'We Need Partners, Not Masters' (Q & A w/ Evo Morales)

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'Q&A: 'We Need Partners, Not Masters'
Interview with Evo Morales, President of Bolivia

Credit:ABI (Agencia de Informacion Boliviana)

President Evo Morales

ROME, Nov 3 (IPS) - Bolivian President Evo Morales visited Italy this week to receive a special award for his government's commitment to social and health issues. He has made these issues a "political priority."

The award was presented by the Pio Manzù Centre, a research organisation based in Rimini in northeast Italy that studies economic, scientific and social policies.

Besides meetings with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano and foreign affairs minister Massimo D'Alema, Morales met members of the 30,000 Bolivian community in Rome, and members of Italian social movements.

Morales told Rome's Bolivians that before he was elected President in December 2005, Bolivia received 300 million dollars a year in tax revenues from the oil industry. Following nationalisation of energy reserves, Bolivia now receives 2 billion dollars annually.

The increased revenues are being used for education and healthcare, and for creation of a microcredit programme, Morales says.

"To increase revenues there is no need to create additional taxes," he told Claudia Diez de Medina from IPS, "but simply to make better use of our natural resources." For this, he said, "we need partners, not masters."

Some excerpts from the interview put together by IPS Italy correspondent Sabina Zaccaro:

IPS: You have been awarded by an Italian organisation this week for your government's programmes for better access to health and nutrition, focusing on children particularly. Could you give us some details of these steps?

Evo Morales: Our challenge is to work for all Bolivians without prioritising any sector, but my first obligation is to the people in need; these are the children, the old, the poor. Talking about children, we are also implementing a policy called 'Zero Malnutrition' (Hambre Zero) to attend to the issue of health for children.

Our next step will focus on nutrition; we are implementing a project on dairy processing plants this year for milk and yogurt. I have suggested -- and hope it will have good results -- to make yogurt with quinoa (a crop growing in the Andean region of South America acclaimed for its protein content).

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