South African President Thabo Mbeki said on Sunday that rich countries must pay up if the international agenda for tackling world poverty is to be successful.
Speaking to a ”progressive governance” conference in London of centre-left leaders from around the globe, Mbeki said: ”There is a global agenda against poverty”.
”One of the first challenges we face is to ensure that the global agenda is an agenda we all adhere to”.
Such commitments, however, were not going to be seen through ”just because they are stated”.
Mbeki said people around the world ”don’t have clean water because they don’t have the money for clean water. Somebody has to pay. Rich countries must pay”.
He continued: ”The poor must do something else. We’ve got to do something to make sure that we behave. You cannot have wars and instability … we have got to address those questions”.
”The rich countries, because they are rich, do not have that same impulse as I have” to address poverty, ”because it does not affect them as much”, Mbeki added.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the conference that Britain had massively increased its aid to the developing world.
However he stressed the need for a ”concept of partnership” where ”we put in more money … but in return for that, there should be clear obligations of governance so that money is actually going to to the poor people that need that money.”
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva used the conference to call on rich countries to set up a multilateral body to finance the infrastructure of developing countries.
He said that businesses in countries providing funds for such an institution ”could contribute to carrying out infrastructure work together with companies in the developing countries.”
”It would thus support the economies of both rich and poor countries,” he suggested.
The ”progressive governance” conference in London saw some 400 think-tank analysts and centre-left leaders from 14 nations taking part.
The event concluded Sunday afternoon and was being followed Sunday evening and Monday by a summit of leaders from 14 centre-left states.
Both the conference and summit aimed to give a fillip to the ”third way” that informed the politics of the centre-left in the 1990s. – Sapa-AFP