The preparations for the London G20 Summit in April mean that the normally quieter summer months of January and February have seen hard work and close contact between Argentine and British experts.  

We are working together to help ensure the Summit helps restore conditions for global economic growth and stability, and at the same time helps both protect and create new jobs.  

We have had particularly useful talks at ministerial level when British Foreign Office Minister Mark Malloch Brown and Treasury Secretary Stephen Timms met their counterparts in Buenos Aires.  

Our close work with Argentina will continue in the final weeks before the Summit.  We are looking for views from all sectors of government and society. As well as the ministerial meetings, I am pleased that Argentine experts are due to be among those participating at the pre-Summit London conference for business leaders on 18 March  and a high level conference on employment on 24 March. When the Ministers were here from London a wide range of Argentine experts also joined lively debates at the Embassy. Everyone is also welcome to join the online debate on the London Summit website.  

We are already seeing some of the fruits of debate. In February, the British Government published an interim report, “The road to the London Summit – the plan for recovery”.  That sets out some of the specific targets for the Summit. These include measures to stimulate global demand and to avoid the risks of protectionism getting in the way of trade flows. It will be very important for international cooperation to ensure emerging economies can get the capital they need to help boost demand. Also we must recognise the poorest countries are the most vulnerable to the impacts of the crisis. Donor countries must deliver on their existing commitments, including new support for the Millennium Development Goals pledged at the UN last September.  You can read a Spanish translation of the report’s Executive Summary on the Embassy website.

There is much work to be done, but it is encouraging that leaders around the world are speaking out. Argentina has been among the most vocal supporters of action on areas such as the reform of the International Monetary Fund and action on tax havens to form part of improved regulatory measures. The United Kingdom agrees and we will be working more on these areas in the coming weeks.

The London Summit has been my top priority in these weeks, but it has not been our only area of work.  In Britain our financial year operates from April to March, so this is also a time of year when several of our cooperation programmes come to an end. Among our projects, this month we have been glad to welcome back the UK experts who have been running training exchanges with the Argentine audit office over the last two years. We have also just come to the end of a successful three year project with the Argentine Education Ministry and CIPPEC monitoring the quality of expenditure on education. You can read more about what we have been doing on the Embassy website, and I will be writing more about specific new projects in the coming months.