Development & Aid, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

COMMUNICATIONS: Filling the Information Void

Raúl Pierri

MONTEVIDEO, Jun 8 2005 (IPS) - How can the information void on issues of development and globalisation be effectively filled? That question was addressed Wednesday at activities organised by the IPS news agency to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its Tierramérica publication and the inauguration of the agency’s Latin American regional headquarters in the Uruguayan capital.

“Without good communication, there cannot be good information, or sensitisation of public opinion,” and without this, “there is no social participation” in the pursuit of development, declared the Uruguayan director-general of IPS, Mario Lubetkin, addressing a gathering of Uruguayan authorities, civil society representatives and journalists.

Lubetkin pointed to the unique news agenda of IPS (Inter Press Service), which focuses on the themes of development and the sociocultural effects of globalisation, along with the many voices of civil society and their new role as leading actors in current events.

IPS was founded in 1964 with the goal of redressing the informational imbalance between the North and the South, at a time of growing concentration of control over the media, a phenomenon that is much more serious today, Lubetkin noted.

Today, the agency’s priority in coverage of development issues is to report what individual countries are doing, particularly in the South, to fulfil the Millennium Development Goals, established by the United Nations in 2000 as a strategy for combating poverty and inequality.

The first of the eight Millennium Development Goals is to halve the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty by 2015.

Lubetkin explained that the IPS Latin American regional office was established in Montevideo in 1995 “for four main reasons: the technological advances achieved here in this capital, the facilities offered by the government, the high level of human resources, and the fact that IPS has always accompanied political changes in Latin America, and this area, with the birth of Mercosur (the Southern Common Market, made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) had become the information centre of the region.”

The anniversary celebration held Wednesday at the Montevideo offices of IPS was attended by Uruguayan President Tabaré Vázquez, Public Health Minister María Julia Muñoz, and Montevideo Mayor Adolfo Pérez Piera, along with other government officials, lawmakers, and representatives of U.N. agencies and civil society organisations.

Vázquez congratulated IPS on its anniversary and stressed that his government, which took office in March, would work to protect freedom of the press.

“Today we Uruguayans enjoy the fullest possible freedom of expression and information, which will be guaranteed by this government. Today all Uruguayans can freely express themselves with no fear of reprisals of any kind,” he said.

“The microphones, television screens and newspaper pages in Uruguay today express a diversity of opinions. This is an achievement made by all of society, and will be guaranteed by the government,” he added.

Pérez Piera highlighted the agency’s history and its journalistic independence, as well as its emphasis on the issues of concern to the developing South and society in general.

“It is a distinction for Montevideo to be the headquarters of the regional office of such a prestigious international news agency…We believe Uruguay is strategically placed because of its insertion in the Mercosur and its ties with international agencies,” said Pérez Piera.

The mayor said he became familiar with IPS in the late 1960s, when he was studying in Rome, where the agency’s world desk is located.

“Back then, the media were not as developed as they are today. When I was first told about IPS, I began to visit the office frequently to find out what was happening in Uruguay” and in the region, he said.

IPS, which was founded by Argentine-Italian journalist Roberto Savio, has a network of 400 reporters today, three-quarters of whom are in the developing South, who cover 150 countries and more than 230 cities. The agency offers news articles in 17 languages, including Swahili, Hindi and Thai.

More than 3,000 media outlets and thousands of academic institutions and civil society organisations are clients of IPS, which is an international, not-for-profit association of professional journalists and others in the field of communications.

On Wednesday, IPS also celebrated the 10th anniversary of Tierramérica, a specialised weekly news supplement on the environment and sustainable development published by 20 newspapers in 11 countries in Latin America.

Tierramérica, which also produces a weekly radio programme broadcast by some 400 community, commercial and cultural stations, is a cooperative project of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The UNDP representative in Uruguay, Pablo Mandeville, said Tierramérica’s success over the past 10 years demonstrates the value of the publication, as an instrument of dialogue and debate of environmental issues in the region.

Federico Fasano, the director of the daily newspaper La República, which publishes Tierramérica in Uruguay, stressed the “multi-media” nature of the product and its ability to “give a voice to so many actors who have an influence on environmental policy-making.”