HELPING THE G-7 TO CATCH UP ON SOCIAL PRIORITIES!

by Someshwar Singh

Geneva, 27June 2000 -- The baby born out of the latest “partnership”between the United Nations, World Bank, IMF and the OECD has raised quite a storm and baffled many. The baby, called “A Better World for All”, is a report launched Monday on the opening day of the Geneva Special Session of the UN General Assembly on the Social Summit.

The report has raised so many questions and attracted such answers that outsiders are left bewildered on what the joint exercise is really meant to achieve.

At a press conference to launch the report, the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and senior representatives of the World Bank, IMF and the OECD explained that the (glossy) report was meant essentially to “sensitize” the powerful club of the world’s richest and most industrialized countries.

“This report .. is the product of an unprecedented collaboration among four major multilateral organizations,” said Kofi Annan. “And it responds to a specific request from the G-8 countries that such a report be prepared - to help monitor progress in the reduction of poverty worldwide and to guide them in their partnership with developing countries.”

The UNDP Administrator, Mark Malloch Brown, amplified on the theme by saying that the origins of this report lie in a request from the G-8 to have a tool each year when they meet to benchmark progress towards the development goals. “The goal here for us is to create a report which will annually ensure that at the G-8 summit these issues of development and the failures of development are addressed and that is no bad goal, because in many of the recent years development has rarely appeared on the agenda of the G-7.”

“This is an effort to create an annual bench-marking exercise which, at their request - and this is the good news - will put it in front of them every year and when you see the weak level of attendance by heads of Government from the developed countries at this Conference you know that a bench-marking advocacy tool of this kind has to be a plus,” added the UNDP head.

Brian Hammond from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) added his perspective: “This is a sign of partnership in action between the four organizations and it is partnership in action for the long term. We are here at the Social Summit reviewing the fact that progress has not been as good in the 1990s as we would have liked and it is a call to action as Mr. Mark Malloch-Brown has said, to the G-7, to development cooperation ministers for whom I work, to actually say ‘you are off track, we need to get back on track’ but that it can be done and to demonstrate that in figures, to use it as an advocacy tool.”

While Kofi Annan left the press conference after fielding just one question, and that too at the pleading of one of the panellists, Mark Malloch Brown waited for a few more questions and left much before the press conference was over.

A number of the speakers at the press conference claimed that the goals - seven in all - being espoused by the new report were actually drawn from the conclusions and goals set in UN conferences before.

Asked whether this meant that the G-7 was not paying attention to what the UN was saying up until now and what was the guarantee that it would listen now that the Bretton Woods institutions were adding their voice, Mr. Hammond said, “Quite the reverse. It was G-7 ministers in the development assistance committee with their colleagues that first came out with this selection of seven goals in shaping the twenty-first century. "

“By saying that there are so many goals that to follow them all and understand them all does not help in raising funds for development assistance. But by following seven key interrelated goals which if they were to be achieved would make for a much better world, and the title is deliberate, would raise the cause of development cooperation. And that was because they were looking at those conferences and chose to take goals from those conferences to which all countries had signed up and to which all countries are recommitting themselves here in Geneva as we speak.”

In response to a question on when the World Trade Organization would join this partnership and what the role of the WTO would be in relation to the goals (of the new report), Mark Malloch Brown observed, “I see no reason why this group will grow beyond these four organizations because this is not a policy partnership. It is a partnership to benchmark these issues for the future years. Because collectively, we can provide the data for this system of annual benchmarking and if necessary shaming the G-7 to do more. And it is not intended to be a prescriptive group that’s going to set policy.”

Earlier, in describing the new report, Mr Kofi Annan had however said:

“The result is a common understanding - a score card and policy road-map with which to measure progress in banishing extreme poverty from our world and in achieving the targets set by the world conferences of the past decade.”

Responding to a question that the NGOs had nicknamed the report as “Bretton Woods for all”, and their critique is that the recipes are too one-sided, making demands only to the countries of the South, Kofi Annan said, “I would want to work in partnership with everybody, stressing the fact that the United Nations alone can do very little or can do nothing and that we needed to reach out and work in partnership with NGOs, with the private sector, with civil society generally, foundations and universities and link up with all the international organizations to have greater impact and expand our reach."

“The NGOs are a very essential part of this partnership, so are the Bretton Woods institutions and so are the private sector and I think we ought to be careful not to necessarily sow dissent but find ways of pooling everybody together and by pooling our efforts we will have a really great impact on the problems we are dealing with. I did not expect everyone to agree with everything in the report as I do not agree with everything in many reports that I read, but I think the general thrust is right. I think it is a clever slogan but I do not think it really analyses the report effectively.”

