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Global Developmentalization

Here we come to the perennial rich/poor chasm, the righteous clamour of the two billion poor to sit and eat with the obese rich. Perennially at the UN this issue has come to a head around "development." At the 53rd Assembly, it was preempted by "globalization." Development is goal-oriented: how to enrich the poor. Globalization is process: descriptive, not prescriptive. With the demise of "command economies" (mainly USSR and Eastern Europe), the "free market" is touted as the trickle down that inevitably will fill poor bellies. In practice, trade and investment are going to the already more advanced (including the upper ranks of "developing" countries), further bypassing the poor, the "least developed." The rich/poor gap has widened, the number of "least developed" has doubled to 48. To make things worse, the volume of ODA-- "Official Development Assistance" (government funds for "grant aid," not loans to be repaid, flowing bilaterally or through the UN) shrank drastically. This was the setting for this Assembly's "debate" touching on the skewed world economy.

What makes the Assembly's struggle with these issues so frustrating is that, by design from the beginning, the power to deal with them was kept out of the Assembly and put into Bretton Woods-- the World Bank and the IMF.

At the Assembly, then, besides debt relief, the immediate development (or globalization) issues came down to three:

• External investment,
• Market access, and
• Official Development Assistance (ODA).

As things have evolved, the UN has its hands only on ODA, directed mostly at social development in poor countries. The new head of the UNDP, Mark Malloch Brown, wants to direct his share to creating, in poor countries, conditions that attract investment.

Even though the annual Assembly can't take the big pieces in hand, it is important to keep the North-South dialogue alive. Also the dialogue has become less confrontational. Several developments are contributing to this change. There has been a much more serious high-level exchange between the international financial institutions and the United Nations, both ways, in New York and in Washington. Within the UN itself, UNCTAD-- the UN Conference on Trade and Development-- has become more active and more sophisticated as advocate of the South. The G77 have also become more savvy. Even the G7 industrialized countries have been able to look out over the financial and political landscape, and to decide to do something serious about Third World debt.

I was surprised, though not startled, to find that at this session the International Development Strategy for the Fourth Development Decade, blessed by the Assembly at the dawn of the 1990's, is still on the agenda. I had assumed that its benign principles had been reincarnated in the comprehensive UN Agenda for Development, where goals and strategies of the several thematic conferences of the 1990's are gathered in. Not quite, so we have a UN report that says the trend is uneven, some benefitting from global advance, many still left outside, an unstable situation. But the report goes on usefully to say that now we are turning our eyes away from macroeconomic challenges to such preconditions for growth as good governance, accountability, participation and social security. Reacting, for the Group of 77, Guyana said developing countries could get ahead only if the "North" facilitated their integration into the contemporary industrialized knowledge-based international economy. Uganda, a voice in the wilderness, called for the revival of the UN Commission and Centre on Transnational Corporations.

After the ample airing of globalization and its discontents in 1998, at this Assembly the discussion was nudged into exploring ways to manage it. Nitin Desai, Under Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, got the discourse off to a good start. Said he, we must learn how to influence this process, how to oversee it. The European Union, through Finland's President, said we need political measures to guide globalization so as to ensure that the poor are helped. India had put it another way: globalization in fact is political and negative. The Group of 77 said that a political framework should aim at equity in international trade, finance and technology transfer. South Africa said that in Africa globalization overall had made things worse: bad terms of trade, reduced prices of Africa's exports, decline in ODA, decline in Foreign Direct Investment, decline in ODA (Official Development Aid), and insoluble external debt. Humane globalization would promote human rights and eliminate poverty. "The highest calling for all of us," he said, "is to make globalization and interdependence . . . a beginning of hope, redemption and enlightenment for the hungry, the poor and the wretched of the earth."

Concerning trade, many spoke of the pressing need to open "Northern" markets to the South as a prime objective of negotiations to be launched at the WTO Ministerial meeting in Seattle (November 1999). Ah, débacle. This remarkable citizens' protest prevented Kofi Annan from delivering his splendid speech, although the text was passed all around. The speech is so important as a complement to the Annan Statement on "humanitarian intervention" that I am carrying it in Annex 5. He points out that the tariffs imposed by industrialized countries on manufactured imports from the "South" are four times higher than on manufactured goods from advanced economies. No wonder, he says, that the South suspects that tying labour standards and the environment to rules of trade is trade protection in disguise. These concerns (labour, environment) are real, he says, but "the industrialized world must not try to solve its own problems at the expense of the poor." Differences among governments were such that Seattle would have failed without citizen protest. The massive demonstrations served a very useful purpose in exposing the serious social impact of trade as regulated by WTO; and in demonstrating "people power."

Back at the General Assembly, the one important outcome on "development" was the decision to move ahead with a "high level" conference on financing development in 2001. This should be a comprehensive approach, addressing:

• Domestic resources
• International resources (trade, investment)
• ODA and debt relief
• Orienting international finance and trade to development with participation of the "South"
• Special needs (e.g., Africa, the poorest countries)

This conference must be well prepared, said the Assembly; the process of preparation could be the main benefit of convening the event. Bring in all stakeholders. Only through the UN could so important a conference come about, a whiff of intellectual and moral aspiration.

This sequitur may be a non, but this is as good a spot as any to mention those big stakeholders, the Bretton Woods twins, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Although formally "free standing" outside the UN (I repeat for the benefit of new comers), Bretton-UN relations have been warming up recently. "Free marketry" has had its mighty hiccups, e.g., in East Asia and Brazil; and this makes political UN highly relevant to the bankers. There is now much more formal and informal to-and-fro between Washington and New York. In April 1999, the Board of the World Bank met with ECOSOC; and in mid-October, the Secretary-General visited the World Bank, speaking to its Board and staff about how development and peace go together. For the Bank, this was one more step along the road their President James Wolfensohn is taking, investment in human development.

The Managing Director of the IMF, Michel Camdessus (about to retire) has addressed many UN gatherings in recent years, but his October 1999 trip to New York was different. This time he brought his Board of Directors for their first formal consultation with ECOSOC. In her welcoming remarks, Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette outlined three areas for urgent collaboration: poverty, good governance and peace-building. Of these three, poverty is the crux and ground, one billion or more women and men just surviving on something like a dollar a day. The Copenhagen Social Summit (1995) came up with the quixotic target of halving world poverty by 2015. The target has its galvanizing uses. The IMF and the World Bank have joined in a common "country-owned" strategy to reduce poverty, linking external debt relief to human development. Looking ahead as he faces retirement, Camdessus says: "Without any doubt, the next great challenge is humanizing globalization, which calls immediately for an intensified fight against poverty." The UN Decade for the Eradication of Poverty (1997-2006) is worth more than a shrug. The IMF consultation with ECOSOC was more than a showbiz ritual.

A quinquennial assessment of the 1995 World Summit for Social Development is the occasion for a special General Assembly session in Geneva 26-30 June 2000. Nitin Desai believes that this Summit marked a turning from preoccupation with narrow trade liberalization to more balanced socially-oriented development. The Geneva session will consider democratic governance, social principles for economic growth, global employment targets, and guidelines for corporations' responsibility to society. Full employment for a week in June.