Premier Wen Jiabao, Prime Minister
Jin, President Lula, President Mkapa, Mr. Han Zheng, the mayor of
Shanghai, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen: Just two
years ago, I discussed with our friends in Shanghai the possibility
of a conference here in Shanghai to deal with the question of
scaling up our efforts on poverty. I thought it would be a modest
conference, one for specialists and people that might be interested
in this subject.
And so today, to find this huge
number of people here is an enormous surprise and is an enormous
credit to our hosts, the city of Shanghai, and the government and
the Finance Ministry of China. On your behalf, I would like to
thank them enormously for their efforts and for their
hospitality.
I think it is not surprising that we
should have chosen Shanghai. This city is a remarkable part of the
history of this country and today represents a center of industry
of science, of entrepreneurship, and of responsible government. And
I'm reminded of the lament of Deng Xiaoping in 1992 when he said he
wished that Shanghai had been given attention during the opening of
the economy, as it would have transformed not only the Yangtze
River economy but the entire face of China.
Well, I think we have only to step
outside of this building to see how this city has transformed not
only the area here but, indeed, the whole image of China in the
world.
Let me come to the subject of our
discussions here during the next two days. But let me first
acknowledge and thank the Premier for his additional contributions,
financial and moral, to the development agenda which he announced
today.
He said that without peace and
stability, there is no possibility of us alleviating poverty. And I
think that one of the things that we will discuss at this meeting
is the reverse of that proposition. Without alleviating poverty,
there is no possibility for peace and stability. And so the purpose
of this conference is to address the question of what is it that
collectively we can do, representatives of the North and the South,
ministers, representatives of civil society and the private sector,
all of us here, to try and give a world to the younger people that
is safe and secure and that is one that will be vibrant and
stable.
And that is at the heart of our
discussions. We start with the recognition that in our world of six
billion people, one billion have 80 percent of the income and five
billion have under 20 percent. We start with the proposition that
in the next 25 years, two billion more people will come onto our
planet, and all but 50 million will go to developing countries. So
that in the year 2025, we will have a planet of seven billion out
of eight in developing countries, and by 2050, it will be eight
billion out of nine.
I remember very well in Evian, where
I had the privilege of attending the summit, and President Lula
entered the room, and in a typically self-effacing way said how
proud he was to be with the leaders of the G-8, but that maybe next
year President Hu of China, Prime Minister Vajpayee of India, or
his successor, the President of Nigeria, the Prime Minister of
South Africa, and himself, maybe they should be the G-8 because
they represented the five billion out of six on the planet.
And he pointed to this new balance
that is needed in our world. He pointed to the fact that today
there is an imbalance and that we have a challenge of poverty
before us which has been identified in the Millennial Goals. And he
spoke also then and more recently about the challenge of
youth--youth that is now just about half the world, 2.8 billion
people under the age of 24, a billion and a half under the age of
15, and in the next 20, 25 years, two billion more people coming
onto the planet.
This challenge of youth, this
challenge of gender, the issue of the rights of women, this issue
of poverty, as the Premier said, of a billion people or more living
in poverty, this issue of imbalance--this is what we will be
discussing at this conference.
And the important thing about this
conference is that it is not just a two-day meeting. We have
already spent nine months studying experiences in development in
the South, in the developing world. And you have, or will have in
your papers, summaries of a hundred case studies which can give
evidence of good ideas and not-so-good ideas that can be adapted,
learned from, and applied in our development efforts. And I'm
thrilled that we should have on the platform here the leaders of
countries that have contributed good ideas and experience to the
efforts of broadening the approach to poverty alleviation.
This is not a conference for
teaching the Washington Consensus. The Washington Consensus has
been dead for years. It's been replaced by all sorts of other
consensuses. But today we're approaching our discussions with no
consensuses. We're approaching our discussion with an interchange
of ideas, with the opportunity to share experiences, with the
opportunity to learn from each other.
And that is why we have had this
process, not just a two-day meeting but a process which has taken
many of you on 11 field visits, has had you participate in 20
videoconferences, which has had you participate bilaterally with
our teams and with teams from the Chinese Government, in putting
together not doctrines, not lessons which we insist upon, but
opportunities for an exchange of ideas on a South-South and
South-North basis. This is a real chance to learn.
But it is more than just an exchange
of ideas. What we are trying to do at this conference is to go
beyond what we've done so often in the past, which is to
satisfactorily succeed in a project here or a project there. My own
institution is full of what I call "feel-good projects." They're
projects which you ask: What have you done for youth? Or what have
you done for saving water? Or what have you done for the
environment? And you get a long list of successes, of projects
which we've done for a hundred schools in the northern area of a
country, or 200 kilometers of highway, or ten bridges, or impacts
that we've had with small groups.
But we've learned, ladies and
gentlemen, that feeling good about individual projects is not
enough. The challenges that we face are just too big. It's not ten
schools. It's 10,000 schools. It's not five bridges. It's 5,000
bridges. It's not 100 people. It's millions and billions of
people.
What we have to understand at this
conference is how we can move from our successes in these feel-good
projects and scale them up so that we can really have an impact
which is great and which will help us achieve the Millennial
Goals.
