Madame Co-Chair,

I have the honour to speak on behalf of the Group of 77 and China.

The Group would like to first express its appreciation for the past three days of the first informal intergovernmental meetings which we found them productive. We commend Ecuador and France for the able leadership in steering the meeting.

We hope that our views expressed will be taken into account and help guiding the Bureau in producing a revised version of the outcome document. We look forward to receiving the revised version on 27 May which will allow us adequate time to prepare for the next informal meeting in June.

We have the trust in the Bureau and think that the revised version can be presented as a clean version. In our view, the revised version could be shorter and more concise as areas of duplications which we identified could be streamlined. We hope that there will not be dramatic changes to the revised version.

We support the idea of having two Co-facilitators at the possible highest level facilitating our discussions in the next informal meetings. One Co-facilitator must be from a developing country.

Lastly, we wish to assure you of the commitment of the Group of 77 and China in the preparatory process for the Habitat III Conference with the aim to reach a meaningful and ambitious outcome.

Thank you, Madame Co-chair.