FORUM BARCELONA

24 September 2004

Closing Plenary Remarks at the Conference on Reform of the UN and other International Institutions

Salil Shetty

Director, Millennium Campaign

United Nations

Mr. Mayor and friends

Thank you for this opportunity.

There can be no two opinions on whether the current global governance arrangements require a radical rethink.    Traditional notions of national sovereignty have been overtaken by changes in technology, defence, financial sector and indeed new doctrines and attitude.    Cross-national transmission and movement of money, disease vectors, electronic media, environmental crisis and most importantly ideas and people offers an entirely new global framework.   From this perspective, many would argue that the current global governance structure is obsolete, inequitable and on the whole not equal to the task.

The manifestations of this have been described by many including the Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan as a series of inter-linked crises.

The first is the crisis of security.   Much has been said, no doubt, in the last two days in this Conference on this.   Of course, Iraq is the most talked about case of a failure of the current global governance structure to prevent a violation of the UN Charter.   But this is not the only one.   We have an on-going struggle on violation of resolutions of the Security Council in relation to Palestine, not to talk of several other places.   As we speak, millions of people of Darfur and the Great Lakes Region in Africa are losing their lives because of this very crisis and our utter inability to deal with it.      But too much is made of security at an aggregate or macro level.   The greatest insecurities continue to be faced by women and excluded groups and individuals at the individual level, where there is a daily threat to their very existence.   The on-going violence and violation of womens rights epitomises this problem.   Expanding the Security Council to reflect the new distribution of power in the world will only start to begin addressing the imbalances. The world does face a crisis of security at so many levels.

The second is the crisis of intolerance.   Again, the most visible display of this is in relation to Islam with very deep and long-term implications.    Let me give you an example of this from my own country India that surfaced in the media just a couple of weeks ago when there was some new census data that was released.   The headlines were not that the population growth rate was unacceptably high in all religious groups.   Instead, the headline was that the Muslim population was growing at a more rapid pace.   To any rational person, this fact would simply indicate that the Muslim population in India suffers from a high concentration of poverty, womens' illiteracy and more broadly, social exclusion.    Instead, many media houses, themselves controlled by Hindu fundamentalist thinking, preferred to use this to generate more hate towards the already beleaguered minority groups.   We can see the same prejudice and intolerance towards indigenous people, racial minorities and women in so many countries and societies in the world.   So the world indeed faces a crisis of respect of tolerance and diversity.   

The third is the crisis of representative democracy.    Again much has been said about this at a local and national level.     On the one hand more countries today are adopting democratic systems of governance based on elections.   On the other hand, although there are not many models at scale of a better alternative, it is increasingly evident that citizens across the world have not seen enough benefits from representative democracies.   This has led to a growing disillusionment and apathy with governments as an institution and with electoral politics as a means of representation.   With the war in Iraq, this crisis of confidence in governments to represent public opinion has been worsened as governments in several countries allowed this to happen against the wishes of the majority of their population, even in the leading proponents of the invasion in Europe, North America and Asia.    Independent civil society, a free press and the rule of law are essential elements in creating a much more participatory form of democracy and counter-balancing the over-dependence on electoral democracy.

And finally the crisis of poverty and inequality.    There is no greater crisis in my view than that of extreme poverty and its related manifestations.    Unfortunately, we have all become insensitive to the scale of the problem.    As we speak, one of out six people in the world, which is almost a billion people, go hungry every day.   It is estimated that 30,000 people, many of them children, die every day because of poverty.   I am told that the way to get this in the media is to express it in terms of number of planes crashing simultaneously - 100 plane crashes apparently is the headline grabber.   Half a million mothers, no less, died last year alone for no justifiable reason – from child birth, from malnutrition.     Does this have to be expressed in terms of deaths from a famine or floods to draw attention?   The so-called international community has an appalling record of acting too late. We prefer to deal with the consequences than act when we see the early warnings.   The case of the current locust attacks in West Africa are a very graphic case in point, not to repeat the Darfur case.     Almost 3 m. people died from HIV/AIDS last year.   120 million children are denied the right of primary education and are out of school, leave alone the much larger numbers who go to completely ineffective schools, notionally enrolled.    1 billion people have no access to sanitation.    Most of these are women and girls.       Should I say more?   The paradox, of course, is that at the same time the world has never seen so much prosperity before.   The 1000 richest people in the world are said to have a personal wealth greater than the 600 m. people living in the so-called “least developed countries”.  

