DEVELOPMENT: FORGIVING A DYING MAN'S DEBT ISN'T ENOUGH, SAYS OAU PRESIDENT

Martin Khor

Bangkok, 21 Feb -- A comprehensive analysis of the plight of Africa and a devastating critique of the response to it by Western governments was presented by the President of Algeria and current Chairman of the Organization of African Unity OAU), Abdelaziz Bouteflika, on the final day of UNCTAD X.

Bouteflika's speech and answers to questions, which came at a panel made up of world leaders (including the Prime Ministers of Thailand, Mozambique and Morocco and the President of the Dominican Republic) were a major highlight not only of the final day but of the Conference.

The Algerian President's views and comments were greeted with loud and long applause.

The OAU President's main message was that writing off the debt of 33 poorest African countries which could not pay the debt anyway was only a gesture -- a "macabre scene" where a creditor visits a dying man to forgive his debts.

Much more needed to be done by the international community, if Africans, who are a disappearing people threatened with extinction, are to survive.

Whilst the very first speech of UNCTAD X, that by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Muhammad, set a high note for the critique of globalization at the start of UNCTAD X, Bouteflika's presentations at the very end of the Conference served as a stark reminder of how the poorest continent had been subjected not only to exploitation but to hypocrisy from rich nations that purported to help the poor countries.

The OAU President's remarks had all the more impact as the Committee of the Whole of UNCTAD-10 had concluded the previous night a Plan of Action, which in terms of governmental commitments provided no new breakthrough in terms of duty-free and quota-free access for least developed countries, or of debt relief for developing countries, despite well-publicized wrangling for several days on these two key issues.

This had left officials from developing countries feeling that the Northern countries as a whole were not willing to extend concessions or goodwill despite the failure of the WTO's Seattle Conference, and had also influenced the NGOs inside and outside the Conference to criticize UNCTAD X for only being a discussion forum and lacking substantial results.

In his introductory remarks, the OAU leader said the major problem facing Africa was indebtedness. Whilst current debt relief measures were welcome symbols, they only applied to bankrupt states that could not repay the debts anyway. For debt alleviation to go beyond the symbolic, it must be provided for middle-income African countries, as it had been to Russia.

Amplifying on this theme in response to questions from the moderator, Bouteflika, speaking without notes and in a passionate tone, said that "Africa is completely being marginalised." This was made clear at the WTO conference in Seattle, where the dialogue was between the US and EU. The Africans were the forgotten ones in Seattle, and they held their tongues and their dignity.

He said Africa had been split away from the flows and processes of development of the rest of the world. "Globalization can only benefit those countries with the material basis and technological foundation to operate," he added. "Only they can benefit from globalization."

The Algerian President said that the international community had not taken measures to help Africa, which was lagging behind. "Its backwardness in trade is such that it will be utterly left out of the process."

Asking how such a situation came about, Bouteflika said it was necessary to look at history and the background.

"Africa is a continent that suffered from slavery and the trading in blacks. Africa was used to develop other continents that are now more advanced. I am not blaming anyone, but just looking at the past to understand the present. Colonialism divided Africa, introduced regional imbalances, social inequality and inter-ethnic conflict that have used up our energies."

He added that the colonizing countries were interested in exploiting Africa's natural resources, to the detriment of schools, education and social development, whilst also causing cultural divisions. "This jeopardized our subsequent development."

The OAU president said "Once we attained independence, African countries, sad to say, chose the wrong development model. Those that chose socialism or the free market failed equally. There was a lack of executive personnel, services, infrastructure. It was disastrous. There was a general imbalance at every level.

"The international economic order kept the African countries as suppliers of raw materials and as markets for manufactured products. By deregulating trade and bringing in competition when the forces in the North and South are so disproportionate, it is obvious that Africa is absolutely out of the race.

"What can we do? How can we combat marginalisation? What are the palliatives, since there are no remedies? African countries must take responsibility to combat their marginalisation, but without shame we must also say the world cannot set aside such an enormous swathe of humanity and live with a clear conscience.

