WSSD: Rich Nations Cling Tightly to Purses

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

JOHANNESBURG, Aug 30 2002 (IPS) - A senior U.N. adviser has blasted Western donors for reneging on promises to assist poorer nations – even as a longstanding plan for a poverty fund risks being rejected by the World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD), which ends next Wednesday.

“It will be a great disappointment if the summit does not come up with new financial commitments to help fight poverty,” Jeffrey Sachs, special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, told IPS.

At the U.N. Millennium Summit in September 2000, 189 world leaders made specific commitments and pledged time-limited goals to fight hunger, disease and environmental degradation by the year 2015. But the promises have fallen far short of their targets, Sachs pointed out.

If there is a single word to describe WSSD, he said, it would be “accountability”.

“We need money – and lots of money to meet these goals. But this money,” he added, “is not forthcoming”. The international community needs new commitments, “not a recycling of old commitments”, Sachs added.

If U.N. conferences are being dismissed as “talking shops”, he said, donor nations have to take the blame.

Sachs, who is also professor of sustainable development at New York’s prestigious Columbia University, singled out the United States for special criticism because Washington was abandoning the global war against poverty and gearing itself for a potential new war in the Middle East.

The world’s richest country, with a 10-trillion-dollar economy, the United States has already decided it will not pledge new financial resources at the summit.

Andrew Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), told reporters his government is already working on several initiatives, specifically in the fields of housing and water.

“You can sit down and add all these things up,” said. “But new financial commitments should be really made in the field, not at international conferences.”

Since the Millennium Summit, the 133 developing nations of the Group of 77 have been pushing for a global fund to eradicate poverty.

The proposal, which has been kicked around the U.N. system since then, has re-surfaced in the draft plan of action for WSSD.

According to that document, the proposed voluntary fund is aimed at eradicating poverty and promoting social and human development in developing nations.

But the proposed ‘World Solidarity Fund to Eradicate Poverty’ is being strongly opposed both by the United States and the 15-member European Union, who say there is no reason to create a new fund to fight poverty.

Lowell Flanders, senior U.N. advisor tracking WSSD negotiations, said the proposal is still “in brackets”, meaning it is disputed among participating governments. “They have not agreed on that. It is still being discussed,” he said.

Sachs said that if a single penny from each dollar of the gross national product (GNP) of rich nations was set aside for the world’s poor, a 25-billion-dollar global fund would exist to fight poverty and disease in the poorest nations – and save eight billion lives.

By providing increased financial resources, he said, rich nations would also be doing themselves a favour, because they need “to live in a world of stability and prosperity”.