Press Conference with
Paul Wolfowitz
World Bank President
Tokyo, Japan, October 11, 2005 Mr. Dan Sloan, President of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan: Mr. Wolfowitz is going to the Foreign Ministry this afternoon for meetings, so again we will be concluding a bit earlier than initially planned. In that regard, my introduction will be very short and then we will have opening remarks by our speaker and then open our floor to our working press here. If our photographers could finish up in about the next minute we will get started very shortly. Alright, thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guest, fellow journalists welcome to the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. My name is Dan Sloan, I am president of the club. We are honored today to welcome to Tokyo, on his first official visit to Japan, Mr. Paul Wolfowitz who is President of the World Bank. As I introduced, or mentioned in my introductory remarks, we have a very tight schedule today, so my intro will be very short. As I always do, I will please ask you to turn off your hand phones or put them on manner mode and remember that we have a number of camera people filming in the back. Also I would like to briefly acknowledge the tragedy in south Asia that took place over the weekend. Our hearts and thoughts are with those that were affected by this and we really hope as we did with our charity concert over the weekend for hurricane relief that everyone could consider what possibly could be done to help those. As you are well aware our guest speaker was formerly in the Bush White House, in the Defense Department. He was tapped by US President George Bush to head the World Bank in March. In a long career in government and private sector service he has been US Ambassador to Indonesia, along with many other posts. Looking at his brief tenure at the World Bank, Mr. Wolfowitz has, in six months, helped to finalize a debt relief deal for the world’s poorest nations, he has urged world trade ministers to complete the Doha round when they next meet in Hong Kong, and he has a number of other policies which include climate control, and other things that he is involved with right now. Critics say Mr. Wolfowitz has helped to give definition to the World Bank, which they say had been mired in bureaucracy. On its main brief in addressing poverty, today our speaker will again give some opening remarks and then open the floor for questions. Again, we will have very little time, so it will be our working press, and our working press only, who will be speaking, or asking questions today. So with no further ado, World Bank President Mr. Paul Wolfowitz. Mr. Paul Wolfowitz, President, World Bank Group: Thank you, Dan. Thank you all of you I appreciate this large turn-out. First of all I would like to join Dan in expressing condolences to the people of south Asia, Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan for the suffering they are going through now and the enormous losses they have suffered, and as I did earlier, specifically to the family of a Japanese aid worker who was killed along with his two-year old son, in Islamabad. Beyond that sad note, I must say it is a real pleasure to be back in Japan. I made my first visit here in 1981 for planning to organize the head of the policy planning staff of the State Department and it has been a pleasure coming back here frequently, both as a government official, and for seven years as the Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, which boasts a very large number of Japanese graduates, one of whom I just met working in the World Bank Office today; so I am proud of that. We have had a busy schedule in just the first part of this visit, with just another 24 hours to go, but we had a meeting this morning with a parliamentary group of the World Bank, with some very well-informed, I would say, and frequently outspoken, Japanese Diet members that was very informative and a good exchange of views. We met for several hours with a group of Japanese officials from both the Finance Ministry and the Foreign Ministry as well as Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and Japan Bank for International Cooperation, talking about the range of development issues, with particular focus on east Asia and south Asia. We met with the leaders of the leading financial institutions in Japan, in part just to thank them because the World Bank depends heavily on the Japanese financial markets for our own borrowing, and we have had very productive relationship in that regard for which we are appreciative. And I have just come from a meeting at the World Bank Offices with, among others, a group of students, university students, who are called, I think, Youth for Development, who really represent, I think, a lot of the energy and the idealism that the whole development community depends on. As I said I have been coming here for 24 years, but this is my first time as President of the World Bank, and it is exciting to be here. In thinking back, it seems to me the thing I would like to stress most of all is the importance of Japan’s role in international development. It continues to be an important role as an inspiration to developing countries; I think that is sometimes forgotten, because there are so many new entries into the ranks of developing countries. But it was Japan that demonstrated 50 years ago, first demonstrated, that it was possible for countries—in fact, really, going back much longer than that—but in the post-war period, demonstrating that you did not have to be a European country or the United States in order to be successful at development. I