CHINA: It is nonsensical that the international community is spending only $50-$60 billion a year on overseas development, compared with $900 billion in military expenditure and more than $300 billion on agricultural subsidies, the president of the World Bank, Mr James Wolfensohn, has said. Deaglán de Bréadún reports from Shanghai
At the start of an international conference on poverty, hosted by the World Bank and the Chinese government, Mr Wolfensohn pointed out that the rich countries of the world had agreed at Monterey, Mexico, last March to increase aid and open their markets for trade with the developing countries.
"The simple fact of the matter is that, at this moment, we are not doing any significant increase in aid, and the trade negotiations are stalled," he said. "We haven't made a lot of progress."
Asked about the place of human rights in the World Bank's activities, in China or elsewhere, Mr Wolfensohn said: "We don't use the language of human rights." He had engaged in "many discussions" in this regard with Mrs Mary Robinson when she was UN high commissioner for human rights.
"Every day we protect human rights, in terms of poverty, gender, kids (and) labour," he said. Human rights in the political sphere were "beyond the mandate" of the World Bank.
He described a recent allegation of corruption at the World Bank as "absurd" and "preposterous". Commenting on claims that about $100 billion had been lost through corruption, he said: "There's no basis for this. It's a number pulled out of the air."
"There is no organisation anywhere that is doing more about fighting corruption than us," he said. "We are in a world where corruption is a problem. I remind you that, until three years ago, European companies could deduct bribes for tax purposes."
He added: "Everybody in the business of development knows that there are corrupt practices in many developing countries, as there are in many developed countries." He himself had been battling "the cancer of corruption" as World Bank president for the past eight years.
"But the world is full of corruptors and corruptees and some of them are rich and some of them are poor and you've got to try and find them."
The World Bank had "a very strong procedure" for preventing and dealing with corruption. "We make it more difficult for the crooks than perhaps anybody else."
Among more than 1,000 delegates at the three-day conference are President Lula of Brazil, President Museveni of Uganda, China's Minister of Finance, Mr Jin Renqing, and the head of the UN Development Programme, Mr Mark Malloch Brown. An Irish delegation is led by Mr David Donoghue, director general of the development division at the Department of Foreign Affairs.
A former investment banker by profession, Mr Wolfensohn is Australian by birth but a naturalised US citizen. The World Bank was set up to provide assistance to developing countries and has its headquarters in Washington DC.
The conference is discussing ways to meet the first of the UN Millennium Development Goals, agreed by world leaders in New York four years ago, to reduce the proportion of people living on less than one dollar a day to half by the year 2015.