By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 18 1999 (IPS)

The United Nations’ global plan of action – put together four years ago to alleviate poverty and reduce unemployment by the year 2000 – is way short of its target.

The successes and failures of the plan, adopted by 117 world political leaders at the 1995 Social Summit in Copenhagen, came in for review at a two- week meeting that began at the Un headquarters Monday.

In its final declaration, the Summit concluded that one billion people in the world were living in abject poverty. “Since then, 300 million people have swelled the ranks of the destitute,” according to Louise Frechette of Canada, the UN’s deputy secretary- general.

At the opening session of the review, Frechette pointed out that real per capita gross domestic product (GDP) was increasing twice as slowly in developing nations today as it did in 1995.

“Population is growing faster than available income, and poverty is steadily gaining ground,” she said. In some developing countries, especially in Africa, more than 90 percent of the population lived in “abject poverty.”

The three central goals of the Summit’s plan of action were poverty eradication, full employment and social integration but the past four years has seen an increase in “the absolute number of people living in poverty,” said a UN report.

“The number of people officially recorded as unemployed remains high; the number of underemployed people is enormous and growing; and social disintegration is intensifying in some countries,” the 19-page report said. “Therefore, the imperatives for focusing attention on these issues remain at least as strong as, if not stronger than, at the time of the Summit.”

The United Nations called for a renewed commitment not only to the Summit’s plan of action but also to searching for additional and more effective ways of implementing them.

The 185-member General Assembly will hold a Special Session (“Copenhagen Plus-Five”) in Geneva in June next year specifically to take stock of the achievements of the Summit. The current meeting is intended to prepare the way for the Special Session which is mandated to reaffirm the validity of the plan of action, not to renegotiate it.

Frechette noted that: “When we set goals, it is a good idea to take stock at certain points and ask ourselves: Is the course we adopted still valid? Are we headed in the right direction? Have we made enough progress.”

She pointed out that the Copenhagen Summit made countries collectively aware that, in order to achieve social development, national and international plans must be based on well-thought out and well-defined policies.

Since 1995, she said, some 110 countries had taken action to fulfil the commitments made in Copenhagen and had re-defined national policies and strategies to incorporate the principles adopted at the Summit.

Achieving social goals, however, did not depend only on national policies; it also required a “supportive external economic environment,” Frechette said Developing nations were being thwarted from reaching their goals because of several factors: a sharp decline in official development assistance (ODA) and rising debt burdens, she added.

“Some of the most highly indebted countries devote as much as 60 percent of their annual budgets to debt servicing. What does that leave for investing in education, health, and anti-poverty programmes?”

Frechette said an overhaul of the international financial system was also part of the supportive environment that developing nations lack.

“If the international financial system is to benefit not only the global economy but also, and above all, humankind, it must be based on sound and fair principles. I believe that the formulation of such principles should feature prominently among the initiatives proposed at the Special Session,” she said.

Meanwhile, the UN study revealed that recent financial crises had demonstrated the close relationship between poverty and the rate of economic growth. The crises, which began in Thailand in mid-1997, spread to Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, and later to Russia and Brazil.

In Indonesia – where GDP fell by 15 percent in 1998 – the number of people falling back into poverty, measured by a poverty line of 1.25 dollars per day, was expected to more than double to about 56 million.

Using poverty lines of two dollars a day for Thailand and Malaysia and one dollar a day for the Philippines, the World Bank estimated the increase in the number of people living in poverty to be 2.3 million in Thailand, 500,000 in Malaysia and 665,000 in the Philippines.

The report said it was “instructive” to juxtapose the current crisis with the impressive gains made by a number of Asian countries in poverty alleviation during the past decade.

From 1975 to 1995, during two decades of sustained economic growth, the number of people living in poverty fell from 569 million to 269 million in China, from 87 million to 22 million in Indonesia, from 2.1 million to less than 200,000 in Malaysia, and from 3.4 million to less than 500,000 in Thailand.

“In fact, the impact of economic crisis may have an irreversible social impact, meaning that even when economic growth is restored, societies could be left permanently impaired due to malnutrition and lack of schooling,” the report said.

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