Shamed by the sheer magnitude of this violation of basic human rights and troubled by the potential backlash on global security of such deprivation for the majority of the world's population, in the largest gathering of Heads of State in the history of humankind in September 2000, world leaders committed themselves to the Millennium Declaration.   In this sobering document, they rededicated themselves to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to the right to development and to free their fellow citizens from the indignity and suffering that goes with abject poverty.    And at the turn of the century and the millennium, they recapitulated the outcomes of the different UN Summits of the nineties and gave themselves 15 years, up to 2015 to meet a set of very minimal but concrete Goals and targets, later christened the 8 Millennium Development Goals.

In doing this, they knew that the world has enough financial resources to address all these problems.   Best estimates are that an additional $100 billion could help achieve all the Goals in all the countries of the world within the next decade.   The world spent $900 bn on arms alone last year.   Not to speak of the money that is lost due to tied aid, agricultural subsidies and corruption.

In the past we could say that we did not have the technology or resources to address these issues of meeting even the basic needs of all human beings.   That is simply not the case any more.   We know what needs to be done.  

The key to the Millennium Compact is that rich countries have to meet their obligations to helping poverty eradication as spelled out rather imprecisely in Goal 8 of the Millennium Goals.   This means meeting their commitments to the 0.7% of GNI to ODA, big improvement in the quality of aid including untying and simplifying procedures and putting an end to conditionalities, much deeper and quicker reduction of debt – Africa continues to pay out in debt every year, more than it receives.   Debt sustainability has to be now redefined in terms of the achievement of the Millennium Goals.   And we need   a much more level playing field in the trade arena.   This includes time-bound elimination of agricultural subsidies that the make the poor poorer, policy space for developing countries, reviewing all intellectual property agreements that simply benefit TNCs and hinder food security and the health needs of the poor; indeed, concluding the Doha Round in favour of poor countries is essential for the achievement of the Millennium Goals.

Much as rich country commitment to their side of the bargain is critical, there is no doubt that poor countries can do a great deal more to achieve these basic human rights on their own steam.   Having the right policies and plans in place, raising and allocating domestic and external resources for fulfilling the needs of the majority of the population on an inclusive basis, being accountable to our own citizens and stopping corruption don't need too much external help.

The Millennium Goals are far from perfect.   They are indeed minimum goals.   Countries are being encouraged to go much further at the national level – and many have improved on them particularly in terms of the poverty/hunger goals and on gender.   They cannot be seen as techno-fixes, there is no solution outside a full political economy analysis.   And they are only meaningful when they build on national planning and decision-making arrangements.    The global and national aggregates are meaningless and misleading.   They only make sense when we take these goals down to every community and individual.  

But even these minimal and flawed goals mean a lot to the people who are far from realising them.    They offer the best hope in the current scenario as they have the commitment of the world leaders at the highest level, in the South and North.    We cannot allow the best to be the enemy of the good.  

We need to focus on implementation, enough rhetoric, we need action.   But the only way in which governments will actually act is when there is pressure from citizens to hold them to account for their promises.

That is really what we at the Millennium Campaign are focussing on.   To support citizen's action to hold their own governments and international institutions to account for achieving the Millennium Goals, as translated into the national and local context.   And indeed these Campaigns, which are now starting to gain momentum in about 30 countries of the North and South, each look different, as they should.     So the Campaign in the Philippines is focussed on tracking government budgets towards the Millennium Goals.   While the Campaign in El Salvador is focussed on local authorities delivering services that really reaches the people in terms of education, water and health.   The Ghana campaign wants to change the Poverty Reduction Strategy to make it focussed on the rights of poor people.   The Italian Campaign is intent on getting the Government to commit itself to the 0.7% target.   The Irish Campaign is called Keep Our Word .    The Indian campaign is tentatively called Vaada na Todo (Don't break your promise).   What binds them together is that they see the MDGs within a human rights and justice framework as described in the Millennium Declaration, not as a superficial set of targets but looking at the underlying and structural causes of poverty.

