Latin America

: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Our strategy is to do just that by using our limited bilateral funding to leverage much greater spend on poverty-related programmes from multilateral organisations such as the IDB, the World Bank, the EC and the UN. We will use our limited resources to get others to be much more poverty focused. In that context, I was delighted to go to the IDB's annual meeting and to meet its new head, President Moreno. I launched several specific trust funds with the IDB and the World Bank, which I hope will increase the access of the poor to markets and international trade, as well as securing more accountable and responsive public sector management and investment in more accountable political systems. That is one positive example of our work. We also contribute to the IDB's multilateral investment fund. Again, we seek to increase the access of the poor to trading opportunities. Those involved will work with small institutions, slightly larger institutions, such as co-operatives, and more traditional medium-sized private sector businesses. Again, I hope that that will bear fruit and scale up the development assistance to such programmes across the region. I have been asked several specific questions, so let me try to answer some of them in the short time available. The hon. Member for Richmond Park asked about environment programmes and recognised the scale of deforestation in the Amazon. That is one of the issues that I discussed with the director general of Brazil's environment department when I visited the country two or three weeks ago. It was encouraging to hear of a very active programme to tackle illegal logging and deforestation in the Amazon. Some of the NGOs that I met were not quite so positive, which is perhaps not surprising, but it was good to hear their words of caution. South America and central America are the only regions in the world not to have a forest law enforcement and governance programme. If Brazil, in particular, were to ask us to support such a programme, we would be delighted to do so, as we have done in Africa, central Asia and elsewhere. My hon. Friend the Member for Waveney asked some specific questions about the World Bank and the IDB. In particular, he asked about the Government's support for the parliamentary network, which was established five years ago. We contribute £300,000 towards its work, and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State recently attended one of its spring meetings. We are supporting developing countries so that they can have a stronger voice on the boards of the World Bank and other institutions. My hon. Friend advocated that more work be done on regional integration, and that is a key part of the European Union's work with the Mercosur bloc. We are also funding research to encourage more integration in the region and to see how the trade-related aspects of such integration would impact on the poorest people there. Again, we are trying to overcome some of the suspicions about integration, to which my hon. Friend referred. The IDB is very active on energy and infrastructure issues, and, again, we hope that some of the trust fund money that we are providing will improve the poverty focus of that work. I recognise that I have been unable to answer all hon. Members' questions, so I shall review Hansard and, if appropriate, write to hon. Members to correct that.