UN-BWI-OECD ‘BETTER WORLD’ REPORT RILES MANY

by Chakravarthi Raghavan

Geneva, 26 June 2000 -- World poverty can be significantly decreased by 2015 if developing and developed countries implement their commitments to attack the root causes, the UN, IMF, World Bank and the OECD declared Monday in a report which is more in the nature of a pamphlet.

The report, purportedly drawing its goals from agreements and resolutions of the UN Conferences, has converted the goal about “eradication of poverty”, found as a commitment in the Copenhagen Social Summit documents, into “the most compelling of human desires”, and has further refined it in terms of the World Bank/OECD definition of ‘extreme poverty’ at $1 a day of per capita income, and then on what it would take to achieve this goal by 2015.

The report is being launched in Geneva by Kofi Annan, and simultaneously at Paris at the OECD Forum 2000 by Shelton-Colby, the deputy secretary-general of the OECD and UN Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette.

The report speaks of the need for ‘pro-poor’ growth, and faster growth in developing countries, and policies to provide basic social services for all.

But the central thrust of the ‘report’ is the promotion of globalization as the way to achieve goals—through ‘sound’ economic policies (new code words for the discredited Washington Consensus thesis of liberalization, deregulation, privatization etc).

“Globalization,” the report says, “offers enormous opportunities to the developing countries - better ways of tapping the world’s knowledge, better technology for delivering products and services, better access to the world’s markets.”

To take advantage of these opportunities requires actions.

“Countries have to lower their tariffs and other trade barriers and streamline their systems for the flow of exports, and finance.  They have also to manage their inflation, interest and exchange rates -to be seen as good places for doing business. And they have to maintain consistent policies—to be credible to investors, both domestic and foreign."

“The high-income countries have their part to play too - reducing tariffs and other trade barriers to imports from developing countries and providing assistance to build the capacity to trade effectively.”

The report’s talk about globalization offering enormous opportunities, and Annan’s oft-stated views that the only problem about globalization was that it was not spreading to developing countries, was in sharp contrast to the remarks of the ILO director-general Juan Somavia last week at one of the panels of the alternative summit of the NGOs.  Neo-liberal globalisation is dead as it lacks sound legitimacy, and cannot bring people out of poverty or provide them with decent jobs, Somavia said. Poverty and inequality have grown, he also pointed out.

On the talk that globalization was irreversible, Somavia said this was not true at all, and such ideas were false.

The scientific and technological revolution was here to stay, and had provided obvious benefits such as the possibility of civil society organizations to organize globally, which enabled them to defeat the moves for a Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI).

The present international economic arrangements were not inevitable.  The economic, social and trade policy instruments were made by governments and policy-makers. They were the result of political decisions that could be unmade by the same people that had made them.

Policies can be changed, and social movements and peoples' movements can bring about these changes. Those in power had never made changes because it was the right or correct thing to do. They changed only when the inevitable was about to happen.

The key role for bringing about change was thus civil society, and civil society organizations could make things happen, Somavia added.

Though none of the UN system organizations and their officials would speak publicly, several of the senior officials speaking non-attributively said the original idea of the ‘report’ could be traced to the UK development minister, Mrs. Claire Short who had asked the Paris-based OECD’s Development Assistant Committee (DAC), the donor grouping, to provide a report on the aid question for the Okinawa G-7 summit.

Soon, the international officials said, the OECD, the World Bank and the IMF got into the act, and made a donor-perspective on aid into a document to promote the failed policies of globalization, liberalization, privatization etc.

The DAC and the OECD apparently got some inputs from UN agencies and the Bretton Woods Institutions.

The OECD/DAC draft was also circulated to some of the leading NGOs and their views were sought. Some of their comments and views, specially on technical changes, were accepted, but the main thrust for ‘free-trade and open-economies’, one that ideologically sided openly with one side of the post-Seattle international debate on globalization remained.

The introduction, jointly signed by Kofi Annan and the heads of the IMF and World Bank, was apparently a later one, and in any event,was not circulated either to NGOs or UN agencies for their views and comments.

In their comments to the earlier draft, the NGOs of the Social Watch (who have been doing a better job of monitoring implementation than the US system, and producing annual reports) had pointed out that the targets set at Copenhagen and Beijing conference on women, were not for developing countries alone, but also the developed countries.  Developing countries had accepted all the targets and time-bound goals that would bind their governments and make them accountable, but this was linked to matching commitments of the industrialized countries - about increasing ODA, promoting technology transfer, opening up their own markets to exports of developing countries, reducing the debt burden and otherwise contribute to an ‘enabling environment’. No assessment, they said, could be complete without a clear assessment of how far the North had lived up to its own commitments. Even the extent to which the developed countries, with their resources, had lived up to their own social development goals was missing from the document.

And the attribution of Africa’s difficulties to racial and ethnic conflicts or the AIDS pandemics seemed excessive - more so by omitting all the history of trade liberalization that had yielded no benefits to Africa, or the burden of debt and its resulting generation of negative capital flows and the uneven share of the structural adjustment burden on the poor.

The Copenhagen summit took an unequivocal commitment for eradication of poverty, without any qualification. The concept of halving extreme poverty, defining it as a per capital income of $1 a day, though not contrary to the Copenhagen poverty eradication target, was a OECD target and not that of the UN.

The NGOs had also joined issue with the OECD view projecting economic growth and poverty as having a linear relationship.-SUNS4695

The above article first appeared in the South-North Development Monitor (SUNS) of which Chakravarthi Raghavan is the Chief Editor.

© 2000, SUNS - All rights reserved. May not be reproduced, reprinted or posted to any system or service without specific permission from SUNS. This limitation includes incorporation into a database, distribution via Usenet News, bulletin board systems, mailing lists, print media or broadcast. For information about reproduction or multi-user subscriptions please e-mail <suns@igc.org >