By Tito Drago
SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, Spain, Apr 3 2000 (IPS)

The Society for International Development (SID) plans to organise a global conference towards the end of the year to set lines of action that would enable the governing of the globalisation process.

Susan George, the director of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, announced the plans for the conference Monday in the northwestern Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela.

The conference will be held on the recommendation of experts in communications and development from 10 African, Latin American, Asian and European nations, who met over the weekend in Santiago de Compostela.

Among them were Roberto Savio, the secretary-general of SID, the rector of Spain’s Sociedad de Estudios Internacionales, Fernando de Salas, the dean of the School of Journalism of the University of Santiago de Compostela, José López García, and the coordinator of the International Channel of ‘Televisión Española’, José Manuel Martín Medem.

The site for the conference has not yet been chosen, but it is likely to be held in Santiago de Compostela, where SID’s Galicia Chapter is based.

SID is the oldest international non-governmental organisation dedicated to providing support for developing countries. The organisation’s national headquarters is in Rome, and its president is former United Nations secretary-general Boutros Boutros Ghali.

SID decided to promote a debate on the knowledge society and communication in meetings organised by its national chapters as well as through Internet. The debate will culminate in the Global Conference, which is to draw some 500 experts and representatives of business, trade unions and non-governmental organisations from around the world.

The development of communication technology and the communication industry opens many possibilities, but also gives rise to the risk that the gap between the industrialised North and developing South, and between the rich and poor in each nation, will widen, warns SID.

Savio pointed out that 83 percent of production by the information and communication industries is concentrated in the United States, European Union (EU) and Japan, while the rest is unevenly distributed.

The participants at this weekend’s gathering in Santiago de Compostela stressed that the summit of EU heads of state and government in Lisbon and the Mar 7-10 Second Global Knowledge Conference organised by the World Bank in Malaysia put high priority on the question of Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

The most serious problems mentioned by the participants were that a large part of the world’s population were excluded from the development of ICTs, which – they said – lacked the necessary citizen participation and transparency.

So far, the process of globalisation has been more closely tied to trade and finances than to society and its values, they warned, while adding that it was precisely in finances and international trade where the lack of transparency and participation stood out the most.

Thus, new paths must be forged and means must be found to enable civil society to actively participate in decision-making, which must not be solely left up to the markets and states, the experts stressed.

Today’s economy, which is moving ahead faster and faster based on technological innovations, promises new jobs, better working conditions, economic growth and more familiarity and greater mutual understanding between cultures.

That new technological and economic scenario creates expectations within societies as well as in North-South relations.

The participants at the meeting in Santiago de Compostela underlined, however, that since the early 1990s, the digital revolution has provided evidence that the differences between the rich and poor are growing within each individual society and between the First and Third Worlds.

Access to ICTs should be universal and not steered by transnational corporations, technological advances should not destroy, but strengthen, ancestral cultures, and development of ICTs should be homogeneous, steady, sustainable and independent, in order to pave the way towards a new era of equity, justice and democracy for all, they stated.

Those convoked by SID will now focus their efforts on finding ways to realise those goals, which will be defined in greater detail at the conference itself.

Broadly speaking, the questions raised do not differ greatly from those put forth by many during the 20th century, said the experts.

The SID initiative is aimed at coming up with answers to help prevent the world from being split between globalisers and globalised, and to ensure that the development of ICTs takes place in democracy, with justice and equity for all of the world’s peoples.

Excerpt: