By IPS Correspondents
ADDIS ABABA, Nov 20 2008 (IPS)

She fought alongside men in the Ethiopian liberation struggle. She fought for a free and fair society. But today, Yewubmar Asfaw feels that Ethiopia's revolution has failed to deliver a fair share of political power to women.

Asfaw is determined that her new political party will not repeat previous mistakes. Credit: Michael Chebsi/IPS

A third of the fighters were women. Yet few of them rose to top positions in the ruling party, the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which pools the four rebel groups.

Among the 547 members of Parliament, only 116 are women, or 22 per cent – although in 2005 the EPRDF said it would reserve 30 per cent of its lists for women.

The Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF), to which Asfaw devoted 25 years as a guerrilla and as a cadre, has not done much better, she told IPS.

In 1979, at the first general assembly of the TPLF, not one woman was elected to a leadership position. In the next assembly five years later, Aregash Adane was elected into the 29-member central committee – and she remained its sole woman member for 17 years.

"The party used women as a stepping stone," Asfaw told IPS.

Disappointed, she and her husband left the TPLF in 2001, deeming the leadership undemocratic and disrespectful of women's rights.

Long links

That was not an easy decision. Back in 1976, Asfaw was a 20-year-old university student when she and her two sisters went to fight in the northern region with the TPLF.

The signs of machismo, though, were already visible. The following year, Asfaw and other women set up a committee to promote women's rights within the rebel force. The initiative was not welcome.

"We only have one cause to fight for, and feminism is not part of it," she recalls being told. Feminism was considered a foreign ideology.

Asfaw and her husband of 20 years have paid a price for their resolve. The TPLF had arranged for her to study in the Netherlands. She had to quit the course upon leaving the party, but managed to complete a BA degree in financial management on her own in 2004 – but not a job.

"Although I tried to get hired with my degree, I didn’t succeed. Employers were afraid of the potential risks of hiring me," she said. "We depend on our relatives for a living."

During these years, Asfaw wrote her 219-page book. In 2006, she, her husband, Aregash Adane and others started a new party, Arena Tigray.

Gender gap

Recent data underpins Asfaw’s analysis. The Global Gender Gap report, published by the World Economic Forum in early November, shows Ethiopia slipping in the ranking of 130 countries, from the 113th place in 2007, to 122nd in 2008.

The Report considers how well countries divide resources and opportunities among men and women, analyzing economic participation, health, education and political empowerment.

However, others point to a constitution that enshrines equality and to a number of progressive laws banning female genital mutilation and child marriage.

"The issue should not be about individuals assuming a leadership position. It should be the kind of change our constitution has brought," says a woman parliamentarian for the EPRDF, who declined to be identified because she was Asfaw’s comrade for 20 years at the TPLF.

The EPRDF is organizing women’s forums to promote their participation.

"But these are not free and independent women forums, they are opaque party hacks," said Dr. Negaso Gidada, a former president of Ethiopia who left the ruling party in 2001 and is an independent MP.

Back in 1991, there was so much hope when the rebels toppled President Mengistu Haile Mariam, in power since 1974. Some 54,000 people died during the long fight against a regime responsible for heinous human rights violations.

Asfaw may be disappointed, but she is not defeated. She hopes that in her new party women and men will share power.

"I'm quite sure that Arena Tigray won't repeat previous mistakes, but it still needs hard work," says Asfaw. "What we fought for was much more than this."

Excerpt:

By Mario Osava and Thalif Deen
SAO PAULO, Jun 18 2004 (IPS)

China, Brazil and India, three major players in the developing world, may be invited to join the ranks of the world’s most powerful group of nations, the Group of Eight (G8), according to diplomatic sources here.

Although no formal decision has been reached, there are strong indications the three developing nations are potential candidates to join the privileged group.

"It is only a matter of time," a Third World diplomat told IPS. "And it is also a matter of political reality."

Asked if there was any truth to the speculation, Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim told IPS: "I haven’t seen anything specific".

But he agreed that such a move would signal a broadening of political power throughout the world. "I think it is the recognition that you cannot attempt (to rule the world) – not the G8, nor a G11 or G12 could do that either, because those things have to be dealt with institutionally".

"Let’s just say, even to tackle the tasks that will be discussed institutionally, you can no longer gather the seven richest countries, or eight counting Russia (which is an important country not for its gross national product but for other reasons); you cannot just have those countries decide," he said.

Also, added Amorim, today’s world is very complex and what happens in China, India or Brazil will have an impact on rich nations. If the three countries are invited, he said, "it is not to do us a favour, or recognise our importance, but it is because it is important for themselves".

If offered membership, the three nations will follow in the footsteps of Russia, which accepted a formal invitation to join the then Group of Seven (G7) in June 2002.

The original seven, described as the world’s most industrialised nations, were the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan.

When the G7 extended the invitation to Russia, it was considered a personal victory for President Vladimir Putin. Although his nation had taken part in several G7 meetings, it was not a full-fledged member.

Although there is no official word as to when China, India and Brazil would be invited to join the G8, diplomatic sources predict that it is likely to happen in 2006, when Russia will host the G8 summit.

India and Brazil are also strong contenders – along with Germany and Japan – for three new veto-wielding permanent seats in the 15-member United Nations Security Council. China is already one of five permanent members – in the company of the United States, Britain, France and Russia.

The proposed U.N. move, according to several diplomats, would dramatically change the political and economic equation on the international scene.

The possible expansion of the G8 – to G11 – is also being viewed as a bold diplomatic manoeuvre by Washington and the European Union (EU) to neutralise the growing clout of the G20 developing nations, a bloc dominated by China, India and Brazil.

The three countries are also an integral part of the 132-strong Group of 77, alongside some of the poorest of the world’s poor, including Sierra Leone, Uganda, Zambia, Chad and Liberia.

If invited to join the G8, the three nations may be forced to leave the G77, the largest single grouping at the United Nations and the collective voice of the developing world.

In 1994, Mexico became the first developing nation to exit the G77 when it joined the rich nations’ club, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It was followed by South Korea in 1997. Last month, two other members, Cyprus and Malta, were forced to leave the group after they became members of the EU.

Strangely, China – a country that may soon have the world’s fourth largest economy, behind the United States, Japan and Germany – is still a member of the G77. It has also long been tipped to join the G8, because of its tremendous economic clout.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself is ambivalent about China: should it be deemed a developing or a developed country?

At a press conference here Monday for the meeting of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development, Annan said, "in fact, the group that is here sees China as a developing country and part of them."

But, he added, there are countries that will debate that. "And there are countries that see China very much as part of the developing world and China does have lessons for the rest of the members."

Excerpt:

By Mario Osava
SAO PAULO, Jun 18 2004 (IPS)

Civil society representatives said they are frustrated and concerned about the path of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), a critical assessment that contrasts with the rosy evaluation made by the leaders of the U.N. body, which concluded its eleventh ministerial sessions here Friday.

”We were expecting an UNCTAD that would show more leadership,” but during this conference the most important outcomes came from the parallel events involving other institutions, said Yara Pietricovsky, coordinator of the Brazilian Network for the Integration of Peoples and one of the organisers of the UNCTAD Civil Society Forum.

There were numerous meetings during the week-long UNCTAD XI that were related to World Trade Organisation negotiations and to the trade accord being hammered out between the European Union and Mercosur (Southern Common Market), which comprises Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.

Ministerial meetings of the Group of 20 (G20) developing countries that are fighting subsidies and distortions in agricultural markets, on the one hand, and of the P5 (Five Interested Parties), on the other, attempted to kick-start WTO negotiations on farm trade, creating a positive outlook for the future, said host Celso Amorim, Brazil’s foreign minister.

The P5 ”parties” are key players in the agricultural debate: Australia (representing the Cairns Group), Brazil, and India – leaders in the anti-subsidies effort – and the European Union and United States, leaders in paying out subsidies to their farmers.

Paulo Nehru Tannassee, a trade unionist with the World Confederation of Labour, says UNCTAD is not paying enough attention to job creation or to the Millennium Development Goals, established by the U.N. General Assembly in 2000, which do not include specific targets for new jobs.

Magaly Pazello, researcher for DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era), said the negative part of the ”Sao Paulo Consensus”, the final declaration of UNCTAD XI, is ”the narrow view that continues to treat women like objects and not subjects of policies.”

This is a common failing of international forums, she said. They recognise women as victims of globalisation, but not the active role they should have in overcoming inequality, poverty and other social ills.

Women face cultural and institutional barriers that require public policies that have not been included in international resolutions or implemented by governments, and which are essential if women are to be true agents of change, Pazello told IPS.

Trade liberalisation divides production into various stages that take place in different countries, and women are given the ”most mechanical jobs”, such as assembling computers, she said.

Furthermore, policies for increasing farm exports favour the major producers and undermine family farm operations, and with them, women peasants, said Pazello.

But the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) taking part in the Civil Society Forum did name several positive points in the final document and in the UNCTAD XI resolutions, such as the defence of ”spaces for national policies” of developing countries, of family farming and of special treatment for the least-developed countries, said Meena Raman, an activist with Friends of the Earth.

The decision to create a task force to study mechanisms for recuperating and stabilising commodity prices is ”promising”, said Alexandra Stricknen, with the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy.

Another proposal that won applause is to set up a fund that would help countries that rely on exports of just one or two commodities to diversify. But the success of that initiative depends on ”countries that have money”, given that UNCTAD has none, said the institution’s secretary-general, Rubens Ricupero.

”Sao Paulo was another lost opportunity,” lamented Aftab Alam Khan, head of the food rights campaign for ActionAid International. The UNCTAD XI declaration does not adequately respond to the matter of deeply impoverished peasant farmers, or the regulation of transnational corporations, he said.

But ActionAid and 13 more NGOs were pleased with the decision taken during the UNCTAD meeting to reactivate the Global System of Trade Preferences (GSTP) aimed specifically at boosting trade within the developing South.

A big concern of the NGOs and social movements participating in the Civil Society Forum, which was linked to UNCTAD, was the question: Who will succeed Ricupero at the helm?

Activists want someone who will strengthen the U.N. body, based on the original mandate to promote development of poor countries, intensify South-South cooperation, and create a research department with a capacity similar to other multilateral institutions, like the WTO, International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan promised to seek a new UNCTAD leader who would promote those aspirations, and even asked the Civil Society Forum to suggest names.

UNCTAD’s advances ”are fragile” in the global context of militarisation and the U.S. war on terrorism, which activist Pietricovsky said is causing reversals of the achievements made by the major U.N. summits of the past decade.

She says the democratisation of international institutions is essential. ”We want coherence with human rights, ethics and deeper democracy,” and not the ”reverse coherence” with the market, the IMF and WTO.

Excerpt:

By Mario Osava
SAO PAULO, Jun 18 2004 (IPS)

What occurs in the larger developing countries – China, India and even Brazil – increasingly impacts the industrialised world, which will have to do more to include their poorer peers in international decisions if they are going to have legitimacy.

This summarises the opinion that came out of Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim’s conversation with IPS as he took stock of the eleventh sessions of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD XI), held in Sao Paulo this week.

