Thank you very much for allowing me to be here today and participate in this discussion of the UN Millennium Development Goals.

Like all of us, my own views are formed by our own experience, particularly in the early years of our careers. In 1971, I went to Bogotá, Colombia as a part of a team from the Harvard School at the Public Health and Colombian Institute of Family Welfare, and for 7 years worked in the poorest slums trying to improve both maternal child nutrition and child development. These were extremely poor people - sleeping 5 in one bed, malnourished, no running water in the house, poor sanitary conditions, and threat of violence on the streets.

But it was amazing that every day coming out of these poor dwellings were clean, well-dressed, energetic women, ready to sit on a bus for over an hour to go and work in the centre of town, or to work in peoples’ homes at the other end of the city.

These people had little time to think about politics or ideology - they distrusted the politicians. What they wanted was a better paid job. They wanted to go from USD 2 a day to USD 4 a day. And the women, contrary to what some people thought, were very good at managing money. They had to be, if you are going to survive on USD 2 per day.

And I slowly realized that the government could set a legal framework, but could not create jobs. The Colombian Institute of Family Welfare was not going to create jobs, and Harvard School of Public Health was not going to create jobs. Rather, it was businesses, both big and small, which would create jobs. So I changed what I wanted to do in life, flat work for a university, or a government, but for a private company. And Nestlé had an outstanding reputation in Colombia for working with the Family Welfare Institute to improve nutrition of the population.

So now, more than 35 years later, what has happened in regard to world poverty?

There has been progress for some, and it is estimated that in the last 10 years, about 488 million people have come out of abject poverty, and about 230 million new people have joined the middle class.

In the 1970’s the Swedish economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal,  a world expert in development (and a Nobel Prize winner), said that India should be treated with 'benign neglect' - just leave it alone - because it was a hopeless basket case.

Look at India today. It is one of the world’s most dynamic economies, and yes it still has a high percentage of people trapped in rural poverty, but significant progress is being made - and will be made in reducing poverty. The Indians have a right to be proud of what has been accomplished so far.

And China. China was caught then in the Cultural Revolution of Mao Tse Tung, burning any book published in the west, shipping intellectuals out to re-education camps in the countryside, and trying to industrialize through village back yard steel ovens. I don’t need to tell you what is happening in China today. It has embraced a free market economy within a socialist system, and is on its way to becoming the world’s dominant economic power.
 
Yes, there are still millions of people living in rural poverty, but the Chinese government is aware of that and is instituting policies which will make further progress in reducing rural poverty.

Both infant mortality and child mortality have dropped significantly globally in the past l to 15 years. So it can’t be denied that the glass is getting fuller for some people.

But clearly, the glass is still partially empty. Over 2 billion people still lack access to clean water, and an additional billion lack access to decent sanitation.

We know that all countries aren’t like China or lndia, and the most frequently cited case of intransigent poverty is sub-Saharan Africa. Obviously there are great differences in Africa, with Botswana at one end, with a per capita income of about USD 6,000 , and 90% of the people having access to clean drinking water, and at the other end, states such as Rwanda, the Congo, and Burkina Faso with extreme problems of poverty, not to mention the Saharan states of Mali and Sudan.

But even Africa, with its problems, has an economic growth rate of about 7% per annum in recent years, and should such be treated as a basket case, as our friend Gunnar Myrdal did with India over 30 years ago.

In our report 'The Nestlé Commitment to Africa', we tried to make the point that businesses need to invest in Africa, and that it should be viewed as a long-term business opportunity, such as a problem child, that will create both better social conditions and attractive shareholder return for investors.

So, if we look at the eight Millennium Development Goals, there has been progress, even though there is a long way to go. I believe that the reason we are here today is to say what can we do - those of us here in this room - to speed up reaching the UN Millennium Development Goals?

First, there are policy steps that need to be taken. Millennium Goal number 8 addresses global partnerships and the need for tariff and quota-free access for export, and an open trading and financial system.

Developing countries are by nature primarily agricultural, and I believe that until barriers to Third World farmers are lifted through the Doha rounds, we will have difficulty reaching the MDG’s any time soon.

We have sat on the same platform with organizations such as Oxfam, to call on western governments to eliminate artificial support to farmers in Europe and North America.

