"A lot more to do..."

Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for the Department For International Development, believes 2005 offers a big chance for Africa – too good a chance to miss. Interview by Martin Wroe and Malcolm Doney.

A year into the job, do you feel as if you’re getting a handle on what makes international development work?

It’s a privilege to do this job, because it has completely changed the way in which I think about and see the world. I’ve learnt something every day I’ve come to work – so I have a better understanding now of how we need a lot of things to happen if we’re going to crack this.

We do a survey every year and we ask people, "What should we be doing to help reduce poverty around the world?" and the most popular answer given is, "Give aid". Now, aid is extremely important – well used, it undoubtedly makes a difference – which is why we’ve got a rising aid budget. But is aid alone the answer to the problem of global poverty? No, because there are lots of other things that need to happen as well, and it’s quite complex, fitting all of those bits together.

Take conflict, for example. When I first arrived at DFID in my previous incarnation, as deputy, I was quite surprised at the extent to which we were taking an interest in conflict. But once you think about it a bit, you understand that’s absolutely right, because if you don’t have peace and stability, you can forget the prospects for the rest. And Darfur is the most obvious current example of what lack of peace and security does to development.

Are poverty and its roots more complex than people think ?

Firstly, economic development is going to be the main thing which will make a difference to people’s lives. If you doubt that for a second, ask yourselves the question, "How has Britain’s society changed from what we were 400 years ago to what we are today?". Four hundred years ago: enormous poverty, low life expectancy, very few people in school, terrible ill health. Peoples’ lives have been transformed. Lots of things happened, but principally it’s been a process of development in the economic department, and other countries want the same opportunity.

The second thing is that all countries need decent, effective, functioning governments – in order to do the things that we look to governments to do (care for us when we’re sick, educate our kids, provide us with the opportunity to earn a living). I suppose development in the past spent a lot of time working round the fact that effective government didn’t always exist and one of DFID’s strengths is the extent to which we’re working to support the creation of effective functioning government.

Is there a particular experience in your early life when poverty or inequality or injustice crossed your radar?

Well, I grew up in a particular household! When we’re little we think all households are like our own – because it’s the only one we know. In my childhood, we sat around the table and talked about politics and the state of the world. My early experiences were going on a lot of demonstrations with my Dad, Mum, brothers and sister. My father was, in the first 10 years of his term in parliament, heavily involved in the movement of colonial freedom. And I remember one very positive experience, meeting Seretse Khama, who later went on to become the president of Botswana, while he was in exile here in Britain. He was the first African I ever remember meeting when I was a cheeky five or six year old in the 1950s.

My first ever visit to Africa was a different matter. It was Malawi. I remember getting off the plane at Lilongwe in the morning, and going to a TB project – that was an experience I shall never ever forget. I learnt that in order to ever get to the hospital to take a TB test, you had to raise the money for the bus fare, and then you had to go back, and then you had to raise the money for the bus to come back to get the results and get the medicines. And a lot of people couldn’t afford that and they would go and see someone in the slum district who’d set themselves up as a health provider. And if you really couldn’t afford anything, you’d go to one of the kiosks and buy a cough sweet to treat your TB. That morning taught me more than I ever knew about the harsh economics of health care choice when you are absolutely poor. It’s a lesson that has remained with me.

Over seven years of this government how successful has it been in putting international development at the heart of its mission?

I would say it’s been a pretty big success. First of all, because it demonstrates the power of the political process to make a difference. This is an issue I think and worry about a great deal – in part because of the constituency that I represent which is poor inner city, where at the last general election 58 per cent of the electorate voted for nobody. And in politics, whether it’s in Leeds, the UK or globally, if government isn’t able to demonstrate its capacity to make a difference to people’s lives, then we have a problem. Because democracy is undoubtedly the best and most precious system we’ve got – people have to see that it’s capable of changing things for the better.