UNCTAD XI was very productive, as were the numerous parallel meetings it attracted to this Brazilian metropolis, says Amorim.

Progress was made by what is known as the P5 (Five Interested Parties) that could unblock the ever-troubled farm trade talks in the World Trade Organisation’s Doha Round. The ”parties” are key players in the agricultural debate: Australia (representing the Cairns Group), Brazil, European Union, India, and the United States.

The Group of 20 (G20) developing nations opposed to farm subsidies, a bloc that emerged just prior to the disastrous WTO ministerial meet in Cancún, Mexico in September 2003, reaffirmed its unity and detailed some of the concepts it will defend.

And Mercosur (Southern Common Market) and the EU reached some understandings. The South American bloc, comprising Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, and the Europeans have been negotiating a free trade agreement in fits and starts.

Amorim spoke with IPS about the relationship between trade negotiations like these and the larger trend towards democracy in international relations, such as in the G8 (Group of Eight industrialised countries) and the U.N. Security Council. Following are excerpts from that interview:

– You have been talking about a new “geography of trade”, but given what is happening in the world, as evidenced by what took place during UNCTAD XI, isn’t it something broader? A shift in the global balance of power?

– I hope you are right. We are working to strengthen our bargaining position and that of other developing countries, in both the economic and political spheres. I think the G20 is today an undisputed and indispensable actor and, not only that, it is perceived as constructive in trade negotiations, which have completely changed. I participated in the previous trade rounds in which countries like Brazil and India played a role, but the big decisions were taken by the European Union and the United States, sometimes with Japan and Canada. The developing countries came in merely to add a comma here, an accent there.

But not any longer. We are part of the fundamental negotiations, even those that involve the (EU and United States), such as the question of maintaining parallelism between the two in eliminating subsidies and other forms of support for agricultural exports. Of course we don’t have the capacity to dictate anything, but we are often able to contribute to the negotiations between them.

– What do you think of the talk of China’s possible entry into the G8? Will something concrete come of this?

– I didn’t see anything specifically about that, except a statement by the Italian prime minister saying that China and India might be admitted. I learned through my sources that there were discussions, though very cursory, about the possibility of expanding the group. But in those same conversations, France, for example, mentioned Brazil. Other people I spoke to, who are well informed, said nothing has begun in any sort of decisive process.

– Wouldn’t this potential inclusion of China, Brazil and India in the G8 be recognition that there has already been a significant redistribution of power in the world? And not just economically speaking?

– I think it is recognition that they can’t make decisions (on global matters); the G8 can’t, even in regards to its own expansion for a G11 or G12, because things have to be resolved in a more institutional manner. The same goes for preparing work that afterwards will have to be discussed institutionally. They can no longer bring together seven rich countries, or eight with Russia, to take a decision.

Today’s world is very complex. What is happening in China, in India and in Brazil will have impacts in the rich countries. (Our inclusion in the G8) wouldn’t be just to do us the favour of recognising our importance, it would be important for those countries themselves.

– Would the G8’s possible admission of China, for example, cause divisions in the groups of developing countries, like the G77 (Group of 77 developing countries) or G20?

– If it were the admission of just one country, whichever it was, it would indeed have that implication. But not the admission of a group, even if it is small, three or four – China, Brazil and India. Perhaps an African country as well – we can’t ignore Africa. And an Arab country. It depends whether it is going to expand to G10, 12 or 15.

– Would that alter the nature of the G8?

– Certainly. It would change it for the better. It would be a bit more democratic because it would have a greater diversity of opinions. And also more effective, because it would be seeing the real situations that exist in the world. Today there are developing countries whose GDP might not be as high as the developed countries – in some cases it is, if you consider purchasing power – but whose ability to influence, positively or negatively, in the international exchanges is greater.

That is in relation to the European countries, for example, which, because they follow a more or less unified policy, they might individually wield a good deal of weight economically, but politically are subject to a single set of rules. In most developing countries, that doesn’t happen.

– But wouldn’t that divide the G20 or G77? Would it be possible to participate in an expanded G8 – a grouping of wealthy nations – and also in the G20, which are all developing countries?

– The G20 is the greatest success in the history of humanity in terms of the creation of international groups. It is not yet a year old and everyone talks about it as if it were a group that should handle issues beyond farm trade. The G20 has obvious potential, but it was created for the agricultural trade negotiations in the WTO. If we could maintain the cohesion of that group for other negotiations, so much the better.

If you were to take a closer look, there are countries in the group that have disputes amongst themselves on other issues. They are united in the fight to end agricultural subsidies and for greater market access of developing countries. Although the objective is agriculture, we have a similar viewpoint on the issues of the (WTO’s Doha Round). But we would never be able to draw up a platform on all the issues. On the Singapore issues (pending from previous rounds), we have different positions within the G20. The problem didn’t come up because it was better resolved by the G90 (a group specifically opposed to inclusion of the Singapore issues in current negotiations).

– Are there also differences in the G20 about access to agricultural markets?

– There could be differences in terms of nuances. Our interests are not identical, but we know that if we are united we can wield influence in the negotiations on fundamental questions. If we are disunited and defending individual interests we won’t have any influence at all. We won’t make any gains in those fundamental issues or in other areas.

– Will this reorganisation of the international trade arena help towards the expansion of the U.N. Security Council? Is it a similar trend?

– I think the Security Council will have to be democratised sooner or later. It is a trend because there is a perception, among developing and developed countries alike, that if the Security Council is to maintain legitimacy, if its decisions are to be heeded and supported, it is essential that the U.N. members see it as a body that represents the community as a whole. Clearly there will be differences about how it should be done, but there is no doubt about the need to reform the Security Council. There is no doubt that it is impossible for the Council to continue with its five permanent members, which are the five that have been there 50 or 60 years. But the details of reform will not be easy. We will have to continue debating. It is an important moment because (U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan) has created a High Level Panel which could foster the conditions for reform or some sort of transition.

Excerpt:

By Mario Osava
SAO PAULO, Jun 17 2004 (IPS)

In Haiti a woman must work three days harvesting coffee in order to earn the three dollars Europeans spend on an espresso, says Luc Saintville, a technician with the humanitarian watchdog Oxfam International who is assisting coffee growers in his Caribbean country.

Saintville and other activists, including coffee growers from Brazil, Haiti and Honduras staged a protest – complete with the standard 100-pound bags (46 kilos) of coffee beans and donkeys carrying more sacks – at one of the entrances to Anhembi Park, where the eleventh sessions of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD XI) are taking place this week.

They demanded a solution to ”the worse coffee crisis ever – an issue that has been forgotten in the international agenda,” Spaniard Gonzalo Fajul, spokesman for Oxfam which is promoting the ”trade with justice” movement, explained to IPS.

”It is an unprecedented scandal” what is happening with coffee, because of the 75 billion dollars generated by sales of the final coffee products, the coffee growers see just five or six billion dollars, said UNCTAD Secretary-General Rubens Ricupero as he met with the protesters and expressed solidarity with their cause.

In better years, in the 1980s, the portion of overall revenues going to coffee producers reached 11 to 12 billion dollars.

Four transnational corporations control 76 percent of the world coffee market, hoarding the profits, according to Oxfam. Since 1997 prices have plummeted to half what they were, hitting their lowest level in coffee history and driving the 25 million families that depend on the crop into poverty.

Coffee is a major export for 50 countries, and for many it is the main source of revenue.

The final consumers in rich countries are not benefiting from the collapse in the commodity price either, given the hefty profits going to the corporations, noted Ricupero.

But he said there is some hope on the horizon that the situation will improve because the United States has decided to return to the International Coffee Agreement.

It was the U.S. withdrawal that precipitated the 1989 collapse of the agreement, ”which wasn’t perfect, but ensured farmers conditions incomparably better than they are today," said the UNCTAD chief.

A new policy is urgently needed to reorganise the coffee market and to provide financial compensation for the losses suffered, he said.

With the U.S. return to the fold, other major coffee-importing nations, like Australia and Canada may well follow suit, paving the way for negotiations to recuperate and stabilise prices, said Francisco Garcez Ourique, Ricupero’s adviser for UNCTAD XI and representative of the exporting countries in the International Coffee Organisation.

The coffee processing industry, concentrated in the North, has great interest in an agreement that would improve quality and provide guarantees of a stable supply, according to Ourique.

Coffee is a unique product, one that nearly all producing countries export as raw beans. Not even the initial stages of processing – roasting and grinding – take place in the coffee growing countries. Indeed, Germany is the world’s leading exporter of ground-roasted coffee.

Even Brazil, which is more advanced in coffee industrialisation than the other exporters, was only able to put a tiny portion of its roasted coffee on the international market. But efforts are under way to boost roasted coffee exports to 10 percent of the country’s annual harvest.

A ”global initiative” is urgently needed to regulate the coffee market, through controls in production or supply, improved quality and greater industrialisation in the coffee growing countries, summarised the Oxfam spokesman for IPS.

Oxfam is promoting a worldwide campaign known as "Big Noise”, a global petition for fair trade to benefit small producers. The effort already has collected five million signatures.

In Haiti, the recent political crisis has aggravated the social problems associated with low coffee prices. Transportation of the harvested beans along highways has come under threat from armed gangs, and credits are difficult to come by, forcing many to renegotiate their sales contracts, Saintville told IPS.

The Caribbean nation exports relatively little coffee because it consumes 70 percent of the 350,000 bags produced annually. But 200,000 people and an estimated one million of their dependents rely on coffee production for their livelihood.

As the market stands today, the selling price does not even cover production costs, according to Saintville.

The 115,000 coffee growers in Honduras were able to maintain output at three to 3.2 million 46-kilo bags in the midst of the crisis because 85 percent are small farmers and use family labour, said Nelson Guerra, a coffee farmer himself and leader of the Honduran Union of Coffee Cooperatives.

Brazil – the world’s leading coffee producer and exporter – has the luck of massive domestic consumption of coffee beverages. Of the more than 30 million bags of coffee beans harvested each year, 14 million go to the Brazilian market, said Geronimo Brumatti, a grower from the state of Espiritu Santo who was present for Thursday’s demonstration.

But the crisis is hurting Brazil’s estimated 350,000 coffee growers nonetheless. Some 250,000 are family farmers.

Many have abandoned the crop and even left the land, which has fed unemployment in the sector, which otherwise maintained a million workers, said Brumatti.

The entire chain of coffee production employs eight million people in this country of 178 million, he said.

Excerpt:

By Mario Osava
SAO PAULO, Jun 16 2004 (IPS)

The most vulnerable countries need to be given specific attention in all global forums because they are not receiving the official development assistance (ODA) that wealthy countries promised and are finding it difficult to take advantage of the expansion of international trade.

Such was the appeal made by Anwarul Chowdhury, U.N. undersecretary general and high representative of for what are known as the least developed countries (LDCs), landlocked developing countries and small island states, in his address to the eleventh sessions of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD XI).

The ODA goal for the 50 poorest countries is 0.2 percent of gross domestic product of the rich countries, but today reaches just 0.11 percent GDP.

Cotton is among the main exports of at least 20 of the LDCs, most of which are in Africa. As a result of the subsidies the United States grants its cotton growers, international prices for this commodity stand at 25 percent below what experts estimate they should be.

