//SOCIAL SUMMIT 2000//DEVELOPMENT: UN to Review Commitment to Slashing Poverty

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Jun 23 2000 (IPS) - The international community begins next Monday to assess compliance with targets to reduce poverty, adopted five years ago in Copenhagen. But a preliminary glance points to discouraging, even disastrous results, the chairman of the UN General Assembly, Theo-Ben Gurirab, said Friday.

At a Special Session of the General Assembly in Geneva next week, “Copenhagen Plus Five”, the United Nations will evaluate progress made on commitments adopted at the 1995 World Summit for Social Development in the Danish capital.

There will be a marked presence of leaders of developing countries at next week’s special session, while a large number of heads of state and government from industrialised nations will be conspicuously absent.

The draft of the final declaration to be agreed at the conference shows a wide gap between the positions taken by the developing South, represented by the 133-nation Group of 77 (G- 77), and the delegations of the United States and the European Union.

But the chairman of the conference preparatory committee, Chilean diplomat Christian Maquiera, said he believed next week’s negotiations would successfully overcome those differences.

Gurirab also took an upbeat view. “We’ll reach an agreement,” he optimistically told a news briefing Friday.

At the Copenhagen social summit, the UN member states assumed a number of commitments that basically boiled down to the eradication of poverty and the promotion of full employment and social integration as an antidote against marginalisation and social exclusion.

The director of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Juan Somavia, who presided over the 1995 conference in Copenhagen, said that in the past five years poverty has grown, employment has become increasingly precarious, and social integration has made no progress at all.

Somavia drew a link between the failure to move forward in terms of social development and the advance of globalisation — a phenomenon that was initially given the benefit of the doubt, while today it has become clear that the model is failing the people, he said.

The official pinned the blame for that on business, governments, donors, inter-governmental institutions and political parties, and even civil society, which he said had failed to apply enough pressure.

The Geneva conference has not been called to renegotiate the targets set in Copenhagen, but rather the mission of the negotiators would be to remove the hurdles standing in the way of compliance with those objectives, stressed Gurirab.

In order to do that, said the Namibian diplomat, the countries of the world must renew their political will to make good on the commitments assumed in Copenhagen.

Maquiera said the final declaration might incorporate a clause referring to the “Tobin” tax, an idea set forth by US Nobel Economy Prize-winner Paul Tobin, who recommended levying a tax on international financial transactions to support development in poor countries.

UN reports point out that the number of poor people in the world has continued to grow in the past five years, with the number of people living in absolute poverty climbing to 1.2 billion, the number of unemployed to 150 million, and the number of underemployed to more than 750 million, while an estimated 850 million have no access to basic health services.

Other UN figures show that the wealth of the three richest people in the world exceeds the combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the world’s least developed countries, which are home to 600 million people.

The foreign debt of developing countries, another issue to be debated next week in Geneva, stood at 2.2 trillion dollars in 1997.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the president of the Swiss Confederation Adolf Ogi will address Monday’s opening session of the General Assembly.