Speech by the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, at the high-level Plenary Meeting of the 60th UN General Assembly — New York, 15 September 2005.

The approval of the Millennium Goals constituted a significant achievement for contemporary humanism. It represented a victory for the values of human solidarity over the doctrines of moral indifference and political inaction which had previously held sway with regard to the poor and excluded.

The Millennium Goals show we have achieved a level of collective awareness. They are rooted in the conviction that we must fight inequalities while respecting and valuing diversity. They express a vision of democracy in which political rights, in order to be effective, are inseparable from economic, social and cultural rights. They underline the need to increase the generation of wealth, but also make its benefits available to all – and to do so not by destroying sources of life, but by protecting and renewing them.

This will surely require a new, more creative and responsible relationship between peoples, and between humankind and nature. The Millennium Goals, in short, express the civilizing ideal of peace founded upon justice. There are no goals more just or more pertinent: our challenge is to achieve them.

In order to do so, we need more than routine mechanisms and procedures. Under existing models for financing, and given the limited nature of aid flows, the Millennium Goals simply will not be achieved in most countries. We must act more quickly and with greater courage.

The resources available to combat poverty and hunger need to be increased – and increased significantly. We need to offer development opportunities to poor countries. If the developed countries acquire the necessary strategic vision, they will realize that this new posture, this extra effort, is not merely fair but absolutely necessary. Without this extra effort, I fear that international peace and security will remain a chimera.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have always said, and I wish to repeat, that each country must play its part. In Brazil we have been striving to implement the same measures we have been proposing in the international sphere – not with any pretension of being a model for others, but with great enthusiasm and political resolve.

We have adopted the Millennium Development Goals as mandatory benchmarks for all government policies. We have established a national prize to reward practices which express social solidarity, whether implemented by local government, churches, the private sector or social movements.

I would like briefly to highlight our government's initiatives in four areas: the fight against hunger; the right to employment; the promotion of racial and gender equality; and environmental preservation.

Today, the Zero Hunger programme, the main element of which is the Family Allowance, reaches seven and a half million Brazilian families – about 30 million people. By the end of my tenure all families living below the poverty line will have been incorporated into the programme. Brazil will finally have guaranteed all its children the right to eat every day.

We have come far, and gained the credibility on which we can base other, even more ambitious steps towards social justice.

Brazil has recovered a sustained pace of growth, creating jobs and redistributing wealth.

In the last 32 months we have created 3.2 million new jobs in the formal sector, in addition to hundreds of thousands of jobs in family agriculture.

A concern with women's rights and the promotion of racial equality permeate all our policies.

We have created special secretariats, with ministerial status, the purpose of which is to stimulate government action and ensure that concrete initiatives are undertaken. As an example I would refer to an achievement I find deeply moving: the fact that due to our affirmative-action programme, with financial support for poor students, poor black and indigenous people educated in public schools can now go to university.

Another example: in the context of agrarian reform we have ended the discrimination against women in the system of land-ownership in rural areas. Whereas land title was previously granted only to men, now women can share the right to land. Agricultural credit was also the privilege of men, but now women farmers can take out loans.

In the environmental area I am very pleased to highlight the consistent drop in deforestation rates in the Amazon region, as well the new prospects for the region's 22 million inhabitants thanks to the Sustainable Amazon Plan, an innovative project for ecologically-oriented social and economic development.

Social and economic changes in Brazil are making us a more productive and caring country.

We are ready and willing to join forces with nations all around the world in order to ensure that the Millennium Goals are achieved.

Thank you very much.