Responding to the same issue, Mark Malloch Brown said,” Everyone of these goals are the goals acclaimed by the United Nations conferences and in the case of one by the Secretary-General - I mean six by the United Nations conferences and one by the Secretary-General in his Millennium report: The income poverty goal, which we expect to be adopted by the Millennium Assembly. So these are goals adopted by the South as much as the North. And they are aimed at a Northern audience, the G-7, to force them to do more to support poverty reduction in the South. So I don’t think it is a bad goal, and finally on the language which has caused most concern, the language about open markets."

“As the Secretary-General said, we in the United Nations are internationalists, we believe in an open global society, a society where ideas, trade and everything can flow across borders - but we believe in a managed one. The language which has caused such concern is, if you compare it to the language of the Copenhagen Declaration five years ago, almost the same. It is balanced in this report as it was at Copenhagen, with language about social protection, social investment, the inclusion of the poor. So please take the document as a whole.”

When asked why the new report failed to mention the fact that donor countries had been falling behind in their commitments with respect to Official Development Assistance (ODA), Kofi Annan had this to say, “We stand by the target of 0.7 per cent. It is regrettable that very few countries have met that target and this is a point I make often in my own statements. And so we have not moved away from that target. That figure is actually there, my colleagues tell me it is there on page 23.

Indeed, what is referred to on page 23 is falling aid and that too as a footnote explanation to a chart which shows temporal decline in aid by OECD countries to various regions. But strictly speaking, it is true that there is no reference to ODA, which in reality is one form of aid.

To another question on the new conditionalities on democracy, good governance and human rights that are being imposed on developing countries by multilateral institutions, Mr Hammond of the OECD said,”As for the conditionalities as you put it, to democracy, of human rights, there is a recognition here, in this year’s human development report, there is a recognition everywhere. That if development is to succeed and to be for the people of countries, then voices for the people are important. That they have a say in their futures and that there be a say for women just as much as for men is absolutely vital. And that is clear both in this document that originated in this and in the, 'A Better World for All' Report that they go hand in hand in order to make that difference and to make it sustainable.”

Mr. Vito Tanzi, Director of the IMF responded to the same conditionality question and admitted that sometimes, these were used as an excuse to cut assistance.

“Poverty alleviation requires money,” he said. “And as you know ODA money has been falling over the years and we have been calling attention to this repeatedly. But there is a correlation probably between the fall in ODA money and the growing concern about governance and lack of transparency and so forth. Unfortunately lack of transparency and lack of good governance sometimes is being used as an excuse for reducing assistance. And we want to remove that excuse. So with paying more attention to transparency, to corruption and so forth, we will remove that excuse so that ODA money can go back to the 0.7% that we hoped to get.”

Both the representatives of the IMF and the World Bank talked about the recent changes that were happening in their organizations. While Ian Johnson, Vice-President at the World Bank for the environmentally and socially sustainable development network, said that the bank 10 years ago was a “very closed institution”, Mr. Vito Tanzi was quite candid in stating the following about the changing attitudes at the IMF:

“Maybe until the mid-1980s we really felt that poverty issues, issues of income distribution and so forth, were not really our concern. Then the mood started changing and in recent years we have been paying much more attention to this, without abandoning our major mandate which is to improve the working of economies. The work has changed in many areas for example it has changed in the design of our programmes. There was a time when we designed a programme without really worrying too much about the re-distributional consideration about poverty consideration as long as the programme was successful in terms of promoting stability and promoting growth, that was good enough for us."

“But in more recent years, we really worry when we design a programme whether some groups, particularly some poor groups would be impacted by it. We have changed in the sense that we worry a lot about safety nets.  Now when we cannot change the design of the programme in many countries, we are recommending a safety net and we have lots of missions, especially in technical assistance in various countries, and we are clearly worried about issues like unproductive spending. You know, there is a lot of data which have been assembled over time, we are worried about expenditure, say for military expenditure; we are keeping track of how much the countries spend. Sometimes we urge countries to reduce that. Sometimes we have gone to two different countries which are rivals, trying to tell both of them to lower spending, so there is a lot of this kind of work which is taking place and much of it is not very visible because it is behind the scenes. It is being done quietly. But I want to stress that the major mandate of the Fund is still that of promoting good working economies, so that this economy can grow. We are not abandoning obviously that mandate but we are working much more closely with our colleagues from other institutions.”

In the final analysis, however, it is not clear whether the G7 would now prefer to look at the 7 goals of the new Fund-Bank-UN report, or the 10 commitments that all countries - rich and poor - made five years ago in Copenhagen.

A recent report in the International Herald Tribune (after the EU summit in Portugal) suggested that the EU governments and the Commission itself have not been able to understand ‘poverty’ and the Commission’s report is acknowledged by the EC Commissioner Anna Diamantopoulu to have been written in a ‘dead language’ and so confusing.

Perhaps there is a need, with some assistance from the NGOs, for the four sponsors of the Better World for All Report to hold some ‘educational’ seminars for G-7 leaders!

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