wfn.org | Church officials express disappointment at U.N. development summit

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Note #6110 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

11-July-2000
00247

	Church officials express disappointment at U.N. development summit
	
	Developed nations not meeting commitments to poverty-elimination, they say

	by Stephen Brown
	Ecumenical News International

GENEVA -- A major United Nations' gathering on social development has ended
with only minimal progress being agreed to tackle world poverty, according
to members of an ecumenical team co-ordinated by the World Council of
Churches and the Lutheran World Federation, both based in Geneva.

	The gathering -- a special session of the U.N. general assembly on social
development meeting in Geneva from July 1-26 -- was intended to review
progress made since a U.N. conference held in Copenhagen in 1995.

	One of the main recommendations of the Geneva gathering was a call for
action to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty by 2015, for
free and universal primary education by 2015, and for greater steps to ease
the debt burdens of developing countries.

	However, Joy Kennedy, from the Anglican Church of Canada, told ENI that
developed countries at the gathering had failed to make commitments to
provide the resources for development targets to be met.

	Kennedy, a spokesperson for the ecumenical team which has been monitoring
preparations for the Geneva gathering for two years, pointed out that the
Copenhagen meeting had reaffirmed the U.N. target of 0.7 per cent of the
Gross National Product of developed countries to be used for official
development assistance (ODA).

	However, only a handful of countries had met this target.

	"We don't see any signs of a reversal in the [downward] trend of ODA, we
don't see any signs of more open access [to the markets of developed
countries] for the goods of developing countries," she said. "There is
already enough wealth in the world to eradicate poverty today if the will
and the infrastructure is put in place to do so," Kennedy told journalists
in Geneva.

	Kennedy also regretted that no agreement had been reached for a follow-up
gathering in five years time to assess progress.

	In a statement delivered to the gathering's main negotiating committee on
June 26, Judy Williams, a member of the ecumenical team who comes from
Grenada, in the Caribbean, said that the ecumenical team had come to Geneva
with a sense of "profound disappointment."

	"Efforts to implement the Copenhagen Declaration and Program of Action have
neither reversed nor significantly improved the situation for millions of
the world's people.  In fact, the
reality for many has dramatically worsened, in spite of huge increases in
wealth world-wide," she said.

	According to U.N. estimates, the number of people living in absolute
poverty -- with income of less than one U.S. dollar a day -- has increased
from about 200 million in 1995 to 1.2 billion now.

	One of the ecumenical team's key demands was for a currency transaction tax
(CTT), known as the "Tobin tax" after Nobel Prize laureate for economics
James Tobin who in 1972 recommended taxing international currency
operations.  Supporters claim the Tobin tax would discourage speculation and
stabilize exchange rates by making currency trading more costly. They also
claim it would also raise tens, if not hundreds, of billions of U.S. dollars
annually, creating a fund to meet the global challenge of poverty.

	However, in part because of opposition from the United States, Japan and
Australia, the Geneva gathering agreed only to carry out an "analysis" of
"new and innovative sources of funding, both public and private, for
dedication to social development and poverty eradication programs."
 
	David Pfrimmer, of the Canadian Lutheran Office for Public Policy, said
that he was "disappointed that the language wasn't much stronger, that there
wasn't a much more solid case made for a study -- in fact, even
implementation –- of some kind of currency transaction tax."

	Pfrimmer, a member of the ecumenical team who played a leading role during
the Geneva meeting as part of a non-governmental organization (NGO) caucus
promoting the Tobin tax, said that it was NGOs who had done the research on
the Tobin tax, and had tried to maximize political and popular pressure for
implementation.

	"It's regrettable that more governments don't get behind and bring their
resources to bear. We know it's technically feasible, the question is
whether it is politically acceptable," Pfrimmer told journalists at the end
of the gathering. "It's ironic that we're living in what's called the global
economy, we're talking about the new economy, the information age, the
knowledge economy, and yet we're still prepared to accept only the old style
taxes, the old style ways of fulfilling our civic responses through
financial contributions, and this is deeply disappointing."

	One of the most controversial aspects of the Geneva meeting was the launch
by U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan on the opening day of the meeting, of a
report -- "A Better World for All" -- issued jointly by the United Nations,
the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund

	The launch of the report angered NGO representatives, including members of
the ecumenical team, who symbolically threw copies of the report into a
dustbin.  Konrad Raiser, general secretary of the World Council of Churches,
accused Annan of "participation in what amounted to a propaganda exercise
for international finance institutions whose policies are widely held to be
at the root of many of the most grave social problems facing the poor all
over the world, and especially those in the poor nations."

	In a letter sent on June 28 to Kofi Annan, Raiser said, "By identifying
yourself with the goals and the vision promoted by this report in your
address to the general assembly on June 26,
you have cast doubt upon the will of the United Nations to reaffirm the
Copenhagen commitments and translate them into effective strategies for the
eradication of poverty and further significant progress towards the goals of
a people-centered approach to social development."

	Kofi Annan replied, in a letter to Raiser, that the report contained "our
targets and our objectives -- these are the aims of the United Nations, as
expressed at Copenhagen and elsewhere, for which our partner organizations
now express their support as well.

	"It would be truly ironic if, after years of trying to get them to do so,
we were now not to accept their ‘yes' as an answer."

	Annan added that while all the organizations that sponsored the report "now
agree on the objectives, there may well continue to be difference among them
regarding how best to achieve them.

	"In fact, if I have one regret in retrospect, it is that we did not make a
stronger and more explicit case for the necessary contributions by the
entire international community to meeting these targets and objectives."

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