A consequence of this imbalance is that Africa lost an estimated 300 million dollars in revenues, Chowdhury told IPS.

That is a crucial sum of money for countries where the vast majority live on less than a dollar a day, and life expectancy is no more than 50 years.

In Benin, Burkina Faso and Mali, some 11 million people depend on income from cotton, and suffer the direct effects of U.S. cotton subsidies, which were recently condemned by the World Trade Organisation in a complaint filed by Brazil.

The LDCs are home to 736 million people – more than 11 percent of the global population – but their participation in global trade is just 0.4 percent, said the U.N. undersecretary general. Most are among the 39 countries that rely on one single commodity, like cotton, and left without alternatives when international prices plummet.

As such, in addition to a price recovery, these countries need the international community to establish a ”consistent policy for stabilising those prices,” said Idris Waziri, trade minister for Nigeria, which is also a ”victim” of the U.S. cotton subsidies, although it is not on the list of LDCs.

Unless they receive twice the current amount of development aid, their foreign debts are cancelled and conditions established to diversify their economies – such as more favourable terms of trade – the LDCs will not achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), agreed in 2000 to cut poverty and hunger in half by 2015, said Chowdhury.

Trade liberalisation amongst other developing countries is essential for the LDCs, because more than half of their international exchange occurs within the developing world, while 42 percent is with industrialised countries, he said.

The mechanisms for boosting South-South trade in discussion at UNCTAD XI, like the Global System of Trade Preferences (GSTP), a scheme exclusive to developing countries, are a priority for the group.

But they also need measures to help them gain greater and better access to the markets of the industrialised North, where the bulk of world trade is concentrated.

Another 31 countries – of which 16 are LDCs – are in a very vulnerable situation because they lack an outlet to the sea, such as Bolivia and Paraguay in South America. This poses a serious obstacle because it increases shipping costs for their foreign sales an average of 30 percent, said Chowdhury.

These countries need the solidarity and cooperation of their neighbours, like Argentina, Brazil and Chile in the South American case, he said.

Small island developing states face their own set of problems. The nations of the Caribbean are highly dependent on the tourism industry, and those of the Pacific struggle with the enormous distance that separates them from the major markets.

Furthermore, they are too small to attract significant investment. That is why an economic integration process is recommended, said the U.N. official.

These three groups of developing countries require differentiated treatment if they are to benefit from international trade liberalisation, and that is what is hoped will materialise with support from UNCTAD and from other multilateral agreements.

Excerpt:

By Thalif Deen
SAO PAULO, Jun 16 2004 (IPS)

The international community, which four years ago approved a set of key development goals on poverty, hunger, health, education and environment, set deadlines for the poor but not for the rich, says a senior United Nations official.

The September 2000 U.N. General Assembly proposed a target of 2015 for seven of the eight goals, which include preventing extreme poverty and hunger and achieving universal primary education, according to Eveline Herfkens, executive coordinator of the U.N.. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Campaign.

But the eighth goal – a global partnership of rich and poor countries for development – has no clear-cut or rigid deadline.

“We are almost four years after the Millennium Declaration. And it is time for rich nations to honour commitments they made under goal 8 and to translate their promises into time-bound deadlines,” Herfkens told IPS.

If the deal is to be fair and proper, she said, the goal 8 target needs to have deadlines, and these have to be set well in advance of 2015.

Goal eight includes a substantial increase in development aid, reduction or cancellation of developing countries’ debts, removal of protectionist barriers for agricultural products and access for developing nations to western markets.

The remaining goals are to: promote gender equality; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS; and ensure environmental sustainability.

“Inputs from rich countries are needed first to enable poor countries to deliver on their end of the deal,” said Herfkens, a former Dutch minister for development cooperation and onetime permanent representative of the Netherlands to the United Nations in Geneva and the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

She suggests setting targets at an upcoming special session of the General Assembly next year, where world leaders will take stock of the successes and failures of the MDGs 10 years ahead of the 2015 target.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is equally critical about the lack of cooperation by industrial nations. “We need to take action now,” he told a group of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) participating in the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD XI) now in session here.

“Prospects for achieving the goals depend crucially on how we do on the eighth – forging a global partnership for development,” he warned.

“The Millennium Development Goals represent a deal,” Annan explained. “Not every developing country has made sufficient progress, but as a whole the developing world is doing its part.”

“The same cannot yet be said of the wealthiest and most powerful countries, especially when it comes to levelling the international trading system and creating a development-friendly global economic environment,” he added.

On Tuesday, the Netherlands became the only developed country to produce a “progress report” of its efforts to help developing nations achieve their MDGs.

“We have already received about 67 reports from developing countries on their performance,” Dutch Minister for Development Cooperation Agnes Van Ardenne told reporters here.

“It is time we provided them with details of our own efforts, not only in the field of development aid but also on policy coherence in other fields,” she said after presenting her country’s progress report to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The Dutch government says that developing nations can achieve their MDGs only by working with developed countries. “We have commitments for aid, trade and debt relief. Our policy efforts are inputs that should help developing countries realise the MDGs by 2015,” said Van Ardenne.

The Dutch report says the government is spending 0.8 percent of its gross national product (GNP) on overseas development aid (ODA) while its debt relief efforts have doubled in the past 12 years. Almost nine percent of the government’s development budget is spent on re-scheduling the debt of heavily indebted countries, it added.

According to Herfkens, the only area where industrial nations have been willing so far to set deadlines is in relation to an increase in ODA, which was born in the 1970s when the General Assembly unanimously approved a resolution calling on rich nations to provide 0.7 percent of their GNP as aid to the poor.

So far only four nations – Norway, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands – have consistently met the ODA target. But it took nearly 30 years to get there.

Herfkens said five other European countries have set their ODA deadlines well in advance of 2015: Italy (2006), Luxembourg and Ireland (2007), Belgium (2010) and France (2012).

Still, she is not very happy that rich nations are not willing to commit themselves to meet their obligations to remove tariff barriers, permit market access and cancel third world debts.

But she also criticised poorer nations where trade policies are set by rich elites. “Poor countries should examine their own trade regimes to ensure that they are sufficiently pro-poor,” said Herfkens.

At the International Conference on Financing for Development in Mexico two years ago, world leaders agreed that the most important source of funding for development would be trade.

If poor nations increase their exports by only five percent, it would bring in about 350 billion dollars, which is more than six times the total ODA doled out by rich nations to the poor annually.

Herfkens also asks: “how can we achieve the first goal of halving the number of poor people by 2015 when two-thirds of the world’s poor actually live in rural areas and rely on the agricultural sector for their economic survival?”

By and large, it is agriculture that provides food and income for most people in developing nations because 50 percent of employment is in the agricultural sector. The bulk of the export is also in agriculture.

Still, the agricultural sector is also weighted against the poor. Herfkens pointed out that a woman entrepreneur in Ghana, for example, is unable to market her tomatoes because of the availability of cheaper and heavily subsidised canned tomatoes from Italy.

Herfkens is also very cynical about world leaders who make “beautiful promises” at high-level summit meetings only to return home – and forget about them. She says very few governments pluck up the courage to ask their presidents and prime ministers: “how are we going to implement what you promised?”

“It is only parliaments and civil society that can ensure that governments become accountable for global commitments,” she added.

Excerpt:

By Mario Osava
SAO PAULO, Jun 16 2004 (IPS)

An apparently incongruous alliance between an oil company and a programme for sustainable use of biodiversity was announced at the eleventh sessions of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) taking place here this week.

The local subsidiary of the U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum will support CORPEI, an Ecuadorian export and investment organisation, in ”biotrade” projects in the area where the oil company operates – 200,000 hectares that are home to 28 indigenous communities.

It is encouraging that oil companies ”are gaining awareness that they should contribute something to community development, beyond exploiting the oil fields,” and at the same time convince the local people ”not to reject them” out of hand, Ricardo Estrada, CORPEI executive president, said in an IPS interview.

His agency, which has a strong private-sector component, for the past five years has been fomenting economic alternatives based on the sustainable use of Ecuador’s biodiversity, for things like ecotourism, production of ”natural” foods as well as inputs for the cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries.

The programme operates as a sort of ”incubator” for projects that ”are still small, but which are the only means of producing value-added products in a country that has only oil and raw materials, without much industry or technology,” said Giovanni Ginatta, coordinator of the Sustainable Biotrade Initiative in Ecuador.

UNCTAD launched that initiative in 1996 to support trade and investment in sustainable development centred on biological resources, seeking innovative solutions.

For now, they are small businesses that make sustainable use of biodiversity, but their future is promising, according to the participants in a panel discussion that took place during Tuesday’s sessions of UNCTAD XI.

Indeed, there are other big companies already engaged in such projects, like Brazil’s Boticario and Natura, cosmetics and perfume transnationals that export millions of dollars in products in a market where natural ingredients – largely from the Amazon – and ecological protections play an important role.

The opportunities in this area are enormous. Medicinal plants, little known fruit species and seeds used in pharmaceutical, cosmetic and dietary products in 2000 had a global market worth 18.5 billion dollars, according to UNCTAD.

Most are not produced in a sustainable way – a requirement of the biotrade movement – but the demands are growing amongst consumers and industry for sustainability, quality and safety.

The Amazon and the Andes possess the greatest potential for developing biotrade because of their great biological diversity. A regional Andean programme is already being promoted by UNCTAD and the Andean Community of Nations (CAN), which comprises Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela.

The Organisation of the Amazonian Cooperation Treaty has just signed on to a partnership with UNCTAD that, in addition to promoting biotrade, ”will be a catalyst for bilateral relations” amongst the eight countries of the Amazon region, said the group’s secretary-general Rosalia Arteaga.

In addition to inputs for pharmaceutical and cosmetics, the CORPEI programme includes organic food, ecotourism centred on bird watching, the use of bamboo, and sustainable wetlands use, said Ginatta.

The projects, supported by donations of money for equipment and services, have environmental, social, economic and legal requirements. The utilisation of an endangered species, for example, would be disqualified, but there would always be a component of education, not outright exclusion, he said.

Also presented during the UNCTAD panel discussion were projects from Madre Tierra (Mother Earth), for processing and selling Amazonian fruit in Bolivia, and the Association of Tanando Women, from western Colombia, whose 114 members produce cosmetics and dried medicinal plants.

Women’s leadership is important because it contributes to gender equity and because pilot projects show there is a higher success rate when women are heavily involved, said Brazil’s Environment Minister Marina Silva, who presided over the panel.

Brazil is currently working to define a legal framework for the use and protection of genetic resources, to include recognition of the rights of indigenous and other groups with traditional knowledge of biodiversity, she said.

Biotrade faces challenges in developing its market as well as in competing with jungle-devastating activities like livestock ranching and the rapidly expanding soybean agribusiness.

The European market, where environmental awareness is high, consumers are increasingly demanding sustainably produced goods and services, as well as health protections and social responsibility, said Denis Belisle, head of the International Trade Centre.

Despite being a new and relatively limited activity, biotrade is dynamic, with growing production and demand, and is essential for the sustainable development and improved living conditions of many impoverished communities in biologically diverse regions, concluded the panellists.

