It is my great
pleasure to greet my dear friend Mr. Miguel d’Escoto
Brockmann, President of the General Assembly. I wish
you much success in your mission.
The present session of the General Assembly is
being held at a particularly serious time. An often
predicted economic and financial crisis is now today’s
harsh reality. Because of the responsibility of
speculators, entire peoples are suffering anguish in the
wake of successive financial disasters that threaten the
world’s economy. Indispensable interventions by State
authorities have defied market fundamentalists and
shown that this is a time for political decisions. Only
decisive action by Governments — particularly those
of countries at the epicentre of the crisis — will be able
to rein in the disorder that has spread through the
world’s financial sector, with perverse effects on the
daily lives of millions of people. The lack of rules
favours adventurers and opportunists, to the detriment
of real companies and workers.
The great Brazilian economist Celso Furtado said
that we must not always allow speculators’ profits to be
privatized while their losses are invariably socialized.
We must not allow the burden of the boundless greed
of a few to be shouldered by all. The economy is too
serious a matter to be left in the hands of speculators.
Ethics must also apply to the economy.
A crisis of such magnitude will not be overcome
through palliative measures. Mechanisms for both
prevention and control are needed to ensure full
transparency for international finance. Today’s
supranational economic institutions have neither the
authority nor the workable instruments that they need
to control the anarchy of speculation. We must rebuild
them on entirely new foundations.
The global nature of this crisis means that the
solutions we adopt must also be global and must be
decided upon in legitimate and trusted multilateral
forums, without coercion. The United Nations, as the
world’s largest multilateral arena, must call for a
vigorous response to the weighty threats that we all
face.
Yet there are other, equally serious matters facing
the world today. One of them is the food crisis, which
afflicts more than a billion human beings. The energy
crisis is also growing worse every day, as will the risks
to world trade if we fail to achieve an agreement at the
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Doha Round; another is the unrestrained degradation of
the environment, which lies behind so many natural
calamities whose victims are overwhelmingly the poor.
The fall of the Berlin Wall was expected to open
up possibilities for building a world of peace, free from
the stigmas of the cold war. However, it is sad to see
other walls going up so quickly.
Many of those who preach the free circulation of
commodities and capital continue to fight the free
movement of men and women, using nationalistic and
even racist arguments that evoke unpleasant memories
and fears of times that we thought were behind us.
A supposedly “populist nationalism”, which some
forces seek to identify and criticize in the South, is
being unabashedly promoted in the developed
countries. The financial, food, energy, environmental
and migration crises, to say nothing of threats to peace
in several regions of the world, reveal that the
multilateral system must be overhauled to meet the
challenges of the twenty-first century.
Gradually, countries are moving beyond old
conformist alignments with traditional centres. That
new attitude, however, does not imply a
confrontational stance. Simply by using direct dialogue
without intermediation by major powers, developing
countries have stepped into new roles in designing a
multipolar world, with examples such as India, Brazil
and South Africa (IBSA), the G-20, the summits
between South America and Africa and between South
America and the Arab countries and the BRIC
countries — Brazil, Russian Federation, India and
China.
A new political, economic and trade geography is
being built in today’s world. While navigators in the
past would look to the North Star, today we are trying
to find our way by looking at multiple dimensions of
our planet. Now we often find our North Star in the
South. On my continent, the Union of South American
Nations (UNASUR) was created last May, as the first
treaty — after 200 years of independence — that
brings together all South American countries. This new
political union will coordinate the region’s countries in
terms of infrastructure, energy, social policies,
complementary production mechanisms, finance and
defence.
Meeting in Santiago, Chile, just over a week ago,
the Presidents of South America demonstrated
UNASUR’s ability to respond quickly and effectively
to complex situations, such as the one in our sister
nation, Bolivia. We supported its legitimately-elected
Government, its democratic institutions and its
territorial integrity and we issued a call for dialogue as
a path to peace and prosperity for the people of
Bolivia.
