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Discurso do Primeiro-Ministro do Reino Unido Gordon Brown na FAAP, em 26/3/2009, antes do The London Summit 2009 |
Prime Minister:
Ladies and gentlemen, can I say what a huge pleasure it is to be here today. I want to thank you, Celita, for hosting this event. Let me say, it’s a great pleasure to be here with Peter Mandelson, our trade minister, Douglas Alexander, our International Development Secretary, and my wife, Sarah, to be here in São Paulo and in particular to be here at this unique centre that we have just been hearing about, which brings together the people from all over the world. This is not just a seat of learning, but with exchange programmes in five continents and more than 35 countries, you are a gateway to the world and I congratulate you on the work that you do.
This outward looking university perfectly embodies the dynamism of this great nation, Brazil. And so it has been a great pleasure for me to have met President Lula today, to have come now to this great city and to be able to say something to you today about the great global changes that are facing the world.
I was once a university lecturer like many of you here today. Universities, you know, stand for objectivity, impartiality, the disinterested pursuit after truth, rationality - all the qualities you have to leave behind when you go into politics!
Now, I have just come from visiting the football museum. When I was there, I learned that it was a Scotsman from my own nation, Charles Miller, who 115 years ago introduced football to Brazil here in São Paulo. I recall first going to the World Cup as a young person in 1982 and seeing Scotland play Brazil. I remember to this day, and I just had the chance fortunately to talk with Socrates about this because he was a player on that day, how Scotland scored first. And then Brazil scored once, second, a third goal and then a fourth goal. Perhaps not Scotland’s greatest result, but a great personal introduction to me of Brazil’s footballing prowess that I was able to see at first hand.
I am very pleased today that the English Football Association and the Brazilian Football Confederation are announcing a new partnership to share expertise in the governance and development of football. Following my meeting with President Lula, we have announced that the United Kingdom and Brazil will share expertise and experience of hosting sporting events in the world. We have the Olympics in London in 2012, you have the World Cup in Brazil in 2014, and we want to work together to make these two great events the most successful events in history.
It is hard to imagine a time when you could talk of football and not think of Brazil, but let me say also no conversation about the future of the global economy can ever be complete without the nation that has the 10th largest economy in the world and is one of the greatest economies, Brazil. No conversation about the future of our global society can be complete without this, the great democracy in the world. And no conversation about the future of our climate can be complete without the nation with the world’s largest reserves of tropical forests, fresh water and biodiversity.
And this is not simply a matter of numbers; it’s also a matter of the kind of society I know you are trying to build in Brazil: tolerant, diverse, home to a multitude of communities, which in some other places live apart but here have found a way of living together.
We are talking quite a lot at the moment about how we build both a global economy and a global society that can cater for the needs of hard working people. And today here in Brazil, I look around and I see the creativity and the vibrancy that are the very essence of the vision of the global society ahead.
Back in 1946 when the United Nations first met, Brazil made the case for permanent membership of the Security Council of the United Nations. In the past 60 years, this case for permanent membership has grown steadily stronger. So I am proud to come here today to give the British Government’s full support for Brazil’s permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council.
It is right that Brazil and the whole of this continent should be at the centre of the conversation we are now having about our future economy, and indeed the future society in this global age. I want us to try to form a truly global consensus on how we can move forward when we meet as countries together next week in London at what is the G20 summit.
It is not just a new deal that we need for the future with Brazil and with Latin America; with 70% of world economic growth coming not from the older industrialised nations but now coming from the emerging and developing countries, there must be a new deal that includes every country and every continent. A new deal with and for all peoples in this rapidly changing world.
I think only when the history books are finally written will the world truly understand the scale and the scope of the changes that we as a world are now facing together. A few years ago, there were only a billion people who could be said to be truly part of the global industrial economy. Now that figure is four billion people. We are seeing a huge and continuous shift of manufacturing activity from once-strong industrialised countries to industrialising countries.
I believe that there is a massive potential increase in the growth of the world’s economy, despite the problems that we are having at the moment, over the next two decades as millions of people round the world who are producers of their goods at the moment will become consumers of our goods. With the restructuring of the world economy, I believe there is a potential for it to double in size, with all the opportunities - twice the opportunities - that it brings. And of course, all the challenges that we now have to face.