think that example continues to be alive today. In fact, I was very struck when we visited Pakistan back in August and met with a group of poor villagers who were participating in a successful World Bank project in a village called Dhok Tabarak in Pakistan, and I asked them if it was possible to reproduce the success in their village and other villages in Pakistan and this one woman who was a real leader, I must say, she was had strong view points, expressed herself very forcefully—but not in English, it had to go through a translator—and even though she does not speak English she said “Why not? The Japanese have done it, the Chinese have done it, why can we not do it in Pakistan?” I think that impact of successful models is a very important part of the development process, and something not to lose sight of. But Japan is also important in a more tangible way, and that is as a leading donor, a leading contributor to the development process, the second largest shareholder in the World Bank; an indispensable partner to my institution in the development process. Going back to those discussions I had 24 years ago I was struck by the Japanese concept of comprehensive security, and the recognition that Japan could contribute to its own security as well as the peace and security of the world through its development assistance programs. I think that remains a very important feature of Japanese policy. Development is something, I think, that is a moral obligation for all of us, but if anyone feels that is not a sufficient motivation it is also an act of self-interest, and I think that notion of comprehensive security brings it home. In all of the discussions I had today, we talked about development priorities and I feel strongly that the first priority of my institution has to be Africa. I think indeed, it needs to be the first priority of the development community as a whole because in sub-Saharan Africa we have 600 million people who are not progressing the way east Asia is progressing or the way south Asia has started to progress. 600 million people where poverty has doubled in the last 10 years, where poverty is compounded by the epidemic of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and the plague of malaria. It is a situation that needs to turn around, that I think has a real hope of turning around. At the Gleneagles Summit in July in Scotland where Prime Minister Koizumi participated along with the other seven G-8 leaders, and where I was invited along with the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Secretary-General of the United Nations, along with five developing country leaders and seven African leaders. It was a development focus summit and it led to some very important commitments to double development aid and, specifically, to double assistance to Africa; also to cancel the debts of the poorest countries, some of the poorest countries of the world. It was a recognition, I think, that Africa needs the help and support of the developed world. But as Prime Minister Blair said at the time, it is not just aid, it is aid for performance, or as he put it, it is a deal for deal. The reason to think that aid can make a difference in Africa now when it arguable did not make such a difference 10 years ago is, I think because the African countries themselves are stepping up to responsibility in a way they have not done in the past. We are seeing important African governments including Nigeria and South Africa take on the issue of corruption, we are seeing African countries take on issues of economic reform, we are seeing some eight African countries now having sustained positive economic growth over a period of a number of years. That does not mean that the whole subcontinent is transformed, but it does mean, I think, that there is a real chance for the kind of successful process to begin that started here in east Asia some 40 years ago. 40 years ago I recall reading analyses of South Korea that said it was a hopeless basket-case, if you can believe that, and among other things it was the east Asian culture that was said to be its big handicap. As I said in my speech to our annual meetings I think for every Afro-pessimist today there was Oriental-fatalist 40 years ago. The Orient is not an area of fatalism, it is an area of self-confidence and optimism and I hope that Africa can begin to assume that character as well. To those people in Japan who think that Africa is far away and Africa is someone else’s problem I would say that the world is too small for that attitude. It is everybody’s problem, it is a moral obligation for all of us to help. But also, again, if that is not enough for you I think the problems of any part of the world will ultimately come back and effect all of us. But Africa is not the only priority of the World Bank or the development community. It is critically important to help those successful middle-income countries—which is I guess World Bank-ese for China, India, Brazil, and Mexico—to encourage and even strengthen the growth performance in those countries. That has, it has to be said, produced the greatest increase in wealth for the largest number of people in the shortest period of time in the history of humanity. That is remarkable, and it has enabled some 400 million people to escape poverty in the last 20 years. At the same time, there are a billion people living on less than US$1 a day. Nearly 200 million of those are in China and more than 200 million are in India. So when we talk about Africa as a first priority, we by no means think of it as the only priority. I think I would just conclude with saying, while aid is an important