"We can't live with a conscience side by side with this large part of humanity, which faces drought, disease, AIDS affecting up to 40% of the population. Africans are a disappearing people, going extinct. Developed countries now have third-generation AIDS drugs, but not a single African country has benefitted yet from the first generation of such drugs. Everything is happening as if we are trying to regulate the world's population through Malthusian logic, to let the weakest die so we can have a world of the rich and let the poor go to the wall.."

Bouteflika said it was too easy for others to say that Africa must settle its disputes. He agreed that this was a major problem, with 13 conflicts at present between states. Besides, there were also internal social disputes that strike African countries, including Algeria.

"Of course, we can recommend countries to take on their own social responsibility. But we have lost all our rights except the right to dream."

Touching on the need for solidarity and partnership among African countries, Bouteflika said solidarity of the poor is a fantasy more than a dream. "Our people are big-hearted. But the big problem is that of African debt."

He welcomed the Group of 7 decision in Cologne on debt relief as a first step to a solution. He also welcomed the decision of UK Premier Tony Blair and President Chirac of France to extend debt write-off for eligible countries from 90 to 100%. He also welcomed the outgoing IMF managing director's statement that 33 African countries would benefit from debt write-off.

"But what are the 33 countries that have benefitted? We have written off the debts of the countries that are bankrupt and that cannot pay. Their debts could not have been paid anyway. We are looking at a macabre scene of someone visiting a dying man and telling him 'you can die without debts, you can die happy because you do not have debts to pay.'

"The debt problem will not be solved this way. We knew the 33 countries could not squeeze anything out anymore, anyway. Writing off their debts is a welcome gesture. But we need to bring these countries up, to bring their dignity back, and charity is not enough."

The Algerian President said other measures are needed to resolve the debt problem. The debt of middle-income countries needs to be solved. He noted that the Western nations had written off Russia's debt, and urged that similar measures be applied to middle income African countries. If these countries were free of debt, they too would have a chance to develop, and to contribute to resolving world problems. He added that whilst everyone wanted to be part of globalization, and to go against it would be running against history, yet "globalization is something that must not leave out the rich or the poor, and the rich who have must truly share with the poorest among us."

In response to another question, the Algerian president said he was struck by Mr Camdessus' idea to expand the Group of 7 to 30. The idea to bring together creditor and debtor countries for discussions was good but after speaking to his African colleagues he felt that UNCTAD could become the facilitator between creditors and debtors so that African debt can be discussed in the appropriate forum. This he said was a crucial issue for Africa.

In the same session, Thai premier Chuan Leekpai said the Thai crisis was initially due to a fall in foreign reserves as they had been used to fight an attack on the Thai currency. The sharp currency decline led to the disappearance of investor confidence and major capital outflows or "the bleeding of the country." He added that the agreement with the IMF was strict and limited fiscal spending. "But the situation did not improve, so we arranged to adjust the agreement from one requiring a fiscal surplus to one allowing a fiscal deficit. Clearly, the IMF's initial assessment of the situation was wrong."

Chuan said Thailand used the crisis to undertake measures to prevent a recurrence such as revising the legal and regulatory framework and improving governance.

Mozambique premier Pascoal Manuel Mocumbi said the first challenge facing Africa was: "How can we be part of the global picture when we have high poverty and weak institutions? How can we move people earning less than 50 cents a day up from that bracket and then go on to produce?"

The second challenge was the debt crisis that impeded growth. "All that we have is used to pay off this debt." He was happy that "today there is agreement on the need for broader and deeper consideration of the issue."

In the interactive part of the session, South African deputy president Jacob Zuma said the format and processes of the WTO did not allow for a good exchange of views as discussions in the WTO were in a negotiating mode. At UNCTAD X there was a freer atmosphere for discussions.

He added that at the UNCTAD IX in Midrand, some had predicted the demise of UNCTAD. "We have succeeded in turning UNCTAD around at UNCTAD X. Many stakeholders have made their voices heard here. This forum can bring all stakeholders of the world together so we can discuss our problems."

