Summit
Opens With New Drive Against Poverty
By
Gustavo Capdevila
Amidst evidence of increasing poverty worldwide and deepening pessimism that something will be done about it, the United Nations begins a Special Session at the Palais de Nations here Monday which UN officials and diplomats hope will lead to a firm , new resolve to agree on steps to achieve specific reductions in poverty.
Underscoring the importance of reducing poverty , Secretary General Kofi Annan will launch a new report on fighting poverty Monday afternoon. The report is co-authored by the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Annan along with president of the Swiss Confederation Adolf Ogi will address Monday's mornings opening session of summit.
But the new report will signal a renewed commitment to poverty reduction, some developing country diplomats remained sceptical over the weekend that the new commitments will be matched by adequate resources.
Non-compliance with anti-poverty and other targets promised five years ago in Copenhagen were cited .
Conference chairman and UN General Assembly, Theo-Ben Gurirab told a press briefing Friday implementation of the Copenhagen commitments ranged from “uneven to disappointing to disastrous to abysmal” and that developing countries regarded “globalisation as the greatest obstacle to achieving social justice”.
Gurirab, who is also foreign minister of Namibia, stressed that the Special Session is not to re-negotiate the Copenhagen commitments but to review progress and assess obstacles to implementation. Most importantly, the session is to agree on new action to create jobs, reduce poverty and other social problems.
Unlike the Copenhagen Summit which drew 117 heads of state and government from the 186 participating nations, the provisional speakers list released Friday afternoon listed 22 heads of state and government among the 132 countries scheduled to take part in the general debate.
Almost all the leaders are from developing countries while a large number of heads of state and government from industrialised nations will be conspicuously absent.
The draft of the final declaration to be agreed at the conference shows a wide gap between the positions taken by the developing South, represented by the 133-nation Group of 77 (G-77), and the delegations of the United States and the European Union. But the chairman of the conference preparatory committee, Chilean diplomat Cristian Maquieira, said he believed negotiations during the course of the week would be successfully overcome those differences.
Gurirab also took an upbeat view. ''We'll reach an agreement,'' he optimistically told the news briefing Friday.
At the Copenhagen social summit, the UN member states assumed a number of commitments that basically boiled down to the eradication of poverty and the promotion of full employment and social integration as an antidote against marginalisation and
social exclusion.
The director general of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Juan Somavia, who presided over the 1995 conference in Copenhagen,said that in the past five years poverty has grown, employment has become increasingly precarious, and social integration has made no progress at all.
Somavia drew a link between the failure to move forward in terms of social development and the advance of globalisation -- a phenomenon that was initially given the benefit of the doubt, while today it has become clear that the model is failing the people, he said.
“The results are in and globalisation has flunked”, he said.
The official pinned the blame for that on business, governments, donors, inter-governmental institutions and political parties, and even civil society, which he said had failed to apply enough pressure.
Maquieira said the final declaration might incorporate a clause known as the ''Tobin tax'' tax, named after US Nobel prize economist Paul Tobin, who recommended levying a tax on international financial transactions to support development in poor countries.
UN reports point out that the number of poor people in the world has continued to grow in the past five years, with the number of people living in absolute poverty climbing to 1.2 billion, the number of unemployed to 150 million, and the number of under-employed to more than 750 million, while an estimated 850 million have no access to basic health services.
Other UN figures show that the wealth of the three richest people in the world exceeds the combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the world's least developed countries, which are home to 600 million people. The foreign debt of developing countries, another issue to be debated here, stood at 2.2 trillion dollars in 1997.
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Has the world lived up to its 1996 commitments..?
Solidarity 2000 starting 17th of June!
MS's big summer event Solidarity 2000 will start very soon now, with a week-long variety of debates and arrangements. The activities range from encounters between young people from Balkan, Africa and Central America to big conferences on the planet's social development and environment.
Judge by yourself:
The 1996 Copenhagen Social Summit final report in English, French and Spanish.