the question of trade is an important one and whatever you can do to support open fair and free trade would be helpful, but it also means, as I said, getting  the developed countries to remove the subsidies that they pay their own producers. In fact there is a statistic, I don’t know if it’s true, that the subsidy that the European Union pays its farmers is enough to fly every cow in Europe first class around the world!