Excerpt:

By Mario Osava
SAO PAULO, Jun 15 2004 (IPS)

Rich countries will not make trade concessions merely because the countries of the South demand them – what is needed is a political force that can change the face of international relations, said Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva as he explained his foreign policy to social activists Tuesday.

With that goal in mind, Brasilia has tried first to unite South America and then to build bridges with other countries, blocs and regions, which Lula has visited in his first year and a half in the presidency.

India, China, Africa and the Middle East form part of that search for alliances and the effort to strengthen developing countries in order to negotiate on more equal footing with the powerful nations or blocs of the industrialised North.

The fight against hunger is the ”main theme” of his presidential diplomacy, Lula said in a meeting with activists participating in the Civil Society Forum in the context of the eleventh sessions of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), under way this week in the Brazilian metropolis of Sao Paulo.

Making hunger and poverty a political matter, not just a social problem, is the route for finding solutions, and to do so, societal pressure on governments and parliaments is essential, said the president, a former metalworker and a founder of the governing leftist Workers Party (PT).

A global programme against hunger is the banner that Lula carries to all meetings and forums he participates in. To achieve that goal, he proposes the creation of an international fund that could be fed by some sort of tax on speculative financial transactions, especially those conducted in international ”tax havens”, or on weapons deals.

He will present an initiative in that vein on Sep. 20 to the heads of state and government to gather in New York at the beginning of this year’s sessions of the U.N. General Assembly.

France and Chile have already expressed support for the proposal, Lula said in his presentation Tuesday to government and international institution delegates present for a panel discussion on innovative ways of financing development, taking place as part of UNCTAD XI.

To show that it would not be difficult to obtain resources, the Brazilian president stressed that in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), approved by the U.N. in 2000 and intended to halve the number of hungry people in the world by 2015, ”only 50 billion dollars more are needed, according to estimates by international institutions.”

That sum represents ”just two months of the agricultural subsidies granted by the developed countries and just three weeks of what the world spends on weapons,” he said by way of comparison.

Lula said his country is doing its part, lending legitimacy to its promotion of the initiative. The ”Zero Hunger” programme, which he launched when he took office in January 2003, is slated to benefit 11 million families before his term ends in 2006.

To date, 4.5 million families are involved in the programme, and the total is expected to reach 6.5 million by the end of the year. Through Zero Hunger, each participating low-income family receives a monthly stipend for the purchase of food.

The president said his government is promoting a broad-based mobilisation – involving civil society – for the fight against hunger and poverty.

In this context, ”Solidarity Week” is scheduled in August as an opportunity for everyone – trade unions, non-governmental organisations, church groups and the business community – to ”announce what they are doing” and make commitments towards achieving the MDGs in Brazil.

Those goals are related to international trade as well, Lula stressed. Developing countries must be strengthened, through unity, in order to negotiate for more just trade relations, without fighting against other trade partners, but rather seeking ”complementarity” in the world such that countries can ”export the products they do best.”

An example of solidarity with and help for the poorest, according to Lula, was the Brazilian complaint in the World Trade Organisation against U.S. subsidies for its cotton growers, obtaining a ruling ostensibly favourable to the South American giant.

But ”it isn’t only Brazil that benefits most from that lawsuit, but also the African countries for which cotton is the main export,” he said.

”Without a policy of solidarity” amongst developing countries, ”we will not be able to take the necessary steps,” he said, noting that his government sometimes stimulates imports from countries that are facing difficulties, despite lower prices from other sources. One recent case is Brazil’s acquisition of rice from Uruguay, he said.

The assistant general secretary of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), José Olivio Miranda Oliveira, asked Lula to use his leadership role to push for a global forum that would discuss ways of overcoming the negative effects of the current globalisation process, including means that involve trade.

The Brazilian president responded that the developing world cannot agree to the so-called social clause in international trade because it would make it impossible to escape poverty, since poor countries would not be able to compete with rich countries that have had broad labour rights in place for a century and remain competitive because of their advanced technologies.

It is then a question of seeking ”other mechanisms of social promotion,” in dialogue between governments and the union movement, which puts the global social question in the perspective of the South, given that the social clause is being ruled out, Miranda Oliveira told IPS.

The worsening of the world’s social problems calls for an urgent definition of innovative mechanisms for reversing that trend, said the ICFTU official.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 15 2004 (IPS)

Every time Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva speaks at an international forum, he underlines that his main objective is to fight hunger and poverty.

In Brazil, Latin America’s giant, 32 million children and adolescents live in families with incomes of less than 40 dollars a month.

Lula brought up the issue once again Monday, at the opening of UNCTAD XI (the 11th United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), which ends Friday in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city.

”I have undertaken a vital commitment to fighting hunger, and that objective is the top priority of my government…In the various international meetings in which I have participated, I have defended the central importance of this issue, and the need for a new world order, capable of producing prosperity with social justice,” said Lula, a former trade unionist.

In this country of 178 million, poverty pushes school-age children into the world of work and creates a breeding-ground for social ills like malnutrition, sexual exploitation, and violence against children.

Although there are no reliable statistics on child labour in Brazil, an estimated three million children under 14 work, 40 percent of them in agriculture, where the worst conditions are found and where work is generally incompatible with school attendance.

According to statistics from the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers, minors working on plantations cut an average of 2.3 tons of sugar cane a day, doing arduous work at an age at which their bone and muscle systems are not yet fully developed.

As adults they often suffer irreversible limb and joint problems and are at risk of cardiac and respiratory ailments.

An International Labour Organisation (ILO) report released last week found that Brazil has the third largest number of minors working in domestic service – a total of 559,000 – surpassed only by South Africa and Indonesia.

Most of them are girls who are kept by their employers as signs of social status. Very few of the domestics are able to attend school, and they frequently receive no remuneration, but merely room and board and minimal clothing, which relieves the pressure on their impoverished families by reducing the number of mouths to feed.

Sexual exploitation is another problem to which poor children in Brazil are vulnerable. But legislation promoted by various administrations and the work of the Catholic Church organisation Pastoral for Children have considerably reduced the magnitude of the problem, which in the 1990s affected half a million girls and adolescents.

There have been other advances as well. The under-five child mortality rate has been cut from 60 per 1,000 live births 15 years ago to 28 per 1,000 today, the coordinator of the Pastoral for Children, Clovis Boufleur, told IPS.

However, that is still high, he added, pointing out that among the 1.8 million children assisted by the Pastoral, under-five mortality has been reduced to 15 per 1,000 live births.

But ”Our work is aimed at contributing not only to reducing child mortality, but at creating opportunities for the integral development of the child,” said Boufleur. ”We don’t simply want to increase the number of children who survive, but are working for them to have all of the opportunities for integral development to which they have a right.”

In addition, the most highly developed parts of the country have made progress in fighting child malnutrition, and the national average has been reduced to five percent. But in the impoverished northeastern state of Alagoas, for example, 17 percent of children are still undernourished, according to the Health Ministry.

Violence is another serious problem facing minors in certain sectors of society. Every day, an average of four children and adolescents in Brazil are killed by the police, other minors, or common criminals.

In addition, juvenile delinquents are subjected to harsh punishment when they are captured. Government reform schools inspire such fear that adolescents frequently try to pass themselves off as old enough to be sent to prison instead.

A report presented by non-governmental organisations in Brazil to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child on Jun. 11 cites the progress made in the fight against malnutrition and in expanding primary school coverage in Brazil, but states that the country still has a long way to go towards ensuring respect for the rights of children who run into problems with the law.

The groups reported that 71 percent of the 190 institutions for juvenile delinquents in Brazil fall short of U.N. requirements regarding respect for the dignity of minors.

Mistreatment and torture, a deficit in human resources, and prison-like architecture are problems found in these institutions, according to the civil society report presented to the Committee on the Rights of the Child, which is meeting in Geneva.

A government report states that between September and November 2002 a total of 9,555 adolescents were deprived of liberty in Brazil. Of that total, 90 percent were males, 60 percent were black, 51 percent did not attend school, and 49 percent did not work.

The official report also states that between 1988 and 1990, 4,661 children under 17 were murdered – an average of four a day. Of the victims, 52 percent were killed by the police or private security guards; 82 percent were black; and 67 percent were males between the ages of 15 and 17.

Combating violence against minors is one of the commitments assumed by the leftist Lula when he took power in January 2003.

Excerpt:

By Mario Osava
SAO PAULO, Jun 14 2004 (IPS)

The ”convergence” achieved by the informal group that has been dubbed the ”Five Interested Parties” (P5) – the leading actors in international agricultural trade – marks historic progress, says Brazil’s Foreign Minister Celso Amorim.

The P5, comprising Australia (representing the Cairns Group), Brazil, European Union, India, and the United States, concluded their meeting late Sunday night, just as the eleventh United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) got under way in this Brazilian metropolis.

The members of the group agree that ”export subsidies need to be removed gradually, domestic farm aid needs to be reduced substantially, and market access needs to be increased substantially,” EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy announced.

This consensus gives a green light to asking experts to study figures, deadlines, tariffs, quotas and other concrete matters. The possibility for advancing in this area is very promising, ”but there is a great deal of work ahead,” said Amorim.

”We are just five” amongst the many countries and trade blocs, and an international understanding on farm trade must involve the 147 members states of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick told a joint press conference after the group’s four-hour meeting.

The meet was a Brazilian initiative aimed at unblocking the Doha Round of trade negotiations in the WTO arena.

India’s Trade Minister Kamal Nath said there is now a convergence of opinion instead of divergence, giving credence to hopes for effective progress in the technical negotiations slated for the coming weeks, to culminate in July with the meeting of the WTO committee on agriculture.

”One must look upon the P5 announcement with caution,” says Martin Khor, director of the Third World Network and an expert in international trade issues for non-governmental organisations which are meeting in Sao Paulo in parallel to UNCTAD XI.

This group of five does not represent the consensus of WTO members, he told IPS. ”I’m not convinced that it takes seriously the issue of special and differentiated treatment for development countries, and particularly their small farmers.”

The understanding reached by the P5 is ”a small advance, although insufficient,” because technical and implementation details must be worked out, but it is important because it implies burying the ”mixed formula” through which the United States and EU sought to maintain the status quo in international farm trade, said Khor.

The Doha Round, launched during the WTO ministerial meet in the Qatari capital in 2001, has been mostly paralysed since the 5th conference of ministers, held in September 2003 in the Mexican resort of Cancún.

The stagnation is due largely to the fact that a large group of poor countries from Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific regions rejected the inclusion in the talks of what are known as the ”Singapore issues”, pending since the 1996 WTO conference. These include investment, competition rules, transparency in government procurement and facilitation of trade through streamlined customs regulations.

Also in the context of Cancún, the Group of 20 developing countries emerged, seeking correction of the imbalances in international farm trade caused by production and export subsidies, and working for a reduction in farm trade barriers.

Brazil and India are the participants in P5 that are also part of the G20, alongside fellow developing world giant China and countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Australia, meanwhile, has a significant role as a major agricultural exporter and leader of the Cairns Group, created in the 1980s by farm exporting countries – rich and poor – to combat subsidies and protectionism in the sector.

