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DEVELOPMENT: Meet Will Show Landlocked Nations Way Forward – U.N.

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 7 2003 (IPS) - Landlocked developing countries need an extra boost to overcome the challenge of doing business in an era of globalisation without sea access, a senior U.N. official told IPS ahead of a gathering of those nations.

”These are countries paying a heavy price for their geographical isolation,” said U.N. Under-Secretary-General Anwarul Karim Chowdhury.

The Aug. 28-29 conference has enormous political importance because it will place landlocked developing countries high on the global agenda for the first time, he predicted.

”These countries are economically disadvantaged because they have no access to the sea,” he said. ”They should be allowed freedom of transit through the territory of their transit neighbours by all means of transport.”

The conference will take place in Almaty, Kazakhstan, which borders two other landlocked developing countries – Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

An introduction to the meeting’s draft programme of action says that landlocked developing countries are among the poorest of nations, with limited capacities and dependent on a limited number of commodities for their export earnings.

Their essential transportation systems – and those of many of their neighbours – have declined following the long-term drop in official development assistance (ODA) and difficulties in attracting private investment.

”But necessary infrastructure development in these countries requires a degree of financing exceeding their means. There is a need for increased aid and private investment, as well as technical cooperation,” adds the draft.

Chowdhury, U.N. high representative for least developed countries, landlocked developing countries and small island developing states, said a proposed ‘Almaty Programme of Action’ to be adopted at the conference will be ”the guiding light” for landlocked developing countries.

It will focus on transport availability and cost, the main determinant of trade success, he added, including how to provide better access to seaports and facilitate the export of products.

Africa leads all continents with 15 of the world’s 30 landlocked developing countries. Although the 30 nations occupy 12.5 percent of the globe’s land area and contain 4.0 percent of the world population, their combined gross domestic product (GDP) amounts to only about 0.3 percent of the world total and they receive only 0.34 percent of the world’s foreign direct investment.

Additionally, these countries spend 14-16 percent of their export earnings on freight, shipment and insurance costs – more than double the price that other developing countries pay and roughly triple that of industrial economies.

Ten of the 15 landlocked developing countries in Africa (Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Rwanda and Uganda) spend about 40 per cent of their export earnings on transportation and insurance services, pointed out Chowdhury.

The 15-member European Union (EU) says it is providing major funding for key regional transport corridors in sub-Saharan Africa.

Among those are the road and rail links from Tanzania to Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, and the road links from Cameroon to Chad and the Central African Republic.

In Asia, the EU is supporting the transport corridor between Europe and Asia, known as TRACECA, which is particularly important for Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Speaking on behalf of the EU, Ambassador Adamantios Th. Vassilakis of Greece told the conference’s preparatory committee in June that the level of investments required to build an effective and sustainable transport system requires ”innovative mechanisms for financing and the involvement of the private sector through commercialisation and privatisation.”

Addressing the same committee, Kazhmurat Nagamov, minister of transport and communications of Kazakhstan, said that participants in the upcoming conference ”have high expectations of its outcomes”.

Chowdhury, who has been named secretary-general of the conference, said that the meeting is expected to adopt specific, measurable, tangible actions in a number of priority areas, such as infrastructure development, trade, trade facilitation and international support measures.

Even landlocked countries with petroleum reserves have to depend on cooperation with transit nations to have the most direct and cost-effective pipeline routes to potential markets, he added.

In most cases, the neighbours of landlocked nations are themselves developing countries, often with broadly similar economic structure and facing similar scarcities of resources.

But the international community has become increasingly aware of the development challenges faced by landlocked developing economies in recent years, Chowdhury said.

In the 2000 U.N. Millennium Declaration, for example, world leaders called for a global partnership to address the special needs of those nations.

Addressing the annual ministerial meeting of landlocked developing countries last year, EU External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten said, ”our friends sometimes give us the message: ‘just give us the money to re-build our infrastructure and growth will follow’.”

”We fully recognise this need, but building the infrastructure is not enough. Experience shows that such investment must be matched by transport sector reform, ensuring efficient financing for maintenance, improved institutional performance and greater involvement of the private sector in works and service delivery.”

Patten singled out Afghanistan as a country whose problems are in some way related to its isolation as a landlocked country.