part of the picture, and debt relief is an important part of the picture, and better performance by the developing countries is an important part of the picture, there is a missing piece; that is trade. There is a critical event coming up next month, excuse me, in December. Two months from now, in Hong Kong, where there will be a critical round of so-called Doha development-trade negotiations. It is critically important, particularly for the poorest people of the world, that that Hong Kong round produce results because our goal is not to create permanent aid dependency, our goal is to create jobs that can enable poor people to live on their own resources with productive jobs. Productive jobs has to mean opportunities to trade, trade with the developed world, and also trade within the developing world. So even though trade is not the responsibility of the World Bank, the outcome of those negotiations is very much going to affect all of us. I guess I have one little bit of hard news, if you are waiting for this, do not wait breathlessly, but I am very happy to be able to announce that the 2006 Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics, we love acronyms, so that is the ABCDE Conference, the Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics will be held in Tokyo on 29-30 May at the Mita House in Tokyo. So I look forward to coming back to Japan, at least then if not sooner. It is a terrific development partner. I have learned a lot in just the short time I have been here, and I know I will continue learning more as we proceed. With that, Dan are you going to recognize questions? Mr. Sloan: Yeah, very good. Probably sir, just so I can see the floor, we’ll take the podium down. Okay, at this moment we will open up the floor. Bernie. I have neglected to interview also joining me on the front is Antony Rally immediate past president of the club. The Cambodia Daily: I would like to ask you, the United States is probably…is the major donor to the World Bank, and you are very much focused on Africa, you see the need, you see the funds needed. Do you see that the policy in Iraq—and the amount of money that has been dispensed in Iraq, looking backwards—would it have been a better policy not to have gotten involved in Iraq so that the United States and the world might have had more money to help to reduce to reduce poverty in Africa and elsewhere? Mr. Wolfowitz: Let me first say I am glad there is a Cambodia Daily. When I first visited East Asia in 1983 all there was out of Cambodia was refugees. It is a sign of progress. I think that the free press is an important part of the institutions of accountability that are, I think, critical to the development. I think the challenge, first of all, the United States has substantially increased its development assistance, and specifically its assistance to Africa in the last five years. I have to emphasize I am not here as a Bush Administration official and I do not have to be on their record, and I would like to see the United States do more. But they have been doing more, and I think the challenge to doing yet more is not a question of tying it to other issues, including Iraq. I think the issue is demonstrating that that aid produces results. Too often I am confronted by Americans who are very sympathetic to the plight of Africa who say ‘You just told me…isn’t it the case they will say the world is given, I do not know what number they will come up with, 200 billion dollars to Africa in the last 20 years, and did you not jut finish telling me the situation is worse than it was 10 years ago?” Unfortunately that juxtaposition of facts is a challenge, and my answer when people say that is ‘This is not the Africa of 10 years ago; this is an Africa where leaders are stepping down when their time in office ends, this is an Africa where leaders are accepting being voted out of office, this is an Africa where senior officials are being sent to jail for corruption, where the deputy president of South Africa was dismissed because his aid took a bribe. It is not uniformly, but increasingly, I think, African leaders are accepting their responsibility to their own people. That is, I think what is going to make the difference, and I strongly believe that when they perform like that they deserve, and will get help, not only from the United States but from the entire world, and certainly from the World Bank. New York Times: To follow up a little bit on Bernie’s question: in your previous incarnation, as you were, architect of the successful Gulf War—one of the architects—and also the current Iraqi incursion of Asia, whatever you want to call it; it has been two and a half years since mission accomplished, it looks like we are heading into a slow-motion Sunni-Shiite civil war, American troops are obviously trying to prevent that. I am just interested in your thoughts about lessons learned. You lived the first war, you were very active in preparing for the second war. It is not going very well. Two and a half years have passed. What are the lessons learned here? Mr. Wolfowitz: Let us see how long we can keep going before we get a question that is not about Iraq. But look… Mr. Zakawi is not an Iraqi; this is not a Sunni-Shiite civil war, it is a war of terrorists and former Baathists against the idea of a new Iraq, which I think the overwhelming majority of Iraqis want to see. Eight and a half million Iraqis voted on 30 January, even though they faced death if they voted, and even though I think I think some 45 of them actually did die on that day. I have heard about Iraqi voters standing in line when snipers shot at them, standing in line when