Development & Aid, Economy & Trade, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

DEVELOPMENT: Latin America Discusses Anti-Hunger, Poverty Funds

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Jun 16 2003 (IPS) - Representatives from Latin America and the Caribbean are discussing proposals set forth by Brazil and Venezuela for new humanitarian and anti-hunger funds that would be financed through novel mechanisms.

Brazil’s leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who took office in January, has suggested a fund to fight hunger, while Venezuela’s populist President Hugo Chávez is recommending the creation of a humanitarian fund.

Both ideas began to be discussed Monday in the Caracas headquarters of the Latin American Economic System (SELA), by Latin American and Caribbean representatives in the Group of 77 (G- 77), which links 133 countries of the developing South.

The conclusions will be sent to the G-77 conference on South- South cooperation to be held Dec. 16-19 in the southern Moroccan city of Marrakesh.

The G-77 ”has identified the areas of investment and trade, agriculture and food, health and education, and information and communication technology” as the core issues in South-South cooperation, Moroccan ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed Bennoun, said at the Caracas meeting.

The conference in Marrakesh ”will not give rise to new action programmes, but should serve as an opportunity for developing countries to make the plans designed at previous conferences and summits operational,” he said.

However, ”initiatives applicable to the need for new funds, like Venezuela’s proposed humanitarian fund and the anti-hunger proposal recently advanced by Brazil, should be considered,” Venezuela’s representative to the United Nations, Milos Alcalay, told IPS.

At the International Conference on Financing for Development held in March 2002 in Monterrey, Mexico, Chávez suggested creating an International Humanitarian Fund financed by governments and non- governmental organisations (NGOs) to support development initiatives in poor countries.

The fund would be financed by governments, which would contribute the equivalent of one percent of their defence spending, and by half of the resources seized from drug traffickers, as well as donations by the private sector and NGOs.

Early this month, as a guest at the summit of the Group of Eight (G8) most powerful countries in Evian, France, Brazilian President Lula suggested the creation of a fund aimed at fighting hunger, which would be financed by a proportion of the military spending of industrialised countries and of the debt servicing payments made by the developing South.

”What the fund is called is not important, and the diagnosis is clear,” said Alcalay. We need ”our interlocutors to agree to allocate to development initiatives proceeds obtained from…the arms race and drug trafficking.”

The official development aid (ODA) of industrialised countries falls far short of meeting the poverty alleviation targets set by the U.N. Millenium Summit in 2000, states a report by SELA, which links 27 Latin American and Caribbean nations.

”Total ODA amounted to 57 billion dollars in 2002, but most industrialised countries are still far from living up to the international commitment to earmark 0.7 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to that end, with the exception of Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden,” says the report.

Total ODA ”represents just 0.2 percent of the GDP of industrialised countries,” said the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry’s director of economy, Oscar Hernández, who added that ”an additional 50 to 70 billion dollars are needed every year.”

SELA added that ”the effectiveness of ODA, and cooperation between international financial institutions, must be improved,” and developing countries must come together to set forth their positions in a more effective manner in the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

SELA secretary Otto Boye announced that the member states’ directors of international cooperation would be meeting Jul. 21-23 in Panama to discuss that question.

The IMF and World Bank turn 60 in 2004, and SELA suggested that the occasion be used to ”move towards a rebirth” of the two institutions by ”downsizing them and their bureaucracy” and ”redistributing the votes” in order to avoid the predominance of the United States, which basically holds de facto veto power.

SELA also reitereated its proposal for the United Nations to create a Council on Economic Security, which would have 15 members like the U.N. Security Council.

The Marrakesh conference will also try to identify ”good models” of South-South cooperation, Safiatou Ba-N’Daw, the director of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) Special Unit for Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries, said at the meeting in Caracas.

Good models are those that ”facilitate a sustained South-South exchange of ideas, experience, management, and convergence of efforts between the public and private sectors and NGOs,” said Ba- N’Daw, from the West African country of Cote D’Ivoire.

One such programme is New Rice for Africa (NERICA), financed by the Japanese government and UNDP, which has boosted yields by 50 to 200 percent in West Africa, and saves the impoverished subregion 88 million dollars a year in imports.

Another good model is the Africa-Asia Business Forum, she said, pointing out that business deals totalling 20 and 77 million dollars, respectively, were closed at the 1999 and 2001 meetings in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Durban, South Africa. A third forum is being planned for year-end in Senegal, she added.