The Moroccan premier Abderrahman El-Youssoufi said UNCTAD should now endeavour to play its role in full. "After the failure of the WTO at Seattle, UNCTAD now enjoys more legitimacy and weight, and we have the opportunity to rethink the principles and guidelines of the multilateral trading system. Our institution should be a democratic forum where everyone can defend their views. It should be the appropriate framework for consensus to emerge. This is the optimistic impression from UNCTAD X."

THE THIRD WAY IN BANGKOK

Raj Patel

Earlier this month, with colourful protesters, teargas, custard pies and the other accoutrements of international economic institutional gatherings, the Tenth United Nations Conference on Trade and Development summit was held in Bangkok. UNCTAD needed this conference to be a success. In 1995, the institution had seemed all but doomed, with many northern governments, particularly the US, arguing that the WTO’s Committee On Development was the new appropriate place for trade-related development concerns, and thus that UNCTAD had outlived its usefulness. After the Ninth UNCTAD summit in Midrand, South Africa in 1996, the combined efforts of developing countries, some first world countries and lobbying by NGOs saved UNCTAD from an untimely demise. After Seattle, however, the WTO is no longer a beacon of legitimacy, and UNCTAD has become, once again, a ‘useful’ organisation. The final document produced by participants at the Bangkok summit subtly, but unmistakably, indicts the Northern led international economic experiment led by Northern countries over the past decades. Developing countries seem to have found their forum once again. But beneath the surface, all is not well. 

UNCTAD was set up in 1964 as a direct organ of the United Nations General Assembly, designed to promote the economic well-being of the newly independent and developing nations. Its work involved the creation of the Generalised System of Preferences, a system of reduced tariffs and quotas for developing countries, together with a system of primary commodity price supports. These supports were designed to nurture these developing economies, whose main source of foreign exchange lay in the export of these primary commodities. In 1974, the Group of 77 developing countries asserted the need for a more equitable approach to the integration of developing countries into the global economy. Their proposal, called the New International Economic Order alarmed many developed countries. The launch of the NIEO, together with the isolationist response of the North to the oil shocks, and the rise of monetarist economic theory, marked the beginning of UNCTAD’s decreasing influence. 

After Seattle, circumstances seem to have changed, however, UNCTAD has the legitimacy of being part of the UN system, and of arriving at decisions through processes that do not exclude the world’s poorest countries. The Plan of Action produced at Bangkok shows that there is room still within the UN system for at least a modest critique of the existing economic order. 

‘It is clear,’ says the Plan of Action ‘that while the rules-based system seeks to establish a level playing field, remaining barriers have a negative impact, including on developing countries. Whilst trade barriers in the main markets are now generally low for most trade of developed countries, there is a lack of equal opportunities for developing countries’ exports in the present system.’ 

The Plan of Action targets high non-tariff barriers, particularly in the textile industry, and high barriers to the import of agricultural products into Northern countries as issues of particular concern. Anti-dumping measures and countervailing duties used by the US and EU are also targeted.  Special attention was directed to the group of 48 Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in the final document. UNCTAD X participants urged that Northern countries make good on their commitments to allow duty free access for most commodities from LDCs.  Yet, as many commentators note, this is nonetheless a surprisingly tepid document, given the considerable heat of some of the debates in Bangkok. 

Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the head of the OAU, gave a speech in which he pilloried current debt-relief initiatives, arguing that “forgiving a dying man’s debt is not enough”. His speech was met with a standing ovation. Chakravarthi Raghavan, of the Third World Network, reports that it was hard to find any official delegate who, in private, did not admit to being deeply unhappy with the current international trading system. Rubens Ricupero, the Secretary General of UNCTAD himself noted that “Globalisation is not an unstoppable change sweeping inevitably across the face of the world… at least in part, it is a work of deliberate construction.”

These are all fighting words. But in the process from moving to rhetoric to action, Rubens Ricupero observed that the political construction of the current global economic order called for ‘the abandonment of extremism in economic policy by all sides’. He urged a self-censored economic policy that belonged neither to the old left or right, saying ‘let us finally put away  those doctrine of economic policy that, as a matter of fact, were never economic in origin at all, but created in the heat of geopolitical conflict that is now, mercifully, concluded’.  Is this a signal for the South, too, to adopt a ‘Third Way’?