The United States and EU, in addition to erecting trade barriers to protect their farmers, are responsible for most of the subsidies granted in the industrialised world, totalling a billion dollars a day, and driving down international prices for many commodities that are important to developing countries.

Consensus among the five leading actors in farm trade could pave the way for a multilateral agreement on what is seen as the touchiest issue on the Doha Round agenda, and which the developing world is demanding be resolved if there is to be progress in other areas.

But there are no guarantees that such an agreement will be reached. Amongst the 25 members of the EU represented by Lamy, several resist reducing farm subsidies and opening their markets, admitted the commissioner.

Furthermore, the Doha Round is an all or nothing deal. As long as there is not agreement on all 20 chapters, no single chapter can be considered resolved, including, for example, those on reducing industrial tariffs, trade in services and investment, said Lamy.

The industrialised nations are demanding progress on issues of interest to them in exchange for ”concessions” on their part in the agricultural area.

”Parallelism and equivalence are the names of the game,” said the EU commissioner.

These concepts initially applied to the European demand that an end to export subsidies be accompanied by the elimination of other sorts of ”disloyal competition” in farm trade, such as privileged credits for the sector, insurance systems and government purchase of surplus for use in food aid.

All of the participants in P5 underscored the importance of maintaining the ”three pillars” of farm trade negotiations: export subsidies, domestic supports that distort the market, and market access.

Excerpt:

By Thalif Deen
SAO PAULO, Jun 14 2004 (IPS)

When United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan addressed a press conference here Monday, he was asked why no speaker on the opening day of a major U.N. meeting had thought fit to address the problem of declining official development assistance (ODA).

Will the long-promised ODA, which industrial nations first pledged to the world’s poorer countries back in the 1970s, go the way of the dinosaur?

ODA is still alive, responded Annan, hours after the opening of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD XI), which is trying to figure out how the world’s 132 developing nations will survive the battle against poverty, disease, debt and the inequities of the international trading system. The five-day meeting is scheduled to conclude Friday.

“The fact that we did not mention ODA this morning does not mean we have given up on it,” Annan told reporters.

But the secretary-general admitted that only four of 22 industrial nations – Norway, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands – have consistently met the target of spending 0.7 percent of their gross national product (GNP) on aid.

The rest have continued to renege on their promises and pledges, according to the latest figures released by the United Nations.

Total ODA – which has declined over the last 20 years, averaging about 55 billion U.S. dollars annually – registered a surprise increase last year to 68.3 billion dollars.

Theoretically, ODA has been climbing since the U.N. International Conference on Financing for Development, held in Mexico in March 2002, says Jose Antonio Ocampo, U.N. under-secretary-general for economic and social affairs.

But a large part of the increase was made up of additional aid to Iraq, and also money to fund the debt-relief programme of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC).

“The increase does not provide fresh funding to low-income countries,” Ocampo said in an interview Friday.

Despite this aberration, Annan says 2003’s 68.3 billion dollars is still below the target of 100 billion dollars annually, which will be required to meet the U.N.’ s much-trumpeted Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The MDGs, approved by the U.N. General Assembly in September 2000, seek to reduce by almost 50 percent the number of people living in abject poverty and also those suffering from hunger and disease. The deadline to reach its targets is 2015.

“We have made some progress in our MDGs,” Annan told reporters Monday. “But a lot more needs to be done.”

It will be accomplished, he added, only with the infusion of new and additional resources to the world’s poorer nations.

In contrast, the United States has earmarked a staggering 119 billion dollars for the first two years of a military conflict against a single country: Iraq. The proposed spending includes 97.2 billion dollars for military operations, 21.2 billion dollars for reconstruction and a billion dollars for administrative expenses.

In an appeal to the Group of Eight (G8) nations – the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan and Russia – Annan said last week: “you in the G8 have a clear responsibility to place yourselves in the vanguard of that increase, and I hope you can do so by committing yourselves to specific timetables for achieving the ODA target of 0.7 percent of GNP.”

Such commitments, he said, will have a powerful impact and reinforce the confidence of developing nations. Annan also said an increase in ODA is essential for sub-Saharan Africa, which is being devastated by the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other tropical diseases.

But the G8 summit, by and large, ignored Annan’s appeal.

The worst hit by the decline in ODA are the 50 least developed countries (LDCs), described as the poorest of the poor.

They range from Bhutan and Bangladesh to Uganda and Zambia.

U.N. Under-Secretary-General for LDCs Anwarul Karim Chowdhury told IPS Monday that if ODA is not doubled between now and 2010 – and if there is no outright cancellation of debt and no diversification of economies – “there is really no way the LDCs can achieve the MDGs by 2015.”

“Of course, some LDCs have done well in respect of human development goals, but overall prospects are not encouraging,” he added.

“That is why I believe special attention should be given to the 50 LDCs to lift them out of the morass of poverty,” Chowdhury said.

Diverting a tiny fraction of the world’s arms expenditures – including funds earmarked for Iraq – would result in a miraculous transformation of LDCs, he added.

Despite such talk, Saradha Iyer of the non-governmental organisation Third World Network (TWN) believes the UNCTAD meeting in Sao Paulo is unlikely to seriously affect, much less influence, ODA spending and the aid value systems that dominate today.

“The United Nations is only showing up in force at Sao Paulo because the MDGs in 2005 is going to show up all its inadequacies, and this is the primary building block for the wall of excuses it will have to erect to explain why so many countries in sub-Saharan Africa are unable to meet the MDGs,” Iyer told IPS.

The U.N. General Assembly is scheduled to hold a special session in late 2005 to assess why developing nations are falling behind in their targets to meet MDGs.

Excerpt:

By Mario Osava
SAO PAULO, Jun 14 2004 (IPS)

Coherence is the theme of this meeting, and ”countries which press others to liberalise trade should be willing to do the same themselves,” said U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan as he officially inaugurated the eleventh ministerial sessions of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development here Monday.

”If they don’t, we politely call it lack of coherence; but we could just as accurately call it discrimination,” Annan said.

”Consider the African farmer, eager to take advantage of duty-free access to global markets, only to find her competitive advantage nullified by sophisticated packaging regulations, or by subsidies paid to competitors in wealthier countries,” he added.

Demands for a more just and balanced international trade system marked the opening statements of UNCTAD XI, in which the institution is celebrating 40 years of existence.

But Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva noted that overcoming the enormous inequalities in the world ”cannot rely only on trade.”

What is needed, said the conference host, are a “financial architecture that sustains changes” and public investment, which has been underestimated by “mistaken recipes” for development that have led to additional sacrifices in poor countries.

As a model for the future, Lula pointed to the Marshall Plan that helped Europe recover its lost prosperity in the wake of the World War II.

Over the past 40 years, annual per capita income in the richest countries rose from 11,400 to 32,400 dollars, while in the poorest countries the increase was only from 212 to 267 dollars, he noted.

The situation will only get worse if current trends remain unchanged. In the past five years, 23 developing countries saw their economies decline, 55 grew less than two percent a year, and only 16 achieved growth of more than three percent annually, said the Brazilian president, a former metalworker and founder of the governing leftist Workers Party (PT).

Development ”does not automatically occur nor will it be the spontaneous result of market forces,” and it will not be ”a gift from the international community,” he said, and urged developing countries to remain united and persistent in negotiating for change.

As for trade, Lula confirmed Brazil’s willingness to take part in “pragmatic and mutually respectful negotiations” that take into account the needs of developing countries, especially the poorest.

He praised UNCTAD for its ”economic vision that has not lost its social sense” and defended the reactivation of the Global System of Trade Preferences (GSTP), a trade barrier reduction scheme exclusive to developing countries, saying it will build “a new global trade geography.”

Lula said he hopes another 40 countries will join the GSTP already signed by 44 nations.

The Brazilian leader went on to propose the creation of an international policy centre for financing development, and suggested it be named for fellow Brazilian Celso Furtado, an economist who was lauded in the UNCTAD XI inaugural addresses for his theoretical and practical contributions to the development arena.

It would be ”a centre for disseminating innovative projects and policies for combating hunger, poverty, and bottlenecks in development,” contributing to a new globalisation agenda, Lula explained.

”Globalisation is not synonymous with development, it is not a substitute for development, but it can be used as an instrument for development.”

He also invited world leaders to a meeting in New York on Sep. 20 with the aim of defining mechanisms for a fund to fight hunger and poverty, an initiative Lula himself launched, and backed by India and South Africa.

The world’s trade imbalances were condemned in Monday’s speeches, particularly in the address by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, of Thailand, which hosted UNCTAD X in 2000.

The industrialised countries have been “slow” in attending to what the developing world needs most, which is the elimination of agricultural subsidies and barriers, he said.

Julian Hunte, chair of the 58th U.N. General Assembly and foreign minister of Santa Lucia, said that reality has belied the premise that globalisation and free trade will bring prosperity to all.

Today many developing countries continue to suffer economic and social problems while many others, mostly in the industrialised world, ”sail in an ocean of prosperity,” said Hunte.

He demanded special and differentiated treatment for “small, open and vulnerable economies,” like his own, a tiny Caribbean island nation, and for those considered “least developed countries.”

An agreement at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) cannot create new imbalances on the one side and seek to create balance on the other, said the Santa Lucia diplomat.

Hunte noted that 50 developing countries rely on two or three exportable commodities and 39 are dependent on just one raw product, which is why there is an urgent need to seek solutions for trade with fairer prices.

Thailand’s Shinawatra said trade and South-South cooperation hold great potential, as is already evident in Asia. But it is largely unknown territory and there are no guarantees that such agreements would work better than North-South cooperation, he warned.

Multilateralism still offers the best hope for all, and that is why negotiation of the WTO’s Doha Round must go forward, he said.

U.N. chief Annan seemed to agree, saying: ”what we need now is a successful conclusion to the Doha negotiations (begun at the WTO ministerial meet in the Qatari capital in 2001). It is increasingly clear that this can be achieved only if developing countries are granted full access to the markets of the industrialised world, and if agricultural and other subsidies that distort world markets are dramatically reduced or eliminated.”

”Such an outcome would strike a blow not only for coherence, but for development and justice, too,” he said.

”If developing countries agree to reduce the average tariffs applied to each other by 50 percent (under the GSTP), this would generate an additional 15.5 billion dollars in trade. This is not an alternative, but a complement to the multilateral liberalisation process,” Annan said.

Excerpt:

By Mario Osava
SAO PAULO, Jun 13 2004 (IPS)

Further consolidation of the unity of nations of the South was the principal outcome of the ministerial meeting of the Group of 20 developing countries (G20) opposed to distortions of agricultural trade in the WTO, held in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo.

That was the conclusion reached by activist Adriano Campolina, regional director of Action Aid International in the Americas and one of the three representatives of civil society who addressed the ministers at their meeting Saturday.

The participation in the meeting of the coordinator of the Group of 90 (G90), Foreign Trade and International Cooperation Minister of Guyana Clement Rohee, sealed – at the ministerial level – the unity of the developing world in the multilateral trade talks, said Campolina.

