By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Mar 13 2002 (IPS)

The United Nations initiative to achieve a first-ever international mobilisation of financial resources for development in poor countries is doomed for failure even before debate begins at the world conference slated to take place next week in Monterrey, Mexico, say European development activists.

In Switzerland, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and even government sources are saying that the International Conference on Financing for Development is “programmed for failure.”

The responsibility for this letdown belongs to the industrialised countries, and to the United States in particular, because at the preparatory meetings for the conference their attitude was “not constructive,” agree Swiss activists.

In addition to establishing other development-related goals, the UN proposed the Monterrey Conference as a means towards gathering the resources needed to cut world poverty in half by 2015.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned that unless the international community mobilises much larger volumes of resources, whether through public investment or market forces, poverty eradication plans will be frustrated and the problem will continue to grow.

Objectives include boosting development assistance to 0.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) of donor countries and creating an international tax organisation that would have the authority to tax transnational corporations.

Also under discussion is the creation of a UN convention to fight corruption and initiatives for negotiating debt reduction for developing countries, particularly the poorest and those with the heaviest debt burden.

But these high hopes have been reduced to nothing, according to Swiss NGOs like the Berne Declaration, the Swiss Coalition of Development Organisations and the Catholic institution Action de Carême.

Wealthy countries have not made a firm commitment to halve world poverty by 2015. The benefits of development assistance, says the UN, should be the 1.2 billion people who live on less than a dollar a day, and the 826 million who do not have adequate food available to live a normal life.

Seventy European NGOs signed a declaration distributed earlier this week in Brussels, stating that the European Union (EU) has already failed in its objective to ensure valid results from the Monterrey Conference.

The UN-sponsored meeting is the first international forum convened specifically to assume commitments on financing for development.

The international conference will not produce a common strategy, nor will it represent an advance in the fight against poverty, says Bruno Gurtner, of the Swiss Coalition.

The draft declaration to be presented to the participants in the Monterrey Conference, who are to include heads of state, government officials, NGO leaders, international financial institution executives and business leaders, does not mention concrete actions or objectives, complained Gurtner.

Any meaningful content the document had was gutted during the preparatory conferences, he said.

The Swiss Coalition coordinator stated that the industrialised countries, with the United States at the forefront, diluted the original UN proposal for the conference’s declaration.

Regis Avanthay, a Swiss government official, said his country laments “the inflexible position” that the United States maintained, from beginning to end, during negotiations on the Monterrey Conference final declaration.

Avanthay, head of multilateral affairs at the Swiss Cooperation and Development Directorate, criticised the “excessive moral debt” that the United States claimed after the Sep 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

The matter of financing for the development of poor countries must not be obstructed by the fight against terrorism, said the Swiss official.

The forces are unbalanced because the EU cannot play the role of a counterweight, says Avanthay, because it is too divided and therefore plays a weak role in the debate.

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