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And Professor Sachs, I mean, do you agree with that?
What have you seen in the last 18 months
in terms of efforts to alleviate poverty, hunger,
other issues that are very near and dear to you?
I think the key is that we need a long-term perspective
for all of these issues:
for energy, for reducing carbon emissions,
for fighting poverty.
None of this goes on a year-to-year basis.
Everything requires a long-term perspective.
And when the markets are as destabilized
as they are in recent years,
when oil goes from 25 dollars a barrel a few years ago
to 150, as you heard, then drops back down to 50,
then climbs to 80,
and it's anybody's guess at some points.
It's extraordinarily difficult for anybody
to manage in this environment.
Of course, the poor get whipsawed,
because they have no margin of survival in general.
The food price increases,
which are perhaps are a little bit less seen to us,
are what really hits the poor, because for them,
that's what they're spending 50, 75, 80 percent
of their monetary income on,
and they've been hit very hard.
So what I've seen is a lot of hardship,
but this is inevitable in the kind of shock that we had.
We shouldn't be having these shocks.
When I say we need a new macroeconomics,
it's saying that we need a perspective
that links the financial, the monetary,
the "traditional" issues of so-called aggregate demand,
with the structural - with the energy,
with the food supply, with the population,
with the poverty alleviation.
I see that our macroeconomics policy-makers
are pretty much blind to these structural phenomena.
They don't understand them.
They say "that's not our business;
we don't really have to know about that."
But then we are whipsawed year to year.
Now they do have to tend to their normal focus of monetary policy.
They haven't done a good job on that.
We've had a badly run Fed actually,
for quite a while, in my opinionů
just wild swings that were stoking bubbles.
But our economic policy-makers can't say
"that's just left to the market" anymore.
Because in this interconnected world,
where we have a resource crisis,
we have a global social crisis,
we have an interconnected world,
we've got to be thinking harder about long-term solutions.
That's really the key.
And what is the responsibility
do you think, of corporations like, Mr. Scaroni's
in this scenario?
Well I think companies are vital.
Eni and leading world enterprises like Eni
need to take what I call a "statesman" leadership role,
and I think the company does.
And that is to say
"we're not just in business,
leave us alone, those aren't our problems."
A business like Eni and, again, this is what Eni is doing,
that's why I'm sitting here
happy to be having this conversation,
is saying
"look, we need to come to grips with climate;
that's the real issue."
It's not saying
"that's a fraud, push it aside, that's junk,"
which a narrow, self-interest, short-term perspective could say.
Or a different kind of company could say,
"look, we're taking what we want out of Africa;
we're getting in there,
we're getting out of there as fast as we can;
we're going to make the buck and that's it."
But that's not what Eni is saying,
because a serious leading company has a very different perspective
it needs to.
It says "we're going to put tens of billions of dollars into investment;
we don't want to be thrown out tomorrow;
we don't want a coup to change everything;
we don't want social instability
to make it impossible for our workers to go to an oil siteů"
and so forth.
And moreover, my point is that governments strangely,
the ones that we look to solve these problems,
are so much less aware of solutions
than business leadership is.
So to my mind, the hard part is
- and with all respectů and the respect is tremendous -
if businesses pursue the narrow objective,
if they're in there lobbying for the maximum advantage
in the short term,
we're going to have a wrecked world system.
That's what happened;
Wall Street lobbied its way to our bankruptcy.
But if the businesses say
"look, we are the repositories of hundreds of thousands of workers,
dozens of countries, leading technology;
we actually are the repositories of key solutions,
but we can't do it alone because we're private-sector companies;
we need partnership with the global community,
both the governments and civil society,
and we need to look towards long-term solutions,"
then there really is a way forward.
That's why I am very comfortable saying
it's not the businesses that are the source of the problem
this anti-corporate movement
of the anti-globalization crowd gets it wrong.
We need to find effective answers
for the long term
and the major multi-national companies have their own need
to find those long-term answers,
because they're putting down billions
or tens of billions of dollars
and they need the stability to get the returns on that.
This is not the fly-by-night operation
just trying to grab something in the short run.
Mr. Scaroni, how would you respond to that?
Because you do have to deal with the image of some corporations
who come in before you
and they did just want to take the goods and run.
Let me tell you that I couldn't agree more with Professor Sachs.
I really believe that companies justify their existence
only if they are looking for the long-term benefit
of the society in which they operate.
I'll go even further, saying and using the words of Adrian Cadbury,
which is a guru of the corporate governance,
that between companies and society
there is an implicit contract in which society allows companies
to work, to sell their products, to make profits
as long as the benefits they get from the companies
are more than the harm that the companies make to the society.
And this is true on a global basis,
but it's true on a local basis as well.
So we have been always, I would say since our foundation,
very, very careful to give more than what we take.
Eni is a relatively young company.
It was essentially founded after the Second World War.
And Eni had to find its way into the oil market
in which the giants were already there for many years.
My predecessor, the founder of the company,
thought that the best way to enter into new countries,
particularly in Africa,
was to find a different approach
and to find an approach in which
we have been sitting on the side of the governments,
rather than on the other side of the table,
trying to find solutions for the countries in which we operate,
in many different areas which have nothing to do with oil,
including infrastructure, agriculture, industry, electricityů
So, ways in which we make the difference
and could sell ourselves as a different approach to the oil-producing countries.
This has been extremely successful,
because we have been the fastest-growing oil company in the world by far
ůwe still are.
We are now the number one producer of oil and gas in Africa
and in my view, this is due to the initial approach
which today we call sustainabilityů
but at that time it was simply
a different way of approaching governments and countries.
And we continue on that path,
because we are convinced that the survival of our company
and the survival of our business depends very much on our capabilities
of being able to work for the long-term of the world
and of the countries in which we operate.