The alliance between different groupings of countries of the South was reinforced by the defence of ”special and differentiated treatment” for the least developed countries (LDCs) and solidarity with African cotton-growing nations expressed in the statement released by the ministerial meeting, Campolina told IPS.

The G90 links the countries of the African Union, the LDC Group, and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries, agricultural exporting nations that were once European colonies.

Like the G20, the G90 took shape within the ambit of last year’s WTO (World Trade Organisation) ministerial conference in Cancun, Mexico, giving a unified voice to opposition to the attempts by the United States and European Union (EU) to include the so-called Singapore issues – investment, competition policy, transparency in government procurement and trade facilitation – in the negotiations.

The G20, led by Brazil, includes several other Latin American countries as well as other developing world powers like India, South Africa and China. The new bloc played a key role in Cancun by refusing to accept continued stalling by the industrialised North with respect to the elimination of its huge farm subsidies.

Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim delivered a speech, as spokesman for the G20, at the G90 ministerial meeting held Jun. 3 in Guyana.

Action Aid, Oxfam International and the Brazilian Network for the Integration of the Peoples urged the G20 on Saturday to remain united ”in the face of the heavy political pressure” to divide it, and to forge ties with other groups of the South that have organised to defend the needs of the developing world, like the G90 and the G33 (countries heavily dependent on a handful of commodities).

Oxfam and the other non-governmental organisations (NGOs) praised ”the strategic vision and political will” of the G20, which is pushing in the WTO for outcomes in favour of the developing world.

The groups also recognised the G20’s major contribution to the shift in the balance of power in the multilateral negotiations, since Cancun.

The NGOs also called on the G20 to consult civil society in the preparations for next year’s WTO ministerial conference in Hong Kong, in order to strengthen the dialogue with the people.

The G20 took stock of the negotiations and of its own role in them, and expressed support for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), whose 11th ministerial conference opened Sunday and runs through Friday in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city.

The intensification of South-South trade, promoted by UNCTAD, should be a priority for all of the members, says the G20 statement, which reaffirms the new bloc’s unity and positions.

The group is united in the push for progress in the talks on agriculture on three fronts: an end to subsidies for farm exports; a reduction in domestic supports that distort international trade; and greater market access, said Foreign Minister Amorim.

In response to criticism from negotiators from rich countries and the press, who argue that India also practices agricultural protectionism and could hurt the unity of the group in its attempts to open up markets, India’s Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath underlined his total commitment to the G20 and the ”three pillars” of the negotiations.

The trade ministers of Nigeria and South Africa, Idris Adamu Waziri and Lndiwe Hendrix, expressed similar sentiments.

The G20’s great contribution has been to clarify the concepts that should orient the proposals set forth in the multilateral talks, said Argentina’s Deputy Foreign Minister Martin Redrado.

One concept is ”progressivity” in tariff reductions through deeper cuts in higher tariffs and direct attacks on ”tariff peaks” of up to 500 percent, applied by developed nations, he explained.

Another is ”flexibility” in recognising the differences and economic asymmetries between countries and the absolute need of some countries to defend agriculture.

The situation of India’s farmers, for whom agriculture is a question of survival, is very different from that of European farmers, said Amorim, referring to the huge subsidies shelled out to agriculture in the EU.

There are prospects for progress in the WTO agriculture talks, that form part of the Doha Round that was launched at the global trade body’s ministerial meeting in the capital of Qatar in November 2001, said Amorim.

The minister was referring to statements by EU negotiators, according to which the bloc would agree to set a deadline for eliminating farm export subsidies as long as there is ”parallelism” – measures by exporter rivals to match EU concessions, such as abolishing other forms of export promotion that harm developing countries, like U.S. export credits and export support in the guise of ”food aid”.

Excerpt:

By Mario Osava
SAO PAULO, Jun 12 2004 (IPS)

”We don’t want an UNCTAD instrumental to World Trade Organisation agreements,” is the message that hundreds of non-governmental organisations and social movements will tell the government officials gathered for the eleventh United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

The declaration of the Civil Society Forum, approved here Saturday by NGO representatives from 40 countries and to be read in the official opening sessions of UNCTAD XI Monday, maintains that international trade, its institutions and agreements should be conditional on ”the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and the conventions approved within the U.N. framework.

They also call for an end to the ”blackmail and military intervention” through which wealthy nations illegally occupy other territories in defence of their narrow interests and investments.

The text goes on to criticise the official statement of UNCTAD for omitting mention of the ”perverse relationship” between trade questions, ”the war and its billion-dollar costs” and poverty.

The Forum also demands the return to nations of their ”sovereign right to define policies appropriate to their realities,” without externally imposed constraints, including those imposed by transnational corporations through ”legal artifice”.

The civil society representatives, meeting here through Thursday to track and engage in dialogue with UNCTAD XI, criticise that conference’s official discussion document for accepting globalisation as a strong factor ”of growth and development”.

That contradicts the U.N. body’s own diagnosis of the negative effects of trade liberalisation in recent years, say the activists.

UNCTAD expresses its desire for an ”inclusive and equitable globalisation”, but notes there are countries and economic sectors that are ”losers” in that process, but fails to mention that transnationals and speculative financial capital are the winners, charge the NGOs and movements of workers, peasants, women and clerics.

Their declaration underscores the paralysis afflicting the WTO negotiation agenda and the changes in the ”international balance of power” that took place at the Cancún, Mexico conference of WTO ministers last year, when developing countries, united in several blocs, stood up against the measures that the global economic powers tried to impose.

UNCTAD, meanwhile, has taken up the discussion of issues that were rejected by the nations of the South in Cancún and which caused that meeting to fail.

Market access cannot be negotiated if there are stipulations in regards to other issues, like government procurement, investment, competition rules and expansion of intellectual property, says the Civil Society Forum.

Foreign debt, unilateral trade sanctions and other inequities should have solutions which ensure that poor countries can develop in ”sovereign, sustainable and equitable” ways, overcoming gender inequalities, protecting biodiversity and promoting family farming and food security, say the activists.

But despite the criticisms, several participants defended the strengthened role of UNCTAD as a defender of the link between trade and development.

Jorge Saavedra Durao, president of the Brazilian Association of NGOs (ABONG), one of the Forum organisers, denounced attempts by rich countries to undermine the UNCTAD mandate to that of a mere technical adviser to Africa and less developed nations.

Cancún ”changed the geopolitics of the WTO,” but the countries of the South must remain united, avoiding the divisions that the United States and the European Union try to create, Adriano Campolina, head of Action Aid International-Brazil, told IPS.

The increase of South-South trade, just as UNCTAD proposes, is a positive thing: ”it builds new bridges for sustainable development by multiplying the number of trade partners,” he said.

In those countries there are no ”tariff peaks”, which otherwise make exports of some products impossible, especially if one adds value to raw materials, he said.

But agreeing to negotiations on investment and intellectual property at the WTO, in exchange for liberalisation of agricultural markets would be to regress to neo-colonial relations, said Campolina.

Trade ”is a tool, not an end in itself.” Brazil’s foreign trade grew a great deal in the past few years, leading to a surplus, but did nothing to alleviate poverty or resolve the country’s social problems, he added.

According to the activist, it is essential that trade agreements do not impede a country’s ability to promote its own public policies, for example, promoting family farming through government procurement as a means to reduce poverty.

UNCTAD has the chance to establish itself as ”a centre for new ideas”, after it has become evident that the WTO does not attend to the demands of civil society or of governments, says Marcelo Furtado, international relations coordinator for the Brazilian office of the international environmental watchdog Greenpeace.

Its current proposals, such as the Global System of Trade Preferences (GSTP) amongst developing countries, still are ”timid”, says Furtado.

Civil society is calling for the incorporation of sustainability criteria in trade negotiations and assurances that the development agenda will not be privatised, and must remain in the hands of government, he said.

The threat facing UNCTAD is that could align itself with the WTO model, in considering globalisation a positive process, and be satisfied with ”a geographic change” in trade, promoting South- South exchange without altering the economic paradigms, says Furtado.

Peruvian activist Rosa Guillén Velarde, coordinator of the Latin American Network of Women Transforming the Economy (REMTE), considers UNCTAD’s coordinating role important for strengthening the governments of the South that are under pressure from the United States and the EU.

UNCTAD is also key for promoting ”a more democratic U.N. system in support of development of our countries and our peoples,” she says.

The problem, adds Guillén Velarde, is that while the UNCTAD makes good diagnoses, it lacks coherence with governments to create alternative policies for overcoming poverty and inequalities.

In the name of free trade, for example, ”our governments are coerced into conceding privileges to the big corporations,” therefore international trade is not benefiting the small entrepreneur and is not generating employment, she said.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
ISTANBUL, Jun 12 2004 (IPS)

World trade is booming. Food, goods and services move across the globe with astonishing speed. Money is made.

Yet tell that to the woman entrepreneur from Mauritania who can’t ship her camel cheese to the North because of stringent European Union health regulations. Or to one of 15 million cotton farmers in Africa, where the industry is reported to be losing 250 million dollars a year due to U.S. subsidies to its own cotton growers.

Not to mention any one of 2.8 billion people around the world who live on two dollars a day or 1 billion on just one dollar a day.

How to trickle down to the poor the enormous wealth generated by world trade is once again coming under global scrutiny at the 11th United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD XI), taking place Jun. 13-18 in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city.

UNCTAD Secretary-General Rubens Ricupero called this gathering an “unprecedented opportunity” to help developing nations in overcoming trade imbalance and its consequences.

Trade and wealth are growing steadily, but so is inequality. Developing countries now have the chance to revert the trend by increasing South-South trade and exploring new competitive edges.

Above all, the emphasis falls on improved access to markets and reduction of trade barriers and subsidies that distort trade to the detriment of poorer nations, thus compounding poverty and gender inequality.

North-South rift

Representatives of civil society fear the Sao Paulo gathering could again wind up in an impasse between North and South, the North unwilling to yield its entrenched gains from world trade to the South.

“UNCTAD must be ready to make far-reaching proposals and resist pressure from some industrialised nations to limit its role,” says Celine Charveriat of Oxfam.

Adds Iara Pietrikovsky of the Brazilian Network of Trade: “The International Status Quo does not allow for international development compatible with the global needs to grow, to generate wealth and overcome poverty.”

Statistically, global commerce rose 4.3 percent last year and is projected to shoot up seven percent in 2004, with benefits to developing countries as well, as their share of world trade climbed from 24 percent in 1990 to 32 percent in 2000.

Still, over 80 percent of all global exports are produced by only 10 countries, and the lion’s share of every dollar of wealth produced in the world economy goes to wealthy or middle-income countries. Only three cents of every dollar, says the World Bank, goes to the low-income countries that are home to 40 percent of the world’s population.

And the share of the 50 least developed countries in trade slumped from 1.7 percent in 1970 to 0.6 percent in 2002, as East Asia produces 75 percent of the developing world’s manufactured exports.

African and other least developed countries accounted for a mere 0.62 percent of world trade last year, and their economies combined made up 0.58 percent of global GDP.

In 15 Latin American and Caribbean nations, more than 25 percent of the population lives in poverty, according to the World Bank.