If you compare what went on before with what’s happened now – in terms of our aid budget; our focus on debt relief; our commitment to reaching the target of spending 0.7 per cent of the national budget by 2013; the way in which we provide development assistance; in pushing for a fairer world trading system – I think those are all really good examples of politics making a difference. I don’t just mean politicians either, because debt relief happened because a lot of people campaigned very hard, politicians got the message and finance ministers moved from sitting around a table and saying, "Third World debt. Isn’t it awful? Can’t do anything about it?" to HIPC, to $70 billion worth of debt relief to 27 of the world’s poorest countries.

That’s progress, and I’m interested in progress, because if you can demonstrate progress then, one, you can encourage people to do more and, two, you demonstrate that the capacity of the political process actually make a difference. Take the initiative that Gordon Brown and I announced recently taking multilateral debt relief a stage further. We’re doing it because we’ve got more money to pay for it. That’s political choice, so it’s not a bad record. However, we’ve go a lot more to do…

Is there a kind of irony, in that at DFID you are a politician working to make life better for people who can’t return you to power?

I hadn’t thought of it that way. But what is very striking is the extent to which development has now moved to the centre of big international politics, a huge change. Why? Because we understand better now that we share this small and fragile planet with a growing number of our fellow human beings. We are more interdependent – events in one country affect those who live in others. When I do my constituency surgery tomorrow, as many as 25 per cent of the people who come to see me will have fled their homes in other countries – the DRC, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan – and come here to seek shelter. And we have to do something practical to make the world safe and secure. And that’s something that benefits my constituency, isn’t it?

Is there a situation where the wheels have fallen off? Or where you feel frustrated or disappointed?

Well, I think on trade. Everybody gathered in Doha and said this trade round has got to be different – Cancun didn’t work and that was immensely disappointing – except that the developing country voice was heard much more loudly and forcefully than has happened in the past. I welcome that unreservedly. I’m sure they don’t mean it, but sometimes you get a sense that the development community are patting developing countries on the head and saying, "This is all too difficult for them". I don’t buy that argument. In my experience developing countries’ ministers are very clear about what they want to achieve for their countries, and we believe in supporting them in building the capacity, recognising that, in important respects, the future of each individual country is down to what the people of that country and the governments choose to do for themselves. The future of Africa does actually lie in the hands of Africa, so we have got to give them a better chance.

However, we still have to demonstrate that we meant it when we said we wanted a development round. The framework agreement at the end of July was very important in getting this process back on track – you had the EU saying that we want to fix an end-date for export subsidies. That’s good news, but it’s all to play for in the negotiations. We know that if we can crack this one then the benefit that will flow to people in poor countries is much, much greater than the value of all the aid which the rich world currently gives. So I think that has been a frustration because we haven’t got there yet, and we’ve got to.

You’ve just come back from Ethiopia, what can the Africa Commission achieve?

With the Africa Commission we have a serving G8 leader who has chosen to establish a commission for Africa. This is because the Prime Minister feels very strongly about this. Anyone who sat in the African Hall and heard his speech in Addis would have felt that, palpably, particularly towards the end of the speech when he put his notes aside and it came out of the heart – not least as a result of the visit we paid that morning to an organisation that was supporting people who are HIV positive. We sat in a small hut, and talked to a young girl who’d lost her family and a woman who was a sex worker, and a teacher and others. This, like all those conversations, reminds you what it’s all about.

The Commission is a political enterprise in the sense it’s about helping to generate political will and commitment to do the things that need to be done. We know we’re falling short – I think everybody understands that, given what’s happened to Africa over the last 25 years. But in 2005 we will have the G8, the EU Presidency, the Millennium Summit, the World Trade Organisation ministerial... a unique opportunity to get the world to do the things it knows it needs to do, and to encourage developing countries to do the things they need to do.

At the Labour conference, U2’s Bono said that 2005 is a moment which "could be real history, something your children, your children’s children, our whole generation could be remembered for, putting right a relationship that’s been so very wrong for so very long". Do you think the year really could mean historic progress for the poorest countries?

Well it’s all about progress. There’s an old joke that on demonstrations Fabians shout:

"What do we want?"
"Gradual progress."
"When do we want it?"
"In due course."

