Paul Polman. CEO, Unilever. MDG Success: Accelerating Action and Partnering for Impact. Monday 23 September 2013

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1 Paul Polman CEO, Unilever MDG Success: Accelerating Action and Partnering for Impact Monday 23 September 2013 Secretary General, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, In 2000 the members of this General Assembly made an historic commitment - to halve poverty by We have made good progress in many areas, of which we can be proud. Millions of lives have been saved. Millions of families now have access to clean water. Millions of boys and girls are going to school, getting the education that will allow them to fulfil their potential. But the job is incomplete. We have a duty and an obligation to finish it - to end poverty in our life-time. Once and for all. Irreversibly. Over the past 12 months, as a member of the Secretary General s High Level Panel on the Post 2015 Development Agenda, I have had the opportunity to listen to many thousands of people across the world talk about their hopes and dreams for the future. There has been an enormous response, especially from the young.

2 What I took out was a deep desire for change. Instinctively people recognise that the social, economic and environmental challenges that we face demand a new kind of leadership, a new way of doing things. Business, like governments, will have to be in the forefront of this change. No-one can do it alone. As part of the Panel s outreach we consulted with many companies, in over 30 countries. The combined revenues of these companies exceeds $8 trillion dollars - nearly 10% of global GDP. Nothing like this has ever been done before. What we heard from these businesses was that economic growth and job creation were key to development. But we heard too that business in the 21 st century has to grow differently. First, our future growth has to respect the limits of the planet s dwindling resources. Water, energy, land and many minerals are in increasingly short supply. We will all have to learn to do more with less. Second, we need to tackle the challenge of climate change (growth has to be carbon free) as it undermines growth and hits the poor hardest.

3 Third, the fruits of our growth need to be shared more evenly. The countries where inequalities are greatest and where people get left behind are also most prone to instability and conflict. Business cannot succeed in societies that fail either. Responsible business understands this well and sees, more and more, that the cost of inaction exceeds the cost of action. Responsible business also understands that they have to be part of the solution and not bystanders in a system that gives them life in the first place. The issues of poverty, food-security, climate change have simply become too complex for any one company or government, however powerful, to tackle alone. New forms of partnership are needed. Partnerships such as Grow Africa, driving transformative change in African agriculture, or the Tropical Forest Alliance, bringing together governments, business and NGOs to end illegal deforestation in commodity supply chains. Business is well placed to help meet the challenges of food security, poor sanitation, disease and environmental degradation. It has the technology, skills in innovation, and, above all, geographic reach which enables it to deliver on the ground. Let me give you one example.

4 A billion people around the world are obese. Another billion people go to bed hungry, whilst over a third of the food grown ends up as waste - $750 billion according to the FAO. To complicate things further, the agricultural systems which produces this food is responsible for more than 40% of the world s greenhouse gas emissions and 70% of water use. It was concern for these issues that led us to host the G8 Nutrition for Growth event in June in London. On paper it was a tremendous success. 91 governments and organisations signing the pledge to address the issues. 22 companies committing to take action. 19 billion dollars pledged. A great outcome. But the 1 billion people who go to bed hungry can t eat nice words. Our task as leaders, whether in business or in government, is to draw the future closer and make the present reality a thing of the past. This requires leadership and action. Secretary General, as we gather here today just 48 hours ahead of the United Nations Special Event on the Millennium Development Goals, I would like to leave this message.

5 The great challenges of this century cannot be met with the working methods of the last. We need to do things differently. We need to work at scale, and this requires a different partnership, built on trust and mutual respect. Let s not forget that, while it was 152 member states that signed the UN s Millennium Declaration, it was over seven thousand businesses and civil society groups that signed up in the Global Compact to help make it a reality. Today we see the emergence of a new generation of business leaders, men and women who instinctively understand the need to do things differently. Men and women who understand that they need to have business models that contribute to society and not anymore take from society if they want to continue legitimately to operate. For them, the new business frontiers are the very places where the development needs are the greatest. The opportunity to do things differently has perhaps never been greater. So let s be bold and mobilise and embrace the energy and resource of business. By doing so we will not only be making good on our promises, We will also be making history by eradicating poverty once and for all. There has never been a better time to make the world a better place.