In a recent attack on the centre-left in Europe, the academic Slavoj Zizek makes an interesting point. He notes that in the current widespread condemnation of the Austrian Freidemokraten party, the centre left “puts forward Righist populists as [the] common true enemy, while it effectively manipulates this Rightist scare in order to hegemonize the "democratic" field, i.e. to define the terrain and win over, discipline, its true adversary, the radical Left.” In other words, the centre-left is playing a dual game. The same unity with respect to the distasteful right is used to smother radical voices who threaten both the right, and the centre-left.

UNITED STATES: NATIONAL SUMMIT ON AFRICA ENDS ON AN UNCERTAIN NOTE

Washington, Feb 21 (IPS)

 A five-day meeting of more than 2,000 delegates concerned about Africa, from all 50 US states, ended here Sunday with great enthusiasm about making the continent a higher priority for American foreign-policymakers, but deeply split over how to do so.

The National Summit on Africa -- the most ambitious effort to forge a powerful coalition of interests to improve Africa's public image and boost its position in the hierarchy of US foreign-policy interests in the post-Cold War, post-apartheid era - concluded amid charges that its leadership was too dominated by government and corporate perspectives and pleas that any follow-up effort guarantee the widest possible participation. "'Corporate-friendly' policies are being promoted, I'm afraid," said Prof. Maojubaolee Okome, co-chair of the New York delegation. "If the National Summit continues, it's important that ordinary people's voices are heard." Okome, who spoke for a dissident group that included grassroots activists and representatives of many non-governmental organisations (NGOs), stressed that she would continue to work with the summit.

Its delegates Sunday endorsed a 254-point policy programme which called for a greater US commitment to the continent, and more clout for Africa itself in global affairs, particularly in multilateral financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Among other provisions, the 102-page programme, called a 'National Policy Plan of Action for U.S.-Africa Relations in the 21st Century', gave conditional approval to pending legislation to promote US trade and investment in Africa; called for Washington to substantially increase aid and peacekeeping missions in Africa, as well as funding for research on HIV/AIDS; urged a ban on the sale of small arms to Africa; and an end to IMF structural adjustment programmes (SAPs).

President Bill Clinton, who opened the summit Thursday and provided its major theme - that "Africa does matter to the US" - also came in for criticism in the final document for "the emphasis of the new Africa policy is not on democracy and human rights, but rather on trade and security."

The summit process actually began in 1996, when it received its seed funding from the Ford and Carnegie foundations which have since poured a total of some eight million dollars into the project. Concerned about Africa's marginalisation after the Cold War - demonstrated by rapidly declining bilateral aid and Washington's refusal to do much to stop the bloody conflicts which have wreaked the region since the 1992-93 Somalia intervention - the summit's founders and funders felt that only a powerful Africa constituency could reverse those trends. The organisation was also fuelled by a sense that Africa was increasingly the victim of double standards, especially compared with southern Europe. As the secretary-general of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), Salim A. Salim, said during the opening ceremonies, "Little urgency is given to our problems, and when assistance is rendered, it is relatively too little and often delayed. This is in remarkable contrast to how other societies are treated in this regard."

To build such a constituency, the summit convened over the last two years six regional conferences around the United States to discuss policy initiatives and choose delegates to the meeting here. From the outset, however, the way the summit secretariat worked was an issue of considerable contention on the board of directors, some of whom resigned to protest various actions undertaken by the staff leadership, including fund-raising from corporations. Those differences rose to the surface last month, when the president, Leonard Robinson, formally proposed transforming the summit into a permanent organisation that would act as a "central repository on Africa-related issues and affairs", 50% of whose board would be made up of corporate representatives. "The new board can not afford to be perceived as being other than 'corporate-friendly'," he wrote in a memo obtained by IPS.

