Brown: Aid has a strategic as well as moral imperative

Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, told an audience in New York last night that increasing aid to Africa has become as much a strategic as a moral challenge as the continent falls under the influence of China as well as of international terror groups such as al-Qa'ida.

Appearing at an anti-poverty conference organised by the former US president Bill Clinton, the Chancellor urged delegates to embrace a "new deal" for Africa before it is too late. He said Britain had set an example by pledging $15bn (£7.9bn) over 10 years to educate children there.

"My fear is that if we don't wake up to the need for the new deal we will find that what we thought was a moral imperative has become very quickly a strategic imperative," he said, taking part in a panel on poverty chaired by the former president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn.

"In the last year," Mr Brown said, several things had changed in Africa. "We are seeing more al-Qa'ida bases than in any other part of the world, we are seeing more immigration from Africa into Europe and we are seeing China playing politics in Africa." Beijing, Mr Brown said, is lending money at such a rate that it is "almost negating the debt relief" efforts of industrialised nations.

Emphasising that "terrorist propaganda is being spread" throughout the Third World, Mr Brown predicted that the politics of development assistance would move "right to the centre of the agenda" in industrialised countries. Ignoring those problems, he added, would generate "security problems that could tear the world apart".

Mr Brown cited statistics gathered by his own staff to demonstrate the depths of deprivation in some countries. Mozambique, with a population of 20 million, had only 500 doctors, he said.

It did not escape anyone at the Clinton Global Initiative conference that while it was Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, who attended last time, the invitation this year went to Mr Brown. There were chuckles when Mr Wolfensohn thanked him for speaking and added: "I hope this presages your ability to do this on a broader scale sometime soon."

When Mr Clinton ends his conference tonight, he will go to Manchester for the Labour conference.