Next December, in the state of Bahia, Brazil will
host the first summit of all of the countries of Latin
America and the Caribbean on integration and
development. This will be a high-level meeting under
no umbrella, based on Latin America’s and the
Caribbean’s own perspectives. All these efforts in the
multilateral sphere are complemented by my country’s
solidarity initiatives with poorer nations, particularly in
Africa.
I also wish to emphasize our commitment to
Haiti, where we command troops of the United Nations
Stabilization Mission in Haiti and are helping to restore
peace. I reiterate my appeal for the solidarity of
developed countries with Haiti, since implementation
has fallen far short of the many promises.
The strength of values must prevail over the
value of strength. Only legitimate and effective
instruments can assure collective security. The United
Nations has spent 15 years discussing the reform of its
Security Council. Today’s structure has been frozen for
six decades and does not match the challenges of
today’s world. Its distorted form of representation
stands between us and the multilateral world to which
we aspire. Therefore, I am much encouraged by the
General Assembly’s decision to launch negotiations in
the near future on the reform of the Security Council.
It is multilateralism that must also guide us
toward solutions to the complex problems of global
warming, based on the principle of common but
differentiated responsibilities. Brazil has not shirked its
responsibilities. Our energy matrix is increasingly
clean. Today’s food and energy crises are deeply
intertwined. The inflation of food prices is affected not
only by climatic factors and speculation in agricultural
commodities; it is also driven by rising oil prices
which affect the prices of fertilizers and transportation.
Attempts to tie high food prices to the distribution of
biofuels do not stand up to an objective analysis of
reality.
Brazil’s experience demonstrates — and this
could be the case for countries similar to ours — that
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sugar-cane ethanol and biodiesel production reduce our
dependency on fossil fuels, create jobs, regenerate
degraded land and are fully compatible with expanding
food production. We wish to intensify all aspects of
that discussion at the world conference on energy and
biofuels which we will be holding in November 2008,
in the city of Sao Paulo.
My obsession with the hunger problem explains
my ongoing efforts, along with other world leaders, to
reach a positive conclusion to the Doha Round. We are
still pushing for an agreement to reduce scandalous
farm subsidies in rich countries. A successful Doha
Round will have a very positive impact on food
production, particularly in developing and poor
countries.
Four years ago, along with several world leaders,
I launched the Action Against Hunger and Poverty here
in New York. Our proposal, then and now, is to adopt
innovative funding mechanisms. The International
Drug Purchase Facility is one early result of that
initiative, helping to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and
malaria in several African countries. But it is not
enough. We still have a long way to go if we want
humanity to actually achieve the Millennium
Development Goals.
In December 2008, we will commemorate the
sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, paying a tribute that will go far beyond
mere formalities. That document expresses inalienable
commitments that challenge us all. As Governments,
we must do more than support the Declaration with
rhetoric. We are called upon to fight for the values
proclaimed six decades ago and to make them a reality
in each country and around the world.
Today’s Brazil is very different from what it was
in 2003, when I became President of my country and
stood for the first time before the General Assembly.
Our Government and society have taken decisive steps
to transform the lives of Brazilians, creating nearly 10
million formal jobs, distributing income and wealth,
improving public services, lifting 9 million people out
of extreme poverty, and bringing another 20 million
into the middle class. All this has occurred in an
environment of strong growth, economic stability,
lower external vulnerability and, above all, a stronger
democracy with the intense participation of our people.
In the year when we commemorate the
one-hundredth birthday of the great Brazilian Josué de
Castro — the first Director-General of the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and a
pioneer in the studies concerning the problem of
hunger in the world — it is worthwhile to reread his
warning: “It is no longer possible to sit back and let a
region go hungry without the entire world suffering the
consequences.”
I am proud to state that Brazil is overcoming
hunger and poverty. I reiterate the optimism that I
expressed here five years ago. We are much greater
than the crises that threaten us. We have the heart, the
right-mindedness and the will to overcome any
adversity. More than ever, that is the spirit of
Brazilians.