In response, Salih Booker, a former board member who resigned earlier, charged in another memo circulated to the board that Robinson's plan could lead to the "creation of an entity dominated by US corporations to act as a catalyst for working against people-centred NGOs and their public education and public advocacy networking efforts". Booker, who was recently appointed as Africa specialist on Clinton's National Security Council, also warned that such an organisation also "will only lead to a further diminution of funding possibilities for existing Africa-focused organisations, especially politically and economically progressive (groups). . . .Any new organisation with that kind of money behind it has the potential for de-funding the groups that have been the mainstay of Africa work generally," said Melvin Foote, director of the Washington- based Constituency for Africa (CFA). He noted that summit leaders had earlier "sworn on a stack of bibles they had no intention of becoming permanent". Foote, who was also on the board, resigned last month.

Fears about the summit's direction became clearer once it got underway last week. Grassroots and NGO delegates were upset about the sponsorship of corporate giants Chevron and Monsanto of specific summit events and the appearance of Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi as the only African head of state to address the meeting.

"Taking money from Chevron was a violation of decisions taken earlier in the summit process and of the people who are struggling in the Niger Delta," said Jennifer Davis, director of the New York-based Africa Fund, which played a leadership role in the anti-apartheid movement and in the struggle against successive military regimes in Nigeria. "Chevron's policies in the Niger Delta are morally bankrupt," said Okome, whose brother-in-law was killed in the violence which has wreaked the oil-rich region. "I would have preferred to do without a couple of dinners and not have Chevron and Monsanto as donors."

As for corporate sponsorship and Robinson's larger plans for a new board with greater corporate representation, secretariat staff insisted they were appropriate. "We're going to need a board which brings a lot more to the table," said Sunni Khalid, the summit's director of communications. "It takes money to do this." For his part, Robinson, who defended "constructive engagement" with South Africa as a senior State Department official in the Ronald Reagan administration and later worked as a lobbyist for the Sani Abacha government in Nigeria and Africa's longest-ruling dictator, Togolese president Gnassingbe Eyadema, insisted that he intended to cooperate fully with the NGOs and other dissidents.

"As long as the National Summit on Africa has a nickel to spend," he said, "we guarantee that we will work with anybody who has Africa - not self-interest - in mind. ...Why can't we work together to make this happen?" But some delegates were not reassured. "We are extremely concerned that the process has been organised in violation of many of the core values that motivate and drive our efforts to promote social, economic, environmental and political justice in Africa," noted a petition which circulated Saturday evening and quickly gained the signatures of more than 150 delegates. "This meeting was pretty much dominated by official and corporate perspectives," said David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World. "If this (movement) is going to be strong, it's important that religious and other grassroots groups be fully integrated into this process." 

STATEMENT BY Professor Yash Tandon, Director, THE INTERNATIONAL SOUTH GROUP NETWORK (ISGN), at UNCTAD X, 17^th February, 2000, Bangkok, Thailand.

Your Excellency, President of UNCTAD X, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen.

I wish first to thank UNCTAD for giving us this opportunity to address its Tenth Session here in Bangkok. ISGN is one among several NGOs that are addressing this body. It is a testimony to UNCTAD’s commitment to open its doors to civil society and to engage in debates that go beyond the confines of intergovernmental negotiations.  We believe that this kind of interaction is of considerable mutual benefit.

Mr. President, the International South Group Network (ISGN) is a network of several community based organisations, peoples’ movements, and academic organisations in the South.  We are committed to advance the struggle of peoples all over for a world that is just, peaceful and democratic, and that helps to release the potential (but presently suppressed) creativity of the ordinary people of the world.  The ISGN was founded in June 1994 at the historically famous University of Fort Hare in South Africa.    We work with minimal human resources located in five centres: South Africa, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, the Philippines and Nicaragua.   We have a vast range of activities.  These include promoting land reform and food security in the countries in the South, developing and strengthening the struggle for gender equality, promoting human rights especially those enshrined in several United Nations conventions, encouraging grassroots initiatives aimed at conflict resolution, and raising and analysing matters that relate to the South-North relations, such as debt, trade, development, governance and the environment.