mortars landed on them; I have heard of two Iraqi policemen who sacrificed their lives that day to stop suicide bombers. The Iraqi people want a different future, and the people who are trying to keep them from that are extraordinary criminals who blow up children and kill innocent people. The challenge is how to make progress in the face of that, and part of it is a military challenge which is other people’s responsibility, I am happy to say, now. But part of it is in fact economic reconstruction. The World Bank, of course, was originally called, and it is still part of our name, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and reconstruction is a challenge in many parts of the world; Iraq, and Afghanistan, but also in Rwanda, in Liberia, in Haiti, in the Balkans, where I am very happy to say the World Bank has played a leading role, in Gaza today. One of the challenges is how to help countries that have just emerged from conflict or in some cases countries that are still in the middle of conflict, to provide better lives for their people, because that is, I think, part of making sure that conflict does not occur. Business Times: China obviously faces some extreme development challenges and it is under considerable pressure at the moment to revalue its currency even further. Do you think this pressure could possible be dangerous, not only to China’s development but also to the rather precarious balance at the moment in the global financial system? Mr. Wolfowitz: I am not the expert on currencies and I do not know what is the right answer for China. I feel reasonably confident that the Chinese government will make its decisions based on what it thinks is best for its people and its country, not matter what the pressures may be. So I worry less about the pressures. I do think that the success of China’s economy is important for all of us. It is important for a billion Chinese and that makes it important for the rest of us. But it is also, I think, clearly important for stability and progress in east Asia. Sometimes people try to stir up the specter of a very strong and powerful China in the future. I would much rather live with the problems of a successful than with the problems of an unsuccessful China. I think that is probably true, one could say, of Japan as well. Japan’s success has not been without new challenges for the world, but those kinds of challenges are the ones that I think we should welcome. It is so much better than the challenges of a failure which we are trying to escape in Africa today. Reuters: I have a question on the debt relief deal announced at the World Bank Annual Meeting in September. Just, could you give us more details on the compensation schedule as I believe that is being worked out right now. And also, when do you expect the deal to be approved by the Board of Members? Mr. Wolfowitz: The rule is, if you ask two questions I get to pick which one I answer, but actually that was a single question disguised as two so…usually it is the other way around. For those of you who do not follow this on a daily basis, I think the best summary of where we are on the debt relief deal is that in Scotland in July the leaders of the eight industrialized countries agreed on a debt cancellation package. They are responsible, if I have the percentages correct, for about 70% of the debt. That means that 30% of it is the responsibility is the responsibility of a large number of other countries including some important donors that would have made it into the G-10 or the G-12. We finished the annual meetings of the World Bank and the IMF in Washington two weeks ago, and as Trevor Manuel, the Finance Minister of South Africa, described in the end, we went from a G-8 debt cancellation agreement to a G-184 debt cancellation agreement. We got the consensus of all the ministers represented there, from the 184 shareholders of the World Bank, to proceed with canceling the debts and having the donors make up the difference with additional commitments to what we call IDA—that is the International Development Association—funding. We have to come up with a detailed schedule, which is what your question asks about. We have not done that yet. We are working on that as we speak. And my expectation is that we will be done in a matter of weeks, not a matter of months, and at that point we will take it to our Board with a strong commitment from the ministers to get it done. So I think the way is clear now, to finishing the deal . Freelance: How long do you think it will take to rebuild Iraq economically, in other worlds to get rid of Al Qaeda influence? Mr. Wolfowitz: Actually, those are two different things. I think one of the things that is unfortunately the case is that Afghanistan really has been devastated by 25 years of invasion and civil war, and Iraq has been devastated by 35 years of misrule and in many cases including, particularly southern Iraq and northern Iraq, punitive policy of disinvestment, which any visitor to Basra could observe very easily. Basra was once called the Venice of the Persian Gulf, and it is a miserable dilapidated city. There is a lot of rebuilding work to do; it will move a lot faster however, obviously, if the killers stopped their work. I think if there is peace in Iraq there is every reason to think that it can move quickly. People often talk about Iraq’s considerable natural resources, by which they usually mean the oil; it also has wonderful water resources which can be in agriculture. Most of all, it has remarkable human resources, and some of the most talented people in the world. So I think with peace, the Iraqis have an enormous chance to