By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 29 2000 (IPS)

United Nations officials have expressed disappointment that five years after a global summit on social development, the international community has fallen short in its commitments to alleviate poverty, cut unemployment and reduce income gaps between rich and poor.

“The world has clearly regressed in many ways,” laments Secretary-General Kofi Annan, although he admits there has been “some clear progress” in areas of social development since the 1995 Social Summit in Copenhagen.

But overall, he says, social development has been “severely tested” since 117 world leaders meeting in the Danish capital pledged to eradicate poverty, provide full employment and foster stable, safe and just societies.

A 161-page UN report assessing the “achievements” of the Copenhagen summit pithily summarises the current state of affairs: “Inequality is up, poverty is up, insecurity is up, and more countries have been economically marginalised due to globalisation.”

The study, released last week, says that many governments have reported levels of poverty, income inequality and unemployment which are “unacceptable in human terms.”

The United Nations predicts that the number of people living in extreme poverty may rise from the present 1.3 billion to 1.9 billion by 2015. Currently, world population is about six billion people.

The study says that wars, local conflicts and natural disasters have also had a devastating negative impact on social development in many countries.

Caroline Wildeman of the Netherlands Organisation for International Development Cooperation (Novib), a leading non-governmental aid agency, told IPS that rich and poor countries are blaming each other for the lack of social development.

The poor countries say they are not only being denied market access by industrial countries but are also being deprived of any form of significant relief from their debt burdens, she added.

At the same time, Wildeman said, the poorer nations also accuse the rich of reneging on their commitments to provide the targeted 0.7 percent of their gross national product (GNP) as official development assistance (ODA).

Since that target was set by the General Assembly in 1970, only four out of 24 of the world’s richest industrial countries have exceeded it: Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

ODA, meanwhile, has continued to decline, averaging about 50 billion dollars annually in the late 1990s, from about 58 billion dollars in the early 1990s.

Wildeman said that rich countries, on the other hand, are blaming the poor for the lack of good governance and endemic corruption in most developing nations.

“In the final analysis,” she said, “while the North and the South are blaming each other, social development has come to a standstill.”

“The situation does not look good,” she noted, “but still we are optimistic that something positive could eventually come out of it.”

John Langmore, director of the UN Division for Social Policy and Development, told reporters last week that the United Nations had received reports from about 80 of the 188 member states indicating that each of those countries were now paying more attention to social development issues, including poverty eradication, employment growth and social integration.

Langmore said that two countries – China and Ireland – have registered major achievements in reducing poverty since 1995. Both had experienced rapid economic growth while increasing the range and effectiveness of their social policies, he added.

But many other countries had experienced little economic growth, renewed internal conflicts or international wars, spread of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), and a lack of resources, he said.

The UN General Assembly will be holding a Special Session – labeled “Copenhagen Plus-Five” – in Geneva in late June to determine what new actions should be taken to ensure that the goals of the Social Summit are met.

A UN Preparatory Committee for the Special Session, Langmore said, has commissioned 25 papers from within the UN system suggesting new initiatives to address the goals of social development.

Didier Le Bret of France, a member of the Preparatory Committee, said the credibility of the entire UN system will be at stake at the Special Session in Geneva in June.

“To maintain credibility, the United Nations must bring to Geneva concrete initiatives that would help social development goals become more of a reality than they were now,” he said.

Langmore pointed out that new initiatives currently being negotiated included increasing market access for Third World products, and reduction of tariff and non-tariff trade barriers.

How far these would be acceptable, he said, would depend on negotiations between rich and poor countries at the Geneva meeting.

Meanwhile, the UN study says that the world has “become a more unequal place, both within and between nations, with increasing inequalities in income, in employment, in access to social services and in opportunities for participation in public and civil society institutions.”

Contrary to the commitment made at Copenhagen to strengthen cooperation for social development through the United Nations, resources allocated for this purpose have declined, the study adds.

“The decline in external assistance, for one reason or another, is reported to have impacted negatively on social development programmes in several developing countries,” the report points out.

The burden of debt has also grown markedly, further squeezing resources available for social development.

The only “clear progress,” on the other hand, is greater awareness of and commitment to social development and continued progress in literacy and life expectancy.

The study also notes that following the Copenhagen summit, there has been increased attention to the goal of full employment and incremental movement towards equality between men and women.

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