Brown calls for global unity on crisis, IMF reform

Saturday, March 28, 2009 at 6:25 AM Posted by Beijing News


British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for global unity and major reform of the IMF to tackle fallout from the financial crisis, at a meeting here ahead of a key G20 summit in London next week.

"We cannot solve the problem of global financial instability without there being a global solution," Brown told center-left leaders and policy makers at a conference in the resort town of Vina del Mar, west of Santiago.

"We must reform the International Monetary Fund, and we must have an institution that can deal with the problems of the environment," Brown said five days before hosting a meeting of the Group of 20 industrialized and developing nations on the global crisis.

"It is absolutely clear that the global institutions that we built in the 1940s are quite incapable of dealing with the problems that we have now."

Brown said that 100 million people had been thrust into poverty as a result of the crisis and 30 million more people will be unemployed.

"Perhaps the worst statistic of all is the World Bank reporting that half a million children will die simply because they won't have enough to live on," he told participants at a two-day Progressive Governance conference.

"I think that we can show that globalisation need not be a force for injustice but can be a force for justice on a global scale."

Host and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet also called of major reform of the IMF to make economic cooperation work.

"We need to coordinate the effort of countries on plans for fiscal stimulus," Bachelet added.

During a separate meeting in Brazil on Thursday, Brown and Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva proposed to create a 100-billion-dollar global fund to boost trade amid the world cash crunch.

Lula, US Vice President Joe Biden, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Uruguayan President Tabare Vazquez and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg also attended the Chile meeting, as well as Argentina's President Cristina Kirchner.

The conference was organized by Policy Network, an international think tank initiated 10 years ago by former US president Bill Clinton, with past meetings in Washington, Berlin, Stockholm, London, Budapest and Johannesburg.

Biden was due to take part in an official visit to Chile on Saturday before traveling to Costa Rica.

During his first Latin America trip, the US vice president was expected to sound out regional leaders ahead of the Summit of the Americas next month in Trinidad and Tobago, which will be US President Barack Obama's first major regional gathering.

"These meetings are an important first step toward a new day in relations and building partnerships," Biden wrote in an op-ed published Friday in 11 Latin American newspapers.

His tour comes as decades-long US influence wanes in the region, with the United States focusing elsewhere in recent years, while Latin American countries have grown stronger and expanded relations with countries such as China, Russia and India.







Kasahara

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