One of our activities of interest to UNCTAD is related to facilitating and developing the capacity of African trade negotiators to deal with issues that come up for negotiations at the World Trade Organisation (WTO).  This project is called the Southern and Eastern African Trade Information and Negotiations Initiative (SEATINI).  We have been working on this now for nearly three years.  In the run up to the Second and the Third WTO Ministerial meetings (in Geneva and Seattle respectively)  SEATINI held workshops at which senior African trade negotiators were able to collectively analyse the issues on the agenda of the global trade regime, and to work out common positions on these.  The ISGN provided the facilitative mechanism at which the trade negotiators owned the processes and the outcome of their deliberations. SEATINI issues a fortnightly Bulletin and has an interactive Network. These processes, we believe, have contributed to build a self-conscious, confident and informed body of negotiators in Southern and Eastern Africa who are able to articulate their concerns in a more positive and constructive manner than was the case when the Uruguay Agreements were signed at Marrakesh and at the Singapore ministerial. We wish to take this opportunity to thank both UNCTAD and UNDP for the support we have received for this project.

Mr. President, we believe that the efforts of UNCTAD, whilst positive and very helpful, have not gone far enough in addressing issues of concern to the people of the South.   Frankly, we are disappointed at the outcome of the current (10^th) Session of UNCTAD.   The Plan of Action is a compromise between demands of justice on the one hand and those of power and privilege on the other.  Whilst we do not expect overnight justice, we do expect that UNCTAD moves in the direction that would eventually bring justice to the people of the third world.  We do not think UNCTAD’s Draft Plan of Action is pointing in the right direction.  The very first sentence of the Draft is problematic. It reads, and I quote,

“Globalization and interdependence have opened new opportunities, through increased trade liberalization and advancement in technology, for the growth of the world economy and development.”

Mr. President, if this is the wisdom of UNCTAD then it is wisdom not based on evidence.  There is no proof that Globalization has opened new opportunities for the development of the peoples of the South.  The missing adjective here is “Corporatist”.  Contrary to the statement in the Draft Plan of Action, there is increasing evidence that Corporatist Globalization has resulted in further marginalization of the poor of the world, further impoverishment of the developing countries and even more so of the least developing countries, and further polarisation of the world between the rich nations and the poor nations, and within nations between the poor and the rich.    What kind of an “opportunity” is it, Mr. President, when the peoples of the South are emburdened with a debt of US$ 30 billion which is not only not payable under any circumstances but also manifestly unjust and in most cases illegitimate?  What kind of “opportunity” is it when the terms of trade of the countries of the South have been facing a long-term secular decline?   If trade liberalization is such a good thing, why is that the European countries have fought tooth and nail even before the Uruguay Agreements and since then to protect their agriculture?  It is clear, Mr.President, that when the West talks about “globalization” they mean protection for themselves and liberalisation of the markets for the South.

In other words, Mr. President, the very first sentence of UNCTAD’s Draft Plan of Action is based on an empirically unsubstantiated assumption.  As a representative of an NGO not involved in the negotiations, I can be bold enough to say that the statement is based on a lie.  Why this blatant lie should be perpetrated in document of this nature must have something to do with the nature of UNCTAD and the nature of the compromises that are made during the course of the negotiations.  Clearly, those who are gaining from the process of globalization and from selective liberalisation had an upper hand in the drafting of that statement than those who are losing from those processes.  The opening of the G77 countries’ Draft Plan of Action was more circumspect and allowed for a more open-ended possibility.  It read, and I quote:

With the acceleration of the pace of globalization in the early 1990s came the expectation that growth and development based on global market forces would be more rapid, more sustainable and more widely shared than in the past, allowing developing countries to narrow the gap with industrial countries and the poorest sections of society to close the income gap with the rich.  However, the empirical record has until now fallen short of this expectation.

How did it happen that the Draft Plan of Action came to put forward a viewpoint that is contradicted by evidence?  It would appear that a blatant untruth is written into document as a means of getting the consensus of those without whose money and power UNCTAD would probably disappear.   Money and power talk to the extent of belying the truth about globalization from the people of the world. 