So it was that when I came here two
years ago, it seemed to me that China was the obvious place to
start with our explorations because this is a country that in the
last 20 years has taken three or four hundred million people out of
poverty. And it's a country which does not look at things in
short-term dimensions. It looks at the challenges in long-term
dimensions. We've had ten five-year plans. The government is now
looking at the 11th five-year plan, and it is consulting
widely.
As the Premier noted, the poverty
reduction strategy of years ago, the seven-year strategy, now
succeeded by another five-year strategy, this attention to
continuity, this attention to a consistent strategy, this line of
thinking which does not allow for forgetting earlier strategies,
which makes allowance for political changes but which has a
consistency, is something from which we need to learn. Because to
go to scale, you can't do it in four years or five years. Scale
requires time. Scale requires management. Scale requires
consistency. And scale requires constantly adapting our experience
to move forward with our programs and our policies.
And you will find in the hundred
studies that we've looked at that there are many common themes that
emerge. The first thing is that you have to set stretch targets.
You don't set targets just by the available money. We in our own
institution have often fallen into the trap of saying we have X
million dollars for such-and-such a country and, therefore, we will
do a project that spends X million dollars.
We should not look at it on the
basis of whether we have X million dollars. We should look at it on
the basis of what is the challenge, what is the stretch target,
what is it that we're trying to achieve, and then look at ways in
which over time we can reach that target. Because the success is
not spending the US$50 million or US$100 million successfully. The
success is approaching the overall strategic target that we are
seeking to achieve.
And we are putting forward in the
papers that you have before you many aspects of this challenge--the
challenge of management, the challenge of leverage, the challenge
of resources.
And for me perhaps the single most
important element which this country knows, which Brazil knows,
which Bangladesh knows, which Tanzania knows, and that is that we
should look at development not as something which we as
professionals dream up and then bring to people that are
developing, to poor people, and in a sense give to them.
What is essential and what comes out
in all these programs is that if you have successful programs, we
need to turn the people who should come out of poverty not into
objects of our charity or our development practices, but to turn
them into the asset, to turn them into the active participant that
is moving towards getting out of poverty.
What we need to do in scaling up is
to engage the community of people who are poor and who are
searching for a better life, to engage them in the solution to
their problems. They know more about poverty than we do. They know
more about what they need than we do. We can help them in terms of
the structure and the approach. We can provide them with
infrastructure. We can provide them with resources. But the assets
that we have to come to terms with is the asset of young people,
the asset of people in poverty, the asset of women, the asset of
the underutilized people whose lives we are trying to help.
You will find in these case studies
many examples of how we need to engage poor people in terms of
having them as people who are rich in capacity and rich in desire
to improve their lives.
We did a study of 60,000 poor people
in 60 countries, and you will not be surprised to find that their
objectives and their feelings are exactly the same as people in
this room. Regardless of country and regardless of condition, they
all say the same thing: We want a life that is secure; we want
voice; we want a chance to be heard; we want our kids to be
educated; we want safety. We do not want charity; we want an
opportunity; we want a chance. And we want to contribute to our
better life.
Our task at this conference is not
complicated. It is to try and find ways in which over a long period
of time and with management skills that some of us lack, that we
can present by working with these people programs that are
replicable, that can be owned by people in poverty, and where
together we can address the question of a better future for
all.
I just want to give you one example
in this country.
It is the example from Loess
Plateau, which I went to, I think now nine years ago, Mr. Premier.
And I saw in front of me valleys that were stark, that had no
trees, and that were filling the Yellow River with sediment from
the water coming down the hills. And it looked arid, it looked
terrible. And the people were living in the worst of conditions on
the tops of these hills--except that there was a plan, and the plan
was to take in each of these valleys, in an area the size of
Switzerland, a hundred thousand people who--and you, Mr. Premier,
may have seen this--would go into these things and terrace these
hills. They'd pick up the rocks. They would terrace the hills.
There would be one machine, one bulldozer for the entire area. And
they were in teams of a hundred thousand. And on the top of each
hill they had a little monument which said, "World Bank Project
Number One," or "Number 20," and the signature of the team leader
and the finance guy and they had all their names on it.
And when I went back, these arid
areas looked like Switzerland. They've got grass. They've got
trees. They've got animals. They have houses. And we now have three
million people that have come from the tops of the mountains into
the valleys, in areas that for all of us you'd like to have a
holiday. Not only that, but the Yellow River is cleaner.
This is not magic. This is a simple
idea carried forward by the diligence of people, an idea that works
year after year. And we see the results in terms of poverty
alleviation and in terms of hope.
Our task is to make this world a
Loess Plateau, an area that is green, that is full of hope, that
allows people in poverty to use their spade or their pen, or
whatever it is they have, to find their way from conditions of
poverty to conditions of hope and opportunity.
Our conference is not just another
conference. Our conference is about peace. It is about the future
of our planet. It is moving to scale. It is about social justice.
It's about what is morally right. It's about hope. And I am very
happy that I can be with you for these next two days and
beyond.
Thank you very much.
(China.org.cn May 25, 2004)