Although the United Nations always has crises to solve, delegates at this year's UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York seemed to have an exceptional number on their plates. With America's financial turmoil creating a bleak backdrop, the gathering seemed to hum with palpable angst about the future. One world leader after another strode to the podium to tell how high food and fuel prices were devastating the poor in their countries - and threatening to reverse economic growth and the significant gains we have made in fighting poverty. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that the world is facing a "development crisis", and worried that wealthy nations would fall further behind in their commitments to the poor. Many delegates and leaders I met echoed those fears.

Read more

Some time ago I met with leaders of several NGOs from a 'Debt and Development Platform'. The quality of our exchanges gave me the idea to continue our discussions on debt here with you.

Read more

Oil prices have gone down in recent weeks from the peak reached in mid-summer, but they are still much higher than at the beginning of the decade. With high oil and coal prices, there are stronger incentives to use less fossil fuels. Alternative energies become financially more attractive. These developments can bring about reductions in greenhouse emissions and contribute to mitigate climate change. But it all can go away if the price of oil comes down substantially. So we could seize the opportunity of high oil and coal prices to lock-in these incentive effects on climate change mitigation. This could be achieved by introducing an internationally harmonized floor to the user cost of emitting carbon by using oil and coal. To implement this floor, a variable carbon levy could be enacted by a group of participating countries. The levy would kick in if and when the price of oil and coal were to fall below a pre-agreed threshold. No additional costs would be imposed on anyone above those already being paid now. And this would create certainty to guide consumers and investors in their behavior and resource allocations towards less greenhouse gases emitting activities

Read more

The failure of the recent WTO Ministerial to achieve its objective of agreeing on modalities for negotiations in agriculture and NAMA is a setback for the Doha Round. The latest in a series of failed attempts, the breakdown of the July talks has led to concerns about the demise of the entire Round. A recent Financial Times editorial even coined the unfortunate but catchy phrase, "dead as a Doha".

Read more

Images of the Beijing sky-line, seemingly bathed in a soup of smog and haze have been never far from the world's TV screens over recent days and weeks.

International reporters with hand-held air pollution detectors have been popping up on street corners checking the levels of soot and dust.

Everyone seems keen to prove that the city's air will be a decisive and debilitating factor for one of the world's most high profile sporting events.

Without doubt Beijing is facing a huge challenge. There are real and understandable concerns for the health of competitors, especially those in endurance and long distance events such as cycling and the marathon.

But the current frenzied focus is marked by a modicum of amnesia-air pollution was a major concern in Los Angeles 24 years ago.

Read more

The failure to reach an agreement in Geneva has severely weakened the Doha round. What could be the consequences of a collapse of the Doha negotiation from the perspective of developing nations?

Read more

On the occasion of the symposium "Investing in Development", let's carry on the discussion started in June.
***
What is the impact of private sector activity in development?What should the public and private sectors' respective roles be?

Read more

Last month, I spoke to a group of British parliamentarians who sit on something called the International Development Committee. Their role is to scrutinise the work of the Department for International Development. "DFID" - as it is known - is the arm of the British government concerned with promoting development, supporting the alleviation of poverty across the globe, and funding multilateral organisations like the UN World Food Programme.Members of the International Development Committee asked me to travel to London to speak to them as part of their inquiry into the work of the World Food Programme (WFP) and the support it receives from DFID. As part of the inquiry, an open invitation was issued to any organisation or individual with an interest in global food security to contribute written evidence.

Read more

These few lines came to my mind after one of our Board of Directors' meetings devoted, among other things, to a new participation in an important microfinance institution in Morocco - a country famous for its involvement in the sector. I have, for a long time, been an avid supporter of microfinance. And I am particularly proud of the important increase in the amount of investments made in this sector by my organization, AFD, over the past 20 years: through 60 projects and nearly 300 million euros invested, we have helped more than 1.5 million people make their way out of poverty. We now want to go further, encouraged in this by GCAP's very positive evaluation of our involvement. I see microfinance as a powerful tool against exclusion; it allows people who have been traditionally excluded from the financial systems to have access to credit. Great tribute must be paid to the pioneers of this revolutionary approach.

Read more

Having just returned from Senegal, I want to share my thoughts with you on an issue that became strikingly clear to me: the favorable perspectives shaping up for Africa's agriculture and their complex implications for future energy choices.

While traveling through the irrigated rice production area in the Senegal River Valley, you could see the new opportunities that rising world prices of agricultural commodities could bring to African agriculture. The changes in Senegal are down right impressive. To be sure, the dramatic upturn in world prices is spawning many challenges for net importers of agricultural commodities and for the World Food Program, as Josette Sheeran so emphatically points out in this blog. In addition, it is creating a fair amount of social and political tension in some urban areas. In order to be beneficial for all, this price surge must therefore incite cities to become better suppliers and service providers to their rural peripheries, so that cities also reap the benefits of improving conditions in rural areas. (I will come back to this fundamental relationship in another column.

Read more