Background
The Second Committee (Economic and Financial) met this morning to conclude its general debate.
Statements
MARKIYAN KULYK (Ukraine) said the Committee’s most important challenge was implementing the Millennium Declaration, the Monterrey Consensus, the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation and the outcomes of other United Nations conferences and summits in the economic and social fields. Ukraine was gratified that other delegations shared the wish to restructure the Committee’s work programme and streamline its burgeoning agenda. The Committee must identify ways to rationalize its work and structure its agenda more meaningfully.
Regarding the Millennium Development Goals, he said, there was a clear rationale for improving the multilateral trading system, which should respond to the development needs of developing and transition economies. Despite the recent failure in Cancun, World Trade Organization (WTO) member governments would summon the political will and flexibility to bridge the gaps that separated them. The WTO must be transformed into a truly universal organization as envisaged in the Monterrey Consensus.
MOHAMMED AL-MEHAIRBI (United Arab Emirates) said his country’s policies had greatly advanced the development of human resources, diversified national income, improved national education programmes and upgraded the information and communication technology network, all of which had helped raise living standards. The Government had made human settlement issues a top priority, implementing the recommendations of the United Nations Human Settlement Conference to build sustainable villages and cities for the poor. The 2001 Abu Dhabi Declaration reflected the Government’s commitment to comply with Agenda 21 guidelines for environmental safety, biological diversity and control of desertification, sea pollution, and land development.
The United Arab Emirates had acceded to bilateral, regional and international conventions in commercial, economic and development fields, he said. It had also provided financial and in-kind assistance to many developing countries, particularly least developed countries in Asia and Africa. Moreover, it had helped reconstruct infrastructure in countries affected by armed conflict, notably Kosovo, Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, and was part of the donor group funding Iraq’s reconstruction.
FAWZI BIN ABDUL MAJEED SHOBOKSHI (Saudi Arabia) stressed that sustainable development and the eradication of poverty were political responsibilities, and the international community must cooperate in achieving them. Development was not an individual task, but one requiring multilateralism. The international community must implement all the commitments made at recent conferences and summits in seeking prosperity for all. Moreover, international peace and security still eluded many nations, and was still an objective that the world must achieve by working together.
He called for a new partnership among developing and developed nations, based on cooperation in international economic relations, mutual benefits, justice and multilateralism. Saudi Arabia had provided about $76 billion -– about 4 per cent of its gross domestic product -- for development, both bilaterally and multilaterally. Its contributions to date had exceeded the target for assistance established by the United Nations.
MICHEL KAFANDO (Burkina Faso) said that while the world economy was controlled and manipulated by a small group of powerful countries, food security was far from guaranteed in developing nations. The shortage of basic services such as drinking water and medical care had kept life expectancy to 40 years in some countries. Those facts underscored the challenges of meeting the millennium goal of poverty reduction. The international community must give the poorest of the poor a hand, slashing external debt loads, increasing official development assistance (ODA) and procuring more resources for the fight against poverty.
He warned that the recent collapse of the fifth ministerial meeting of the WTO could endanger the inclusion of the least developed countries in the multilateral trade system and eliminate preferential treatment for their products, a necessity for their economic survival. Donor countries must honour their commitments to the least developed countries as set forth in the Brussels Programme of Action. Greater equity was needed in international trade, including price stabilization, export guarantees through re-evaluation of raw materials, free and complete access of the South’s products into the North’s markets, an end to the North’s agricultural subsidies and a greater role for the South in the Bretton Woods institutions.
DEJAN SAHOVIC (Serbia and Montenegro) said the Millennium Declaration and the outcomes of major United Nations conferences and summits gave the international community a comprehensive basis for action at the national, regional and international levels. At the same time, the Millennium Development Goals and other internationally agreed objectives had laid down clear tasks in the economic, social and environmental areas. The international community -- including financial institutions, the private sector and civil society -- now needed to focus its attention and act without delay.
He said that by adopting the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation and the Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development, the international community had reaffirmed sustainable development as a central element of the international agenda. States should now build on the momentum generated by the World Summit and translate those commitments into concrete actions. The multi-year progamme of work for 2004-2017 of the Commission on Sustainable Development was vital in that respect. Real achievements at the country level would be the best indication of how successful the international community would be was in realizing conference goals.
LAURO BAJA (Philippines) noted that poverty was deepening in absolute and relative terms. The 2003 Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) indicated that 54 countries, almost half of them African, were poorer now than in 1990, and that it would take 50 years for other countries to meet the millennium targets. That was a result of an international economic environment that continued to short-change the developing world, as well as the widening of economic disparities between rich and poor.
Trade liberalization in developing countries should redound to poverty reduction, he said. Economic growth and sustainable development should guide international trade policy and the international community should urgently and effectively strive for an open, rules-based, predictable and non-discriminatory global trading and financial system. Rich nations’ barriers to agricultural exports from poor countries had hurt the global development agenda, he said, urging delegates to put development at the heart of the WTO agenda.
LUIS ALFONSO DE ALBA (Mexico) said he would not give a substantive statement at the present time, but would participate later in theme-oriented discussions. He invited the Chairman to find time to discuss the methodology of the Committee’s work.
FRANCIS BUTAGIRA (Uganda) said his country was one of seven to have reached the completion point for debt relief implementation under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Debt initiative. Despite that success, Uganda and other developing countries lacked fair market access and commodity prices to sustain their debt. That problem was particularly acute for the least developed countries and landlocked least developed countries whose problems were compounded by steep transport costs and vulnerability to fluctuations in the prices of the raw commodity exports on which their economies depended. Moreover, the least developed countries needed foreign direct investment (FDI) to meet the millennium targets.
He said Uganda had joined other landlocked least developed countries in calling for international support to address their special infrastructure development needs and the Almaty Programme of Action adopted in August. Regional cooperation and interregional trade was part of the solution, he said, adding that the East African nations of Kenya, Uganda and the United Republic of Tanzania would form a customs union in November. Uganda called for the extension of specific trade preferences to those three countries, which depended largely on one commodity for their export earnings.
EDUARDO DORYAN, Special Representative of the World Bank to the United Nations, said the development equation created in the Millennium Declaration, embodied in the Millennium Development Goals and targeted at Monterrey and Johannesburg, was the best chance for effective development. However, greater systematic coherence was needed to implement the development agenda. That could only be achieved through more streamlined support from international institutions to developing countries, enhanced harmonization among development partners at the country level and clear institutional, regional and global connections.
The World Bank, he continued, had streamlined and modernized its operational procedures, processes and practices, improving investment lending and creating a business development credit line for infrastructure and rural projects. This year, it had integrated the staff and policies of its fiduciary, social and environment departments into project teams and would reduce the wait time for development-project processing to 12 months. Moreover, the Bank’s World Development Report 2004 emphasized effective delivery of social services to the poor and spelled out the responsibilities of governments, civil society and donors in that regard. Institutional coherence, he said, also meant greater cooperation at the country level, linking the millennium targets to Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) and better results-based management.