Who’s more liberalised?

While it is possible to link poverty to trade imbalance, UNCTAD Secretary General Rubens Ricupero also points out that despite an impressive trade performance by Latin America, there are 20 million more poor people in that region today than in 1997.

In China’s recent trade boom, however, the percentage of the extremely poor has plunged from 64 percent to 17 percent, since 1981.

In parleys such as the one in Sao Paulo, the main undercurrents are globalisation and liberalisation: two trump cards of the North.

Through “outsourcing” or “off-shoring”, expected to increase 30 to 40 percent in the next five years, any big company can produce almost anything, anywhere, taking advantage of cheap labour and benefits extended by governments anxious to attract foreign investment.

Thus, liberalisation. But, it is now argued, the reluctant South is more liberalised than the North that advocates the freeing up of trade.

“Countries in the South have liberalised trade faster than the industrialised nations of the North, resulting in increased import bills,” says UNCTAD.

“Many of them have liberalised their trade regimes in anticipation of those gains, and the speed of that liberalisation has often outpaced that of developed countries. After two decades of opening up, however, the developing world is still waiting for the results,” the U.N. agency adds.

Alternatives

World trade analysts also see a window of opportunity for developing nations to go for “creative industries” such as music, movies, broadcasting, publishing and software production. Some East Asian economies engaged in such fields tripled their GDP and reduced their poverty level by 40 percent in the past two decades.

Potential is also seen in “service” exports, including labour in developed markets in the so-called “temporary movement of natural persons”, while at the other end of the scale is commodity production, which is highly vulnerable to price fluctuations and external shocks, according to UNCTAD.

If the cards are stacked against the South in North-South trade, unexplored potential exists in South-South trade, making up 10 percent of total world trade, growing 11 percent a year and now representing over 40 percent of all developing-country trade. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has called it the “new geography of trade and economics”.

U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Director-General Jacques Diouf is urging the creation of joint ventures between agriculture-producing countries and oil-producing countries to bolster the development of their production and trading capacity.

In 2001, he noted, the former countries’ petroleum imports were worth 6.3 billion dollars, while the latter imported agricultural products totaling 11.6 billion dollars.

Women

In trade, a key factor apart from poverty, but also very much linked to it, is the “gender differential” creating job opportunities for women in expanding markets such as labour-intensive export industries like textiles and clothing, footwear, horticulture and data processing.

In the western hemisphere, women accounted for more than half of all migrants in 2000, although in many cases liberalisation has also involved the removal of agricultural subsidies paid by developing countries to small-scale farmers, most of them women, resulting in widespread job loss.

Now, women account for about 40 percent of all workers worldwide, and their participation rate has risen steadily. The largest increase has been seen in South America – from 26 to 45 percent of the workforce in 20 years. But women still earn about two-thirds of what men earn.

The manufacturing wage gap ranges from 52 percent in Botswana and 75 percent in Egypt to 81 percent in Costa Rica and 86 percent in Sri Lanka. And, says UNCTAD, 60 percent of the world’s 550 million working poor are women.

The Sao Paulo meeting comes in the wake of a stalemate in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations, reportedly largely the result of the failure of its liberalised, free trade model to improve the lives of people around the world.

And the gathering is seen as supplying an opportunity for governments, NGOs and businesses looking for alternative models for trade that promote sustainable development by examining the critical role of fair trade rules to address hunger, the global farm crisis of commodities, supply management, international markets and economic development.

Excerpt:

By Mario Osava
SAO PAULO, Jun 11 2004 (IPS)

Defence of multilateralism remains a priority of the Group of 77 developing countries (G77), but there are challenges, old and new, said the bloc’s chairman Friday, marking its 40th anniversary with a special two-day ministerial meet in this Brazilian city.

The agenda of the founders has yet to be completed, said the G77’s current chairman, Mohammed bin Ahmad bin Jassim Al-Thani, Qatar’s minister of economy and trade. Many of the same challenges persist, aggravated by new crises and a worsening of conditions for national economic policies, he added.

Strengthening the multilateral system after a certain erosion of the United Nations role in the economic arena, integrating the development dimension of the globalisation process, obtaining capital without threatening national sovereignty, putting the needs of the developing South “at the heart” of trade negotiations, and recuperating the prices for raw materials are the current challenges, said the sheikh.

The stipulations for receiving development financing affect the decisions taken by developing countries to such an extent that they “feel they lose control of their own destinies,” he said.

The G77’s way of operating is not perfect, but it remains the developing countries’ only viable mechanism for carrying out multilateral diplomacy and strengthening the collective capacity to negotiate, said Al-Thani, adding that the bloc will confront the challenges of the future “proud of the past and confident in the present.”

The G77, whose membership has swelled to 132, continues defending “with the same vigour as always” its basic principles from 40 years ago, said Celso Amorim, Brazil’s foreign minister, in the meeting’s opening address.

The defence of “multilateralism in the political and economic spheres” and of “space for national policies in relation to international agendas, not always determined by us,” as well as “fair rules for international trade,” are the group’s ongoing struggles, said Amorim, the meeting’s host.

He underscored the numerous contributions the G77 has made to the multilateral system and to South-South cooperation, with new ideas that have been promoted by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which is holding its 11th conference here next week.

Brazil’s foreign policy today is very much in keeping with the group’s agenda, said the minister.

It is the duty of the G77 to keep alive the international development agenda as the world faces new problems, like global terrorism, which call into question the future of the U.N., and new economic concerns, said UNCTAD secretary-general Rubens Ricupero.

The G77’s two-day meeting concludes Saturday with a formal declaration, and serves as a precursor to the UNCTAD conference, Jun. 13-18.

The bloc emerged in the first sessions of UNCTAD in 1964. “The two grew together, and are linked, for better or worse,” because weakness in one will hurt the other, said Ricupero, himself a Brazilian.

Both the G77 and UNCTAD now have a “unique opportunity” to take stock of the type of development that is occurring and to promote multilateral negotiations, taking into account the current trend of global economic and trade growth, which will see strong expansion this year and next, he said.

The proposal for renewed negotiation of the Global System of Trade Preferences (GSTP), exclusive to developing countries, is expected to be approved during the UNCTAD sessions. Existing conditions are “encouraging” for this mechanism, because South-South trade has recently seen a strong push, said Ricupero.

Parallel to the G77 and UNCTAD meetings, more than 300 non-governmental organisations and social movements are discussing similar issues at the Civil Society Forum, which will present its positions during the official opening ceremonies of the UNCTAD conference on Monday.

The stance taken by the NGOs is quite critical of the official agendas, judging from the opinions of Bolivian Pablo Solon, head of a foundation bearing his name and focused on water and trade issues.

These intergovernmental meetings are serving “as simple mouthpieces for the World Trade Organisation,” he said.

The proposal to intensify South-South trade, even reactivating the GSTP, changes the geography but not the content and nature of international exchange, which lacks equitable distribution of its benefits, said the Bolivian activist.

Agriculture, for example, represents just seven percent of all global trade, but 70 to 80 percent of the farm business “is controlled by five transnational corporations,” said Solon, who upholds the food solidarity argument of the international network Vía Campesina, that food must not be treated as mere merchandise.

Increased South-South trade alone does not ensure development, because it is only enriching the transnationals, while social deterioration continues, with rising unemployment even in the rich countries of Europe and North America, he said.

Excerpt:

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 9 2004 (IPS)

Trade expansion for developing countries has only just begun and potential for reciprocal exchange within the South is “enormous” said government and business sector representatives participating in an international forum on regionalism and South-South cooperation Wednesday in this Brazilian city.

The emblematic case of this new reality, debated during the meet, is the closer ties between India, with its market of one billion people, and Mercosur (Southern Common Market), comprising Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, with a combined population of 225 million.

Trade between the South American bloc and India could increase 16-fold if they take advantage of all existing possibilities, says the secretary-general of the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Brazil’s own Rubens Ricupero.

For now, this bilateral trade flow is a relatively small 1.8 billion dollars a year, according to Mercosur figures for 2002, or 1.3 billion according to India’s statistics.

In either case, “it is very little,” because the participation of each party in the total imports of the other does not surpass 1.2 percent, noted Jayant Dasgupta, India’s assistant trade secretary.

Lack of mutual knowledge, different languages, distances that drive up shipping costs, customs rules and a lack of financial facilities stand in the way of greater trade. Overcoming these obstacles is essential for the success of the tariff preference agreement signed in January by Mercosur and India, according to Dasgupta.

The two sides currently are considering products for which trade could be stimulated by reduced tariffs. Of the initial list of 2,000 presented by Mercosur and 1,700 by India, they hope to select 700 to 800 products to be included in the accord, said New Delhi’s trade official.

An UNCTAD report states that Mercosur exports could reach 13.6 billion dollars and India’s could reach 12.7 billion, based on projected flows from 2000 to 2002 and the market demand on both sides.

A big delegation from India is participating in the activities of Foreign Trade Week in Rio de Janeiro, a preparatory event for eleventh UNCTAD sessions, to take place in the other Brazilian metropolis, Sao Paulo, Jun. 13-18.

The objective is “to expand mutual understanding” and establish conditions to increase trade, such as facilitating credit from the banks that finance exports, explained Yogendra Modi, head of the federation of India’s chambers of commerce and industry.

Modi stressed that, in addition to trade, his country is looking to attract investment from Mercosur, particularly from Brazil and its bigger corporations.

UNCTAD’s Ricupero declared his “personal enthusiasm” for the expansion of trade, not only between Mercosur and India, but also involving developing countries in general, which today “for the first time” surpasses industrialised countries in exporting goods and services to the United States.

But it is South-South trade that is growing fastest, although it represents just 10 percent of global exchange. That trend is likely to continue, given the long-term economic growth forecast of six percent annually in the 41 developing countries of Asia, he said.

It is not a matter of “substituting trade with the industrialised countries,” but rather increasing the flow and in a complementary way, Ricupero said.

The nations of the developing South currently are responsible for 32 percent of international trade and 49 percent of Japan’s imports, the second-largest national economy. Furthermore, 70 percent of the South’s exports are manufactured goods, said the U.N.. official.

But trade relations with some of the bigger developing countries, like China and India, are expanding in ways that are causing concern in Brazilian industrial sectors.

The trend that makes Mercosur a supplier of raw materials or semi-manufactured goods, while the bloc imports mostly industrialised products from India must be corrected, said José Augusto Fernandes, executive director of Brazil’s National Confederation of Industries.

While Brazilian sales to the United States represent 68 percent of the South American giant’s manufacturing exports, these products of highest added value are just 27 percent of what the country sells to India, Fernandes told IPS.

Unrefined Brazilian petroleum and Argentine soybean oil are the two leading products that Mercosur sells to the giant Indian market.

Excerpt:

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 8 2004 (IPS)

Civil society will be an opposing but cooperative presence at the eleventh United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD XI) next week in Sao Paulo, not mere naysayers, according to activists.

Although UNCTAD is critical of the existing globalisation process, “it is still based on the idea that trade should be intensified in order to promote development,” which is an inadequate approach and could entail distortions, says Sergio Haddad, head of the Sao Paulo group Açao Educativa (Education Action).