Last year, we had a major oil crisis. Last year too, there was a major food crisis. We have had a worldwide financial crisis this year. We have a climate-change crisis every year that grows more urgent as we look at the challenges that climate change poses for us.
I believe that, taken together, we face four great challenges, whose solution demands urgent and cooperative global action. These are the challenges.
Financial instability you know about because that is what is happening in this world of instant global capital flows.
Environmental degradation we know about. It is a challenge that we have to meet in a world where there are potentially also huge energy shortages.
Extremism and the threat it brings to the security of peoples in all continents of the world is happening in a world of unprecedented mobility of people.
And of course, we have growing poverty in many parts of the world and worsening inequality.
Unless we can find together a solution to these problems, there will inevitably be a protectionist rebellion against multilateral activity and modernity itself. But by working together to solve these global challenges, I believe that we can and will create what you might call the first truly global society.
This is the scale of the challenge, but these are the opportunities ahead of us as we look forward to the G20 next week, to the G8 in Italy, then to the Copenhagen Summit, which will have to make decisions about climate change.
There is, of course, no greater immediate challenge than helping families and businesses who are being relentlessly buffeted by an economic storm that is not of their making. The crisis is global, but every country is feeling the impact of these financial storms directly: every business, every worker, every homeowner and every family. It is addressing, resolving and preventing these problems from ever happening again that I want to make the focus of my remarks today.
Net flows to emerging market countries have today collapsed from $1 trillion invested in these countries to only $160 billion, a 600% fall. There is an estimate now from the International Labour Organisation that global unemployment could rise to 30 million workers in the next year. Like every other country, you do not need to tell me that Brazil and the people of Brazil have felt the impact of this crisis. I know that from my conversations with people here.
What is the problem that we have to address? Today, the speed at which capital can move around the world and the speed at which goods and services can be sourced from any part of that world has totally overwhelmed all the old national systems of rules and regulations. We must rebalance our world economy, which aligns our values and the economy once again. We must do everything in our power to ensure that markets will serve the public interest, not the other way around.
So for the first time, we have a desire that the world comes together to create the supervisory standards that are necessary: new global standards for financial regulation, coordinated action to bring tax havens and shadow banking within the regulatory net, no hiding place for those who opt out and refuse to pay their fair share.
So first of all, when we meet next week we will make these supervisory and regulatory changes so people can feel that their savings in banks are safe and businesses can feel that they can get loans and get investment from the banks upon which they depend.
We will also see next week the biggest and coordinated fiscal stimulus that the world has ever seen. We will make it a low carbon stimulus to our economies to make our economies stable and fulfil the environmental responsibilities we owe to our children and grandchildren. We will not walk away from our promises to help the poorest countries in the world to meet the Millennium Development Goals.
Here in Brazil, you have acted quickly. We have seen a stimulus to your economy, an injection of $150 billion. Yesterday, I know, was announced long term investment in housing. There have been tax cuts and anti poverty programmes. And the prompt and aggressive actions that different countries have taken globally have now injected the equivalent of $3 trillion into the global economy so that it can start moving forwards. We will continue to take whatever action is necessary to stimulate world growth in the next few years.
Across the world, as you have probably seen, interest rates have been cut to almost zero - in the United States, in Canada, in Japan, in the United Kingdom, and cut very heavily in the Eurozone. While almost all other G20 countries have cut rates significantly, Brazil has also cut its rates by 2.5%.
So central banks around the world have acted in the face of this global financial storm to increase liquidity, to unlock key credit markets and to increase the money supply. The balance sheets of advanced countries’ central banks have grown by more than $2.5 trillion over the past year.
Now, we need to address all the issues that arise from this financial crisis. We need to address the global credit crunch, we need to address the weaknesses in our global institutions, and we need to address almost immediately what has been happening to Brazil, to China, to Japan, to our own country and to the Euro area, which is a collapse in trade over these past few months.
In each of these areas, I believe that Brazil and your neighbours have a crucial role to play in solving these problems. Let me just take each in turn.