build a successful country. Freelance: How is the World Bank going to allocate France to Zimbabawe, for instance, and prevent that money does not go into the wrong hands in Africa? Mr. Wolfowitz: Very, very carefully, and in the case of Zimbabwe, perhaps not at all. My Africa experts have said that with the kind of misgovernment that is taking place in Zimbabwe it is not clear that development is possible at all. That is an unfortunate conclusion if it is true. But I think we…for several reasons, have to be very careful about corruption. It affects our own lending, our own money. For one thing, we need to set an example; for another thing, it is a terrible waste of funds if it diverted into corruption; and for a third thing, I think there are certainly cases in the past where lending or giving money to governments that were doing the wrong thing simply facilitated their continuing to do wrong things. So I think performance is critical—I will go back and repeat what I said about Prime Minister Blair’s characterization of the Gleneagles’ result, that it is a deal for a deal, that is assistance for performance. It is not throwing money down a rathole which is the challenge, at least, when I talk to members of the American Congress, we are going to reward performers and good performers are rewarded more, and do our best to patch up the wounds in places where you do not have it. Armsa News Agency: I would like to ask you a question about endemic health problems in Africa. I was wondering if you can say what if, you know, these endemic problems in Africa are also affecting south-east Asia with bird flu and some others; endemics then are growing. So I was wondering if you have a policy of these for south-east Asia, and what do you do also for some region in Africa which are also very affected. Thank you. Mr. Wolfowitz: I think the global concerns now about the avian flu should be part of the answer to people who say Africa is a long way from Japan and why should we worry about Africa. The problems in one part of the world can spread awfully quickly to another part of the world, and that certainly includes health problems. At the moment, although the diseases of Africa are prevalent elsewhere in the world, I do not think they are coming out of Africa; but one of the great tragedies of the sub-continent is the enormous number people that are dying from preventable diseases, because they do not have the money to buy, for example, malaria bednets to protect them and their children from malaria. Malaria is as big a killer in many parts of southern Africa as HIV/AIDS is, and it is entirely preventable. Thousands of people die every day from tuberculosis, and that is a treatable disease. And even HIV/AIDS is a disease for which we know a lot about how to prevent it, how to really slow the progression of the disease in individuals once they contract it. It is an extraordinary challenge for countries that are poor to begin with. I think as we approach the issue of working with African countries to deal with health, I must say I think we need to look at all the issues—malaria is one that the World Bank has recently launched a new initiative because of our perception that it was not getting sufficient emphasis in the overall picture. But it is important to think of development—I use this analogy—as a team sport. It is not an individual sport like tennis; it is like European football or soccer as we call it in the United States, where all the positions on the field have to be covered. Some of you have seen eight-year-olds play soccer. You know that they tend, the whole team tends to go where the ball is. Sometimes even the goalie chases the ball. And if the ball of this year is HIV/AIDS, or whatever happens to be the most popular cause in the development field, sometimes you get everybody chasing the ball and people not thinking about what is needed to cover the whole field because you cannot just deliver medicine to deal with HIV/AIDS; you have to operate clinics. That means you have to have an education system that produces trained health workers; it means you have to have electricity that supports the clinics. You need clean water because frankly many of the diseases are lethal only because people are already suffering from severe diseases caused by poor sanitation, which means you really need a country-based approach—that is the language we use in the World Bank—you need to cover the whole field. And I think we have learned some lessons in that regard, and it is important to keep applying them. That, by the way, was a sort of major theme of my discussions here today with the Japanese government officials, because the World Bank is a major player in every east Asian country. One or more Japanese agencies is a major player in every east Asian country. I was very pleased to learn that in the last 10 years we have made a lot of progress since the time when Clare Short said the Japanese Development Program was a dinosaur. It is a much more nimble animal now, and it is coordinated, I think, extremely well with the ADB and the World Bank, and I was very pleased to see how well we are doing in that regard. Mr. Dan Sloan: With that we are going to have to conclude today, going on to the Foreign Ministry Mr. Wolfowitz is. We would like to thank you for your time today, as is our custom at the club, we extend a one-year honorary membership to all our speakers and since you will be back in May we certainly expect to see you again. Thank you very much. Can I ask everyone to please stay seated until our guest and his party have left the room?
Thank you. |
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