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DEVELOPMENT: Groups Envision End-Poverty Campaign

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 25 2004 (IPS) - Buoyed by successful global initiatives to ban landmines and create an international criminal court, a coalition of NGOs plans to launch a worldwide campaign seeking support for ”new and innovative sources of financing” to help eradicate hunger and poverty.

”The idea is to copy the successful global processes that resulted in the convention to ban landmines, and also the statute to create the International Criminal Court (ICC),” says Katarina Sehm Patomaki of the Helsinki-based Network Institute for Global Democratisation (NIGD).

Those two initiatives, she said, were overwhelmingly supported by NGOs (non-governmental organisations) worldwide, with strong backing by certain U.N. member states.

The NIGD, a transnational action-oriented research network operating both from Finland and Peru, is trying to gather support for its plan from both NGOs and governments.

”The new U.N. support for global taxation could possibly serve as an inspiration” for the creation of a wider coalition of NGOs in support of new and innovative sources of financing, Patomaki told IPS.

The Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC), which took the initiative to create the global court, consisted of over 2,000 NGOs. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which was a coalition of over 1,200 NGOs, went on to win the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize after successfully lobbying for a treaty banning landmines.

The NIGD, which wants the proposed ”international campaign for global taxes” to be modelled on similar lines, is hoping that Brazil will take the lead, just as Canada did when it took the initiative to help create the ban landmines convention.

At the initiative of Brazilian President Lula da Silva, over 80 world leaders met on the sidelines of the General Assembly in September to discuss ”international action to fight hunger, overcome poverty and increase financing for development.”

Also last month, a study commissioned by the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs presented, for the first time, seven ”innovative ideas” to finance an estimated 50 billion dollars in new money needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The goals include a 50-percent cut in hunger and poverty, universal primary education, gender equality, reduction of child mortality and elimination of HIV/AIDS – all by 2015.

The seven new ideas include global environmental taxes; a global lottery; a tax on currency flows; establishing a new International Finance Facility for long-term, but conditional, loans to the poorest nations; fostering greater private donations for development by firms and individuals; and increasing overseas remittances by expatriate workers.

The study was prepared by the U.N. University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) based in Helsinki.

”Developing countries are mobilising resources themselves to meet the MDG targets by 2015, but they will fall short without additional external flows,” says the study’s author, Anthony B. Watkins, warden of Nuffield College at the University of Oxford, in a statement.

”Increased private and public money is needed in order for the world’s poorest countries to invest in the basic services and infrastructure necessary for human development, and to improve livelihoods and employment for poor people,” said the WIDER study, which will be formally launched in New York by the end of November.

The analysis also concluded that the 50 billion dollars needed could be achieved by doubling current official development assistance (ODA) from rich to poor nations.

”Welcome steps have been made in that direction, but this takes time, and time is of the essence. For this reason alone, it is necessary to consider new sources (of financing),” it added.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has warned that unless current development assistance is doubled to 100 billion dollars annually, the world’s 132 developing nations will fail to meet the MDGs.

”We need action. There is an urgent need for a critical mass of new resources to deal with a wide spectrum of human hardship,” says Annan, who strongly supports finding new sources of funding.

France’s U.N. Ambassador, Jean-Marc de La Sabliere, told reporters in September that the international community had to find the resources to honour its commitment to meet the MDGs by 2015.

That was the intent of an initiative by leaders of Brazil, France, Chile and Spain to identify new sources of financing to achieve the goals, he added. Leaders of the four nations took a prominent role at the U.N. meeting last month.

De La Sabliere said French President Jacques Chirac has asked a group of financial experts to work on the question of international taxation.

The French envoy said he is happy that even the Bretton Woods institutions – the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – no longer reject the idea. The challenge for the United Nations is to have ideas brought before the scheduled summit on the MDGs in September 2005, he added.

Despite support from most leaders of the North and South, the concept of global taxes is being strongly opposed by at least two major industrial nations: the United States and Japan. Washington has argued that global taxes would violate its national sovereignty.

”The question is not one of resources, but one of political will,” says Njoki Njoroge Njehu of the Washington-based ’50 Years is Enough Network’.

The administration of U.S. President George W Bush had the political will to raise billions of dollars for a war on Iraq, she said. But it cries poverty when there is a call for increased development aid.

”We have to call the bluff of our decision-makers,” Njehu told IPS. ”It is naive to think there are no resources. We have people sleeping in the streets in this country and children living in hunger, and the administration is still able to get all the resources it needs for a war.”

She said if an NGO coalition launches a global campaign, it is sure to have strong support. ”But it should not be just NGOs alone,” Njehu argued. ”We have to get civil society engaged, including religious leaders and elected officials.”

She also said the campaign should be strongest in northern industrial countries. ”That’s where the resources are.”

Phil Bloomer of Oxfam said in a statement his organisation welcomes the new initiative and believes that, if implemented, the proposals would contribute to reducing poverty.

”These proposals must be an addition, not a substitute to the major increases in aid, debt relief and reform of global trade rules that are necessary to attack the obscenity of over one billion people on our plant surviving on less than a dollar a day,” he added.