Good afternoon.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm pleased to have the opportunity to talk to you all today. A lot of what I want to do is amplify what Ambassador Rae has just said so compellingly. I hope it's not inappropriate for me to congratulate you on being so well represented by your team led by the ambassador here at the United Nations in New York, where I'm speaking from.
It has been a year full of unpleasant surprises. The virus itself caught us by surprise, but I think a lot of people are being surprised by the severity of the global recession it has caused. I don't think it's surprising that this recession has hit hardest in the 50 or so countries where a hundred million people already only survive because of the help they get from organizations like David's and mine, but some people have been surprised by the speed with which the damage is being done.
What we're going to see this year, for the first time since the 1990s, is that extreme poverty is going to increase, life expectancy will fall, the annual death toll from HIV, tuberculosis and malaria is going to double, and the number of people facing starvation may also double. David will talk more about that. This carnage, which is what it is, is really concentrated in the most vulnerable countries.
Last month, Bill and Melinda Gates, through their foundation, published a report that put it very well. The last 25 weeks basically threaten to unravel 25 years of development progress around the world. It's worth remembering what many poor countries were actually like 25 years ago. I was then working in a country which at that time saw a quarter of its children never reach their fifth birthday. Most of those children never went to school, and one woman in 18 died at childbirth. I don't think any of us really want to see all of that back.
Ambassador Rae has made an excellent point about the difference between the 2% and the 23%. What the better-off countries have done is exactly the right thing to have done. They've essentially thrown out the rule book to pump liquidity and fiscal support into their own economies to protect their own citizens. The poorest countries don't have the resources to do that. That's why they have only been able to do 2% compared to the 23%, and that is surprising in a number of ways. First, it would have been possible for many of the necessary actions of those very poor countries to have been taken with the help of the international financial institutions, not least because those institutions did exactly the same thing for the vulnerable countries just as recently as 2008-09.
It's surprising it hasn't happened, because, as Ambassador Rae has said, solidarity is indeed self-interest. Failing to take action now on behalf of the poorest countries unfortunately isn't just a failure of generosity or empathy. Like the virus, the problems that will be spawned by the huge economic retraction we're seeing now are going to come back to bite everybody. All the poverty, hunger, sickness and suffering are going to fuel grievances and despair all around the world. In that way, there will be a risk of more conflict, instability and migration and refugee flows. All of these things are going to give succour to extremist groups and terrorists, and the consequences of all that will reach far and last long.
Canada is in a really important position to use the months ahead to move the world to a different path. The meeting that Ambassador Rae referred to and that Prime Minister Trudeau chaired on financing for development set out a very powerful forward agenda. There are two things in particular that it would be great if Canada were to champion.
The first is dealing with this 2% versus 23% problem. It can be largely dealt with in a way that does not require significant additional fiscal effort by better-off countries. If the IMF were asked to make a general allocation of the currency—it could issue the so-called special drawing rights—but also to devote those resources mostly to the most fragile countries; if the World Bank were asked to run a program to extend the suspension of debt services being agreed to so far to move toward some rescheduling of debt, but also some debt stock reduction; and if the powerful countries who are the shareholders of the IMF and the World Bank could put influence to bear, so that the private sector comes to the parties as well, that set of measures would get the 2% much closer to the 23%. We would avoid all of the serious adverse consequences, not just for the countries themselves but for the wider world that will also be faced with this problem.
The other thing that I think would be super helpful for Canada to lead the rich countries on would be emulating one or two others in the G7 in moving faster toward the 0.7% target, a target indeed designed and instigated by a very distinguished Canadian public policy expert. You will all remember his work, which is official development assistance. That 0.7% target has contributed over the last 25 years to a lot of the progress that's now at stake, and if Canada were able to increase the overall level of assistance but also get closer to that 0.7% target, it would be easier to persuade others to follow.
The use of those resources is not difficult to find. They are exactly the same things that have been done, including by Canada, over the last several months, and Ambassador Rae ran through a lot of them just now: more humanitarian assistance, support for vaccines, and so on. That is good use of money, not just out of generosity and empathy but also out of self-interest in building a world that is fairer, safer and more prosperous for all of us.
Thank you very much.