|
Financing
for Development:
We have the means – do we have the will?
The decade of the ‘90s saw a flurry of United Nations world
conferences, the likes of which the world has never experienced
before. The value of world conferences are that they give the
world commonly agreed upon social and environmental policies,
developed with the participation of government world leaders
in consultation with civil society.
The synthesis of these UN world conferences led to the Millennium
Development Goals, which were firmly endorsed by world leaders
in 2000. The bill for financing development activities that
would, for example, lead to the reduction of extreme poverty
by half, universal primary education, significant decline of
child and maternal mortality, protection and regeneration of
the environment, and clean water and sanitation for all by 2015
is calculated to be between 40-60 billion dollars per year.
But the Plus Five reviews of UN world conferences have demonstrated
that not only have the rhetoric and resource commitments not
matched real action, the flow of resources for poverty reduction
and social development has in fact often declined. The Plus
Five reviews revealed that foreign aid dropped from .34 to .22
of the GNP of donor countries by 2000, debt cancellation has
been meagre, and tariffs and duties on exports of poor countries
remained as strong as ever, resulting in high import bills and
extremely low export earnings for developing countries.
The structural adjustment programmes of the World Bank and IMF
still force poor countries to divert resources away from social
and health care programmes. At the same time, the increase of
military expenditure by poor countries and arms export by rich
countries continues unabated. Multinational corporations and
financial giants enjoy tax benefits, which serve as subsidies
both from their countries of origin as well as their host countries.
To further reduce their tax obligations, they transfer capital
to off-shore tax havens, which are often small island states.
These policies and practices consume valuable financial resources
that could instead be used towards eradicating poverty and achieving
equitable and sustainable development. In addition, the financial
crisis of 1997 in South East Asia and to a lesser extent in
South Asia, engineered by a few powerful capital giants, forced
millions of people out of work and into poverty. Argentina’s
current financial crisis carries with it certain parallels to
the crisis experienced by Asia.
One does not have to be a cynic to say that the Plus Five reviews
of UN world conferences have revealed negative results. To address
this sorry state of affairs, the UN convened the Financing for
Development Conference in Monterey, Mexico in March 2002. Attended
by many world leaders, civil society activists and representatives
from the business sector, the conference endorsed a document
known as the “Monterrey Consensus”. However, as Julian
Disney points out in the lead article on the Financing for Development
process, the Monterrey Consensus document, “...is a disappointingly
timid and vague agreement”.
It is my strong hope that global civil society will continue
to push forward on the few gains made at Monterrey, and continue
to lobby the international financial institutions and Northern
governments to re-orient and drastically change their policies
in ways that will truly lead to poverty eradication and the
achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. A key element
of this lobbying would be the demand for An International Anti-Poverty
Pact, which matches the Millennium Development Goals with a
number of resource mobilisation measures. These are not at all
undoable propositions. All that is required is the political
will to eradicate poverty in the same way that slavery and apartheid
were removed.
Qazi
Faruque Ahmed
President
International Council on Social Welfare
|