We need to make sure that we can respond to the crisis that many countries are facing, where they cannot themselves raise the resources to restructure the banking system. Our proposal is to increase the resources available to the International Monetary Fund so that it can intervene to ensure that economies are stable and can stop the crisis spreading. Last week, the European Union committed over $100 billion in bilateral loans for the International Monetary Fund. At the G20, we will be calling for a very substantial increase in these resources, one in which I hope Brazil can participate. For these resources are not only crucial for the whole world; they will also directly support Latin America and other emerging economies in fighting to cope with this global downturn.
But we must also make longer-term reforms of the international architecture to build a modern, global economy. The time when a few powers could just sit around a table and set the global agenda is over. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and all the international institutions must change now to meet the new realities.
The next head of the World Bank need not be an American. The next head of the International Monetary Fund need not be a European. We must make the governance systems of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund more transparent, more relevant and more open. Linked to these changes in the mandate and effectiveness of these institutions, we must ensure that emerging and developing countries have the voice and the representation in these institutions, that for too long they have been denied and they do deserve.
We must also address the immediate fallout from the banking crisis: the fall in world trade, the slowing of trade at its sharpest rate for 40 years. Over half of our national income, a quarter of Brazil’s, comes directly from trade. Our bilateral trade alone exceeded 4 billion for the first time in 2008, and UK exports last year were up by 50% to Brazil. I want to thank all the businesses here today for what they are doing to promote trading relationships between our two countries. I want to say that even in this most difficult time, enquiries about exports to Brazil and enquires about better trading relationships between our two countries are growing, not falling. That is a tribute to all those who are playing their part in making trade flow between our two countries. I am very confident that even in these difficult times, the trade between our two countries can be a great bulwark in restoring growth to both our economies.
But the truth is that across the world we are seeing very dramatic falls in exports. China’s exports are down 24%. German exports are down just over 20%. Japan’s exports are down 50%. The World Trade Organisation expects that trade itself will fall by 9% this year, so we have to act. That is why today President Lula and I were able to confirm our commitment to rejecting at all times the protectionism that history teaches us will in the end protect no one. It is why all nations must strengthen their commitments not to raise barriers on trade and investment. It is why we will encourage nations to prioritise the trade negotiations so that we can have a successful conclusion to what could stimulate $150 billion of increased global trade.
We must also urgently address the shortfall in trade finance. It is a gap that is estimated to be around $100 billion and it threatens to undo the huge gains in prosperity that global free trade has delivered and put in jeopardy the livelihoods of millions of people all over the world. Trade finance is the lifeblood of the international financial system. About 90% of all world trade is financed on credit. The supply of trade credit, when it is dried up, has increased the cost of finance available, as exporters are hit in emerging markets and Africa very hard indeed.
This is a very clear example of how the global financial crisis is having a direct and immediate impact on the real economy. If banks cannot provide the finance that is needed so that trade can flow between our countries and other countries, we have to find other ways of doing it. When banks fail and markets falter, the international community must step in to fill this gap in the interest of jobs and trade around the world.
I want to see bilateral donors working with the multilateral development banks and the private sector with an expansion of domestic export credit agencies as well. We will seek next week to use the G20 summit to address the global shortfall in trade finance by creating a pool of finance that is reusable around the world of around $100 billion.
Let us have the courage and the determination to understand the changing world we are in. We will never return to the old orthodoxies of the past, but will have to move forward. But to make these changes is the start not only of an economic recovery but the beginning of building a global society by rebuilding our global institutions. Let us give these institutions the resources that are necessary for the challenges of today, which are so very different from those they faced at the creation of these institutions in the 1940s.
Let us stand fast for free trade and hold fast to the values in which we believe, for the decisions we will be taking next week at the G20 in London and the coming months will define not just the world we are but the world that we want to be. Let us seize this time of profound change, and there is no better place to give this message than at this great international university.
Let us seize this time of profound change to forge for our generation a new internationalism, a new era of international cooperation that is both hard headed and progressive for the future. It is a multilateralism that is born out of a commitment to the power of international cooperation, nations working together, not confronting each other. It is founded on a belief in cooperation and collaboration, not isolation. It is driven forward by a conviction that what we can achieve together by working together will be far greater than anything we can achieve on our own.
Let me say that Brazil’s time has come. Your place at the top table of global leadership is there for you to claim. Join us and let us work together in rebuilding our world, and we will do that best by all of us working together. Thank you all very much.