About half of our 500 factories are in the developing world, and we have the same interests as Third World farmers - to be able to ship finished goods, not raw materials, to the developed world, and to not be subject to discriminatory trade practices which penalize the Third World. Unfortunately, progress continues to be slow on this front, blocked by political interests.

Second, ultimately it is governments who must provide the framework for the creation of economic development, and corruption is a significant hindrance to economic growth. All business needs to adhere to a zero corruption policy, and have a long-term view of the negative impact of corruption.

But rather than only looking to governments, I think that each one of us has to ask 'What can my organization do' to work towards achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals?

Last year, we studied the UN Millennium Development Goals in depth, and looked at our own activities.

Surprisingly, we identified over 120 projects which support the Millennium Development Goals. These projects, large and small, are mostly in partnership with civil society - including NGOs - where we share common interests and goals. If you are interested, I can give you a copy of this report at the end of the session.

If I take, for instance Goal 6 - Combat HIV/AIDS and malaria, and other diseases, we have established a Global Partnership with the International Federation of the Red Cross/Red Crescent Society to reach over 1 million teenagers to educate them on prevention of  HIV/AIDS.

We have extended our partnership with the IFRC in Africa to water and sanitation, resulting  this past year in over 300 new clean water points in Mozambique. If I take Millennium Development Goal 3, promote gender equality and empowering women, Nestlé has established a partnership with the United Nations Development Program in Pakistan, where UNDP has contributed USD 4 million to train 5,000 Pakistani women to become qualified dairy farm experts, and to start their own businesses in animal husbandry.

Given the growing world demand for milk, these women will not only lift their own families out of poverty, they will help hundreds of thousands of women in Pakistan to escape poverty, as it is generally the women who take care of the cows and receive the increased income from milk sold. This is obviously to our benefit as well, as it provides a greater source of milk for our factories.

Now people sometimes say to me, shouldn’t Nestlé be giving the money to the UNDP, rather than the other way around?  But we are bringing millions of francs of training technology and infrastructure developed over decades, and we already reach about 500,000 farmers, with education on how to grow better and more profitable crops and raise livestock.

This is a project which neither UNDP nor Nestlé could do on its own. If UNDP didn’t need us, they wouldn’t be interested in the partnership, and if we didn’t need more milk, it wouldn’t serve our long-term interests either.

This is only one of many programmes we support to improve the status of women through education in places like Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa and Cambodia.

As Mr Fust is here today, I'll mention an organization that both of us support in Cambodia, called Hagar, which takes hundreds of abandoned women and children off the streets, and trains them to produce soy-based food products in their factory. We provide  technical support and have recently donated a factory for their use.

We are involved in these projects because we believe that they are good for both society, and the company. This is what makes them sustainable in the long run.

We call this concept of Social Responsibility 'Creating Shared Value:' value for society, and value for the company, long term.

In order to reach the MDGs, I think that business needs to more widely adopt this concept of creating shared value - it is an attitude of looking to where we can create value for society and at the same time create value for our shareholders - and having a long term view of business development.

At the same time, the fundamental investment in industrializing the Third World should not be forgotten as the basis of poverty reduction. Nestlé is present in more than 80 countries, with, as I mentioned about half of our 500 production facilities located in developing countries. We have 265,000 employees worldwide and if we include the families of our employees, Nestlé’s economic activities result in an income for 3.4 million people across the globe, if you count both our suppliers, employees, and their families.

These investments sometimes have unexpected side-effects. Poonam Singh, the former head of Sustainable Development at WHO and former Development Minister of the Punjab in India said that she used to take tours of hospital administrators through the Nestlé milk factory there - to show them what a hospital should look like. Imagine the impact of putting a factory with Swiss hygiene standards in the middle of rural India.

I recently went back to those same barrios of Bogotá where I worked 30 years ago, and I was glad to see that they now had brick walls rather than cardboard. They had running water in their homes, and the children were going to school. It was clear that progress had been made, and that their glass was fuller. But as we know, the glass is still empty for billions of people in the world, and whether we reach the Millennium Development Goals or not in 2015, we have no option but to keep trying to fill the glass through the creativity, hard work, and collaboration of many people in many places.