Progress really matters. It’s great that we’ve got this expectation, and pressure, because, experience tells us this is the most effective way of getting people to do things. Why did the world gather in Monterey, two-and-a-half years ago, and increase the total volume of aid? Because there was great expectation and great pressure put on people. People are going to have to judge what happens in 2005 by what people do. But this is as good a chance as we’re going to get, and we’d really kick ourselves if we didn’t try.

In a year’s time, how will you measure if it’s been a special year, if it’s actually made a difference?

If we’ve made progress on the amount of aid; if we’ve made progress on debt relief; if we’ve made progress on trade, then that would represent some real difference.

But holding the EU Presidency is part of this whole thing too. The struggle to reform the Common Agricultural Policy has been going on for a very long time: I remember the election of the Labour government in February 1974 – Harold Wilson was committed to renegotiate the CAP at the time. The fact is, export subsidies have reduced by over 50 per cent over the last 10 years, so there has been some progress.

But this is a very important issue for Peter Mandelson as the new Trade Commissioner. Some countries find it easier to make progress than others, let’s be honest about this – cotton is a very good example. When the EU ministers met to discuss decoupling subsidies for the production of cotton, they ended up with 60 per cent. We would have liked to have gone further. Spain, which produces cotton and Greece, which produces cotton were keen. Yet, I think there is a recognition that the EU’s got to move on this, because this is the key to unlocking progress in world trade.

What role do you see non-governmental organisations playing, given the shift in government funding towards direct budget support?

People have this impression that DFID has moved entirely in that direction. In fact 20 per cent of our programme goes on direct budget support, so 80 per cent doesn’t. We are pursuing direct budget support if you’ve got a government that’s got a plan, as the Kenyans did, for getting all those kids in to school. If they’re able to spend the money, have the administrative capacity, but lack the cash, then instead of saying we’ll come along and set up a school system for you, the logical thing is to back them.

NGOs play a really important role. We have a spectrum of activity from direct budget support, through to what we’re doing in Darfur and Zimbabwe, where you can’t work with the government – and all points in between.

I saw a good example of that in Bangladesh, where there’s a very strong NGO sector. I visited one of the projects we were funding that was helping the landless poor get access to land. The law in Bangladesh says you have a right to get access to land, but the people who had the land used to send the police to beat up the landless poor and send them away. I shall never forget the conversation with a group of villagers who’d had some success in exercising their rights under the law. One guy rolled up his trouser leg and said, "See that great big scar, that’s where I was attacked by the police three years ago". Afterwards, the man who was running the project said, "That conversation would have been completely impossible five years ago. Now they have sufficient confidence, because we’re supporting them. You may not have noticed but the chief of police was standing at your shoulder during the course of the conversation. Because of what we’re doing, the politics of the place has begun to change."

The truth is that all of the different approaches we take have a part to play. If you’re talking about the NGOs in the UK context, you know they’re hugely important at getting government to move. Debt relief wouldn’t have happened without the campaigning of NGOs; there wouldn’t be so much pressure on the international system to move on trade if it wasn’t for the Trade Justice Movement.

While people increasingly recognise we live in a globalised world of consumption, fewer see it as a globalised world in terms of social justice.

That’s a very interesting question, because if the call centre jobs in my constituency upped sticks and went to India, I suppose I’d have what’s known in the trade as mixed emotions – constituency MP on the one and Secretary of State for International Development on the other.

If you pick up a child’s toy, in 98 per cent of cases you’ll find "Made in China" on the bottom. Nevertheless, the UK economy continues to flourish, and to prosper – living standards increasing, unemployment is at a 20-year low, That’s because we’re finding new ways in which to earn a living in the world. Secondly, there’s a greater awareness of the condition of humankind in other parts of the world. The media plays a very important part in this. That awareness has the potential in this century to do what the great social reformers did in the 19th century in Britain. They went round and reported on the condition of British humankind in the slums, in the factories and that gave rise to this enormous movement for social improvement – the establishment of the trade unions and tackling the cholera outbreak by building the sewers.

I see the potential of the parallel process happening globally, but we have to keep the world’s attention on this. The honest truth is if we don’t do this, we won’t have a safe and secure world in which to live.