DEVELOPMENT: Few Countries Following Up on Social Summit Commitments

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, May 24 1996 (IPS) - More than a year after the World Summit for Social Development, fewer than a dozen nations are following up on commitments made at the summit by developing detailed anti-poverty strategies, a new study reveals.

“An initial survey shows that by the end of 1995 very few countries were actually preparing national anti-poverty strategies, as agreed upon,” reports ‘Social Watch’, a study published this month by the Institute del Tercer Mundo of Uruguay.

‘Social Watch’ — which is supported by the Dutch development organisation ‘Novib’ — is the first edition of an intended ongoing study of actions following the March 1995 Social Summit. Although the authors acknowledge that this is only “year zero” of the follow-up, they say action so far has been lagging.

Only two countries — Cameroon and Djibouti — have already developed the social development plans agreed to at the summit, according to the report.

Nine others — Botswana, Chad, Comoros, Laos, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Vietnam and Zimbabwe — have drawn up anti- poverty plans, while Syria and Tunisia have developed partial programmes.

Another Social Summit goal — to reduce infant mortality by the year 2000 to one-third of its 1990 level — has also eluded many countries, the report contends.

Dozens of developing nations, including Egypt, Cuba, Namibia, Panama, Singapore, and Turkey, are well on their way to reaching the infant mortality rate goal. Several other countries — among them Argentina, El Salvador, Kenya and the Philippines, are progressing on schedule.

But nearly 70 nations of both the North and South — ranging from the United States and Japan to Pakistan, Tanzania and both Koreas — are behind schedule already, the report says.

In the worst cases — China, Cote d’Ivoire, Indonesia, Lesotho, Papua-New Guinea, and Sierra — infant mortality rates are higher than at the beginning of the 1990s.

Individual country reports reflect that so far, efforts to reduce or eliminate world poverty — the cornerstone of the Social Summit held last year in Copenhagen — have gained little over the past year. From Bangladesh to Brazil, the Social Watch report says, efforts to close income gaps and reduce poverty have yet to get off the ground.

Meanwhile, the authors note, structural adjustment programmes advocated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund continue to skew the economies of developing countries, often sharpening poverty rather than alleviating it.

A coalition of non-governmental organisations last year warned the World Bank of “a growing body of evidence that structural adjustment programmes have exacerbated poverty, income inequality and gender inequities, while further eroding the status of workers, food security, local productive capacity and environmental conditions.”

But Ricardo Carrere, one of the Social Watch authors, notes that World Bank President James Wolfensohn has denied that the language of the Social Summit ties his organisation to any specific policies to mitigate the costs of free-market reforms.

“I don’t want to carry out my business according to some resolution made at the United Nations,” Wolfensohn said last year, according to Carrere.

The multilateral banks, Carrere notes, are particularly responsive to industrialised governments, who hold a majority of shares at the World Bank. These interests have pushed policies which have a clear cost in daily unemployment and misery, he argues.

The conflict between structural adjustment and social policies has been a highlight of the current meeting here of the Commission for Social Development, where governments will be discussing their own follow-up to Copenhagen until the end of the month.

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), a Belgium-based labour coalition, warns that “simply balancing the budget and liberalising the market will not reduce social inequality and in many cases will widen divisions between a fortunate few who are able to exploit new opportunities and the mass of people, who…are locked in a cycle of poverty.”

In a statement to the Commission, the ICFTU adds, “The trade union movement is particularly concerned about the increasing number of export processing zones where millions of workers, mainly young women, are employed in grossly repressive conditions.”

Another worry, says Caroline Wildeman, policy adviser to Novib’s general secretariat, is whether the governments of the North will invest in basic social programmes for the countries of the South.

“People will only be able to break the vicious cycle of poverty if they have access to basic social provisions such as education, health care, clean drinking water and sanitation,” she argues. “At present, too much of the (official development) aid is spent on large-scale and often prestigious projects.”

The Social Watch report praised the recent ’20/20 compact’, by which industrialised countries agree to earmark 20 percent of their official development assistance for social provisions, if developing countries set aside 20 percent of their national budget for such social programmes.