If our analysis is correct, then it follows that UNCTAD is driven not by concerns of development of the countries of the South, as claimed by it, but by forces of the North that wish to keep their stranglehold over the South through an enslaving debt burden and a structured, built-in mechanism in the global trading system for perpetuating a declining terms of trade for the South.   Coming from an NGO, I do not apologise for saying this, Mr. President.  Why?  Because if nobody points a finger at the nudity of the UNCTAD King marching in the streets of Bangkok then everybody would accept the first sentence of the Draft Plan of Action and believe that the King was wearing an elegant suit that only those without faith cannot see. 

We are disappointed, Mr. President, not only at the manner in which truth is sacrificed to the demands of real politik in the Draft Plan of Action, but also in the manner in which the UNCTAD Secretariat seeks knowledge.  We are reminded time and again by the officials of UNCTAD that it is a “knowledge-based” and “ideas-based” organisation.  If that is true, then the relevant question to ask is where does the UNCTAD Secretariat get its ideas?  They get their mandate from the compromised Plans of Action, yes, but from where do they get their ideas?  It turns out that they get their ideas from the “knowledge” of scholars that are based in the citadels of “learning” in Western Universities.   UNCTAD’s whole programme of action, indeed raison d’être, is couched largely in economistic terms. And the economistic rationale for its programme of action is put in the language of Western or Western oriented economists. 

There is no better evidence of this than the Round Table symposium of Economists organised by the Secretariat at UNCTAD X.  Ten out of eleven speakers came from the North, only one from the South. It would seem that “knowledge” is as defined by those who come from the Oxford University and the Institute of Development Studies in the UK, the MIT and Harvard in the USA and from the officials of the World Bank.   It is a mocking irony on the fate of history that the countries that have been largely responsible for the underdevelopment of the South should be asked to produce the “knowledge” that is supposed then to take the South out of the crisis of development.  It is also, incidentally, an insult to the intelligence of the South. It is no gainsaying that almost all the economists based their analysis on neo-classical, neo-liberal economics.  In other words, there was no dialogue. A monologue based on a one-Party rule of one ideology reigns the “knowledge-based” institution of UNCTAD.

Such are the limits of UNCTAD.  Constrained by a Plan of Action based on a lie that had to be negotiated in order to protect the interests of the rich and powerful, and based on “knowledge” coming from outdated economistic theories, UNCTAD is in a serious bind.  The question is: can it get out of it?

Yes, it can.  Two actions are necessary for this to happen.  One is that the countries of the South must speak up a bit more boldly.  If globalization is not such a wonderful thing, as indeed the G77 countries said in their initial proposal to UNCTAD, then they should stick by their statement and not compromise the truth for the sake of pacifying the rich and the powerful.  Since they have done that in UNCTAD X they are authors of their own further victimisation.  Nobody is to blame but themselves for bending truth to power. The second action is by the UNCTAD Secretariat.  They need to understand where knowledge comes from.  Knowledge, especially knowledge for liberation, comes not from books, and certainly not from books written by Oxford and Harvard dons, but from practical experience of those who are struggling on the ground.  A little more “reality-check” by UNCTAD staff by examining the knowledge that comes from the ground, from the experiences of the people, may be needed to counterbalance the uniform, economistic, half-baked “knowledge” that presently forms the impoverished “ideas bank” of UNCTAD.

Mr. President, as I said earlier, I find it necessary to say these things.  It is my role to say these things, and I need apologise to none.  In the NGO caucus meetings prior to the official meeting of UNCTAD, my organisation, the ISGN, was represented by at least a hundred people coming from various parts of the third world within our network.  As soon as the official meeting started, they all left, and I was the only one left behind to continue participating in the UNCTAD official proceedings.  Our members left because they have little faith in a body that is driven by what they call the “top dogs” who are largely insensitive to the concerns of the “under-dogs”.  I was left behind to carry this message to you, which I now do.  We fully appreciate that UNCTAD cannot perform miracles. We also understand the reality of real politik. But the G77 members of UNCTAD and its Secretariat do not have to bend backwards to sacrifice truth to the dictates of power and privilege and to compromise their own intellectual and moral integrity.