“International trade at any price and competition based on low wages, on slave labour,” does not lead to what society really wants, which is “human development with sustainability and distribution of wealth,” he said in a conversation with IPS.

Haddad says it is essential to combine international trade regulation with respect for human rights and to work towards a more just society.

But those who support more trade as a factor of development generally point to the example of the Asian countries, where there might be improvement in some economic indicators but “the labour force suffers greater exploitation,” he said.

Despite their differences with the UNCTAD approach, more than 300 non-governmental groups and social movements from around the world will participate in the Civil Society Forum in the context of the UNCTAD XI, Jun. 13-18 in Sao Paulo.

The Forum, which gets under way on Friday, is taking place on the invitation of the UNCTAD secretary-general himself, Rubens Ricupero.

The activists and experts will debate and approve a manifesto to be read at the opening ceremonies of the UNCTAD XI, to take place Jun. 14, and is expected to outline a reorganisation of the international system and alternatives to the existing international free trade model.

“It is an opportunity for dialogue and we believe we should make the most of it,” said Haddad, one of the organisers of the Civil Society Forum, as international relations director of the Brazilian Association of NGOs (ABONG).

Representatives from the civil society groups will also have a voice in several of UNCTAD’s intergovernmental sessions. Ricupero, meanwhile, will take part in dialogue at the parallel forum, as will U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Then, and until the Forum ends on Jun. 17, the activists will follow their own agenda, discussing issues like economics of solidarity, globalisation, international governance, human rights and fair trade.

The result “will be our stance on the relationship between trade and development,” says Iara Pietricovsky, coordinator of the Brazilian Network for the Integration of Peoples, which is also involved in organising the Forum.

The aim is to influence the UNCTAD debates “without the naiveté of believing we will be able to change the course of international trade,” and to inform the world’s people about “what the current global model of hegemony and imbalance means,” she said.

The civil society groups also seek to prevent the United States and European Union from reducing UNCTAD to a mere technical adviser for Africa and other lesser-developed countries, added Pietricovsky.

She charges that the two trade powers want to limit trade debate and keep it within the World Trade Organisation (WTO), where they impose “equal treatment for unequals” to the detriment of poor countries.

The pressures of industrialised countries on UNCTAD have been manifest for several years in the reduction of financial contributions to the Conference and the harsh attacks against the ideas the U.N. body defends, such as the condemnation of farm subsidies, she said.

Pietricovsky reckons it is important to maintain the Conference’s current mandate, as the “producer of technical knowledge for confronting global inequalities” and as the only institution “that proposes alternative paths of development.”

UNCTAD XI, however, tends to challenge the industrial powers by promoting greater rapprochement of developing countries at a time in which North-South disputes have been accentuated, especially in regards to agricultural subsidies.

During the intergovernmental meet, a new round of talks will be launched for the Global System of Trade Preferences (GSTP), a mechanism exclusive to developing countries, created in the 1980s to foment South-South exchange.

So far, it has not met its objective, but 44 countries recently decided to reactivate the programme, believing that better conditions exist today to achieve efficiency, and because trade amongst developing nations has grown notably in recent years, in large part driven by China’s economic and trade expansion.

All of this points to an UNCTAD that could reaffirm the power of the former “Third World” upon new and more pragmatic bases, strengthened by what is known as the Doha Round, which the WTO ministers approved in 2001 in the Qatari capital, with its “Development Agenda” and recognising the need to correct the distortions in farm trade.

Excerpt:

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 8 2004 (IPS)

Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali have achieved high quality cotton production at lowest cost, but what was supposed to be a success turned into a catastrophe because of the “incoherence” of international trade.

This complaint, voiced by Benin’s ambassador in Geneva, Samuel Amehou, on opening day of the Rio de Janeiro Foreign Trade Week, targeted the heavy subsidies the United States and European Union grant their cotton farmers.

In this “contaminated market”, farmers may be competitive, like the African cotton growers, “but they can’t sell” or they have to sell at prices so low that they give up farming altogether and end up in misery, ruined by trade without consumers, according to Amehou.

It is “incoherent” that the international community makes the fight against poverty a priority while allowing rules that impede fair trade of cotton, which otherwise could contribute to reducing poverty in Africa, he said.

Other incomprehensible rules are the structural adjustments imposed on poor countries by international finance institutions, which ban subsidies, while rich countries are permitted to subsidise, Amehou stressed.

The need for “balanced” rules that are more appropriate for developing countries was also touted by Mauricio Botelho, president of the Brazilian aeronautics firm Embraer, an example of a highly successful advanced technology company in a non-industrialised country.

To achieve such rules, “multilateralism is the best path,” said Botelho, recalling six years of an intense battle at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) against Embraer’s rival from Canada, Bombardier.

Both companies, which compete on the global market to sell small aircraft, accused each other of exporting their product with the benefit of state subsidies. The trade dispute ended with a condemnation of both sides, though it was found that Canada had granted more subsidies than had Brazil.

That experience revealed for the WTO that financing for exports followed the rules established by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a bloc that includes all industrialised countries.

The upshot is: “structural disadvantages for companies established in developing nations,” outside the scope of the OECD, according to Botelho.

Embraer was the “successful case” presented in the opening session of Rio de Janeiro’s Foreign Trade Week, a series of 10 seminars and forums in the lead-up to the 11th United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), to take place in the other Brazilian metropolis, Sao Paulo, Jun. 13-18.

Born as a state enterprise in the 1970s and privatised in the 1990s, Embraer was Brazil’s leading exporter from 1999 to 2001, though lost that edge in the wake of the Sep. 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States, due to the decline in the market for new aircraft.

The aeronautics industry, concentrated in the hands of four corporations, is a global business that involves multiple advanced technologies and complex realities, as each aircraft contains 150,000 to 200,000 components, which must be delivered timely for assembly, said Botelho.

And it is an exception in developing countries, which are unlikely to be able to compete with the industrialised world due to lack of capital and technology.

But the dynamic products for export are not only those related to advanced technology, says Rubens Ricupero, UNCTAD secretary-general. They can also be from the agricultural sector, he said.

Some fruits – the pineapple, for example – are seeing rapid expansion in international trade; up to 25 percent a year, Ricupero said as he launched the Rio meeting.

Developing countries should identify the dynamic products amongst their own exports, to expand their participation in world trade, improve competition and, in many cases, reduce their vulnerability to the financial crises associated with deep debts, said the U.N. official, himself a Brazilian.

He cited the example of Kenya, a country that a short time ago relied heavily on its coffee exports, and today has become the leading seller of cut flowers to Europe. The African country also exports many prepared and packed vegetables, which means added value, said Ricupero.

Greater attention is needed to the supply of products, he added. In his opinion, the Chinese economy has been the world leader in growth during the past 23 years because it has the most to offer in quantity, quality and competitive prices.

Mexico was able to triple its exports in seven years, after joining the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and the United States, but that expansion fell to 2.3 percent last year because it was not able to compete with China, he said.

Ricupero has made it clear that he wants to capitalise on UNCTAD XI and the parallel meetings to identify the areas and mechanisms through which trade can be made a bigger a factor in contributing to development.

This is essential particularly for the highly indebted countries, like Brazil, for which boosting exports “is the only viable route for reducing vulnerability – a strategy of life or death,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Jun 5 2004 (IPS)

Agricultural trade talks this week at the World Trade Organisation reflected an attitude of compromise but differences remain quite marked, said a negotiator from a developing country.

In this context, the meeting of trade ministers to start Jun. 13 in Brazil takes on vital importance.

The next talks on farm trade will take place in Geneva at the end of the month, but the chairman of the WTO agriculture committee’s special session, Tim Groser, of New Zealand, is confident the climate for negotiations will improve after the ministerial meet in Sao Paulo.

The Brazilian metropolis will host the 11th session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Jun. 13-18.

A high-ranking WTO source expressed enthusiasm about the talks because the 147 members of the multilateral system have shown “an attitude of commitment” for reaching an agreement that should be finalised by the end of July.

That is the deadline for reaching a framework agreement on farm trade talks that would allow progress on the rest of the issues under the Doha Round, the trade liberalisation programme launched at the November 2001 ministerial meet in the Qatari capital.

A failure in the already troubled agricultural negotiations would end hopes for reaching an understanding by the end of 2004 on the rest of the Doha agenda, which includes industrial tariffs, trade in services and special and differentiated treatment for poor countries, among others.

The UNCTAD meet will allow the ministers in attendance to discuss separately the specific items also in relation to development.

Luiz Felipe de Seixas Correa, Brazil’s representative to the international institutions in Geneva, anticipated that one of these meetings would bring together the Group of Five interested parties.

That group comprises the countries that serve as leaders of the different negotiating blocs within the WTO: United States, European Union, Brazil and India – representing the Group of 20 developing countries, and Australia, which coordinates the Cairns Group.

The Five Parties will gather next weekend before the inauguration of the UNCTAD XI. Also meeting in Sao Paulo will be the G20, a group created just before the resounding failure of a WTO ministerial meet in the Mexican city of Cancún last September. The 19 members of the group are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Paraguay, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, Tanzania, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

In this weeks farm trade debates in Geneva, the participants discussed a document presented by the G20 on market access, focussing on the tariffs and quotas that obstruct imports of agricultural products.

The G20’s proposal took on increasing importance and guided the week’s discussions, said Argentine negotiator Alfredo Chiaradía. With that contribution, the bloc of developing countries proved that “it has a great deal of manoeuvring room” in the negotiations, he told IPS.

On the other two farm trade issues – export subsidies and domestic supports – not much progress was made, say negotiating sources.

The United States and European Union, the two agricultural trade superpowers, which also lead the way in farm export subsidies, have said they are willing to eliminate that form of protectionism, but they differ in how they would go about doing so.

Difficulties arise when it comes to identifying the parallels between the different forms of subsidies, which include such modalities as credits, guarantees and insurance for exports, as well as food aid for foreign countries.

As for domestic support, industrialised countries aim to include new forms of assistance in the regime created by the farm trade agreement of the Uruguay Round, dating to 1995, to continue their protectionism.

Those efforts will ensured that many other countries “will have great difficulties in advancing” in negotiations on domestic support for farmers, said Chiaradía.

In the negotiations this week there was also active participation by two other blocs, the G10, made up of farm importing countries with a high level of protectionism, the G33, which comprises farm importing developing countries.

The G10, which calls for support of rural multi-functionality – protecting landscape and rural traditions – includes Bulgaria, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, South Korea, Switzerland and Taiwan.

The G33 is seeking farm trade accords that take into consideration certain “special products” that are vital to the economies of the group’s members.

The group is made up of Barbados, Botswana, Congo, Cote D’Ivoire, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kenya, Mauricio, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Senegal, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uganda, Venezuela, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

WTO Director-General Supachai Panitchpakdi, who will also attend the UNCTAD XI sessions, urged the member countries not to squander this opportunity to achieve a compromise in the few weeks remaining.

Supachai, a Thai diplomat, said the positive disposition of many governments has increased the outlook for success, but, he warned, there is still quite a long way to go.

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