The Spanish Sin Excusas 2015 Campaign is off to an excellent start.   The national CSO-led part of the Campaign is being directed from CONGDE, the national development NGO platform.   Petitions are already going to President Zapatero to implement the 0.7% commitment, regional authorities are starting to engage with public awareness campaigns on the Millennium Goals, Regional Working Groups are already up and running in the Basque country, Andalusia and Catalunya.    10 December might see the launch of the Catalan campaign joining an international Skip a Million Meals effort.    From now until December 2004, other regions are starting to get involved to launch a much broader mobilisation from January 2005.   Please visit the las puertas del Millennio in the Mirador, the 8 arches signifying the Goals.   These 8 Arches are going to tour the country starting in Madrid from October in the Plaza Mayor. Please look at the campaign website sinexcusas2015.org for more information.  

The interesting thing is that the MDGs are becoming a unifying force bringing CSOs working on different sectoral and thematic priorities together.   It is bringing the service-delivery programme/operational NGOs together with the advocacy and human rights-oriented ones.   And more importantly it is bringing new constituencies beyond the development NGOs into the process.   Youth, Parliamentarians, local authorities are all joining forces for a combined fight against poverty.

The good news is that already things are beginning to change.   For a start many of the poorest countries in the world are already showing that these Goals can be achieved if there is political commitment,   even in most adverse circumstances, as faced by Sub Saharan Africa.   Malawi, Eritrea and The Gambia are some examples on primary education and Bangladesh, Ghana and Mozambique are all picking up on the health front, not to speak of Thailand, Uganda and Senegal on education.   

Many rich countries are starting to face up to their responsibilities.   Half the EU countries now have a clear deadline to get to 0.7% on aid, including some large economies like Spain and U.K.    Overall aid levels have gone up in 2003 after a very long gap.     There is some glimmer of hope on the trade negotiations through the July announcements on agricultural subsidies.   Cancun was a wake-up call and the subsequent victories by Brazil on their complaints on unfair trade practises in the WTO are also positive signs.   And discussions on debt have been reopened in the last G8 and will continue into the next one.    But none of this is anywhere close to what we need to achieve the Goals.

Civil society at the national and global levels is getting stronger through initiatives such as the World Social Forum and now the Barcelona Forum.   And many excluded groups are beginning to exercise their rights.   We have avowedly progressive and pro-poor Governments and parties in power now in many strategically important countries in the world and elections on the cards in a several others.

2005 is a particularly important year and we need a big push.     The world needs to bring development   back on the agenda, away from the obsession on security and the so-called war on terror.   The Heads of State meeting in September 2005 to review progress against the Millennium Declaration is very important.   This is preceded by the G8 in the UK which will focus on Africa and the MDGs.   At the end of the year, there is likely to be the Ministerial meeting of the WTO in Hong Kong.   Recognising this, a very important Coalition of all major NGOs, trade unions, churches etc has come together initially in the UK and now globally.   Under the name of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, this Coalition is planning a series of mass mobilisations on bringing world attention to these issues.     Major media houses like BBC and MTV are joining forces with us.

At the political level, President Lula supported by a large number of Heads of State has taken the initiative to push hard to create the enabling conditions for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.   This includes new and innovative financing mechanisms and serious reform to many of the key international institutions, particularly the IFIs and WTO.  

Many proposals have come from this Conference on reforming the international institutions to help us move forward – many of these are crucial in the fight against poverty and the struggle for justice and human rights.

We are the first generation that can actually end poverty and we are running out of excuses.     Thank you and we hope you will join forces with the Campaigns in your own country and at the global level.

***