-----Original Message----- From: Carol Barton [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: January 24, 2002 10:18 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: FFD Women's Caucus Subject: [ffdngocaucus] FW: FfD and ...flying cows... -----Original Message----- [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 11:44 AM David Ransom, co-editor of the New Internationalist, reports from behind the scenes at the UN Raising Voices for Financing for Development meeting, and the FfD prepcom. A rather satirical (and frightening) description of an event that has failed, he highlights, to attract the public attention it should have. Here�s a slightly edited and shorter version of his piece (comments, satirical or not, are welcomed): �Every cow in Europe could be flown around the world, First Class, for the money spent on agricultural subsidies by the European Union. I didn't know this, nor that there's a UN conference on 'Financing for Development' coming up in Monterrey, Mexico, this March. It seems I am not alone. So the UN has invited a small band of us to their headquarters here in New York City to raise awareness and, they hope, our voices too. (�) And so a couple of thousand diplomats swarm around a conference room inside the UN. We've been invited to witness a preparatory committee � 'PrepCom' � for the Monterrey conference. People greet each other with the limp handshakes of international diplomacy. I lean languidly against a blank wall, trying not to look too conspicuous. Officials sit in the alphabetical order of their country. New Zealand (no, not 'A' for Aotearoa) and Nicaragua, just in front of me, must have got to know each other pretty well over the years. A buzz and then a hush marks the arrival of Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General himself. He, and two bulky security guards with restless eyes, cast some special significance over the proceedings. He reminds delegates of the importance of their task. For the first time in its history, the UN is staging a major conference on global finance. As a rule this is the closely guarded preserve of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and now the World Trade Organization (WTO). But 'development' falls within UN territory. And the UN has adopted a set of Millennium Development Goals (see panel). Without the finance, there�ll be no ball to score these goals with. Hence UN interest in Financing for Development, and the international conference in Mexico, which starts on 18 March. Styled �a critical global collaboration�, the conference won�t be restricted to the usual UN officials, diplomats and politicians. The IMF, World Bank � the �Bretton Woods� institutions � and WTO are participating too. For those of us who believe that they should always have been accountable to the UN � as was originally intended � this looks like a breakthrough. There is, however, an equal and opposite danger � that the UN will be eaten for breakfast by the Bretton Woods institutions. The lethal mix of free-market nostrums, free-trade propaganda, 'structural adjustment' and privatization they dispense goes by the name of the Washington Consensus. This is, in reality, the transnational corporate agenda in drag. Transnational corporations have tightened their grip on every international institution, especially those that have anything at all to do with money. Until recently the UN itself was something of an exception. But now the Secretary-General has agreed a 'Compact' with major global corporations. This will allow them, among other things, to use the UN logo. In future, distressed citizens of the world won't know for certain whether it's the UN or Nike riding to the rescue. Kofi Annan announces to the meeting the appointment of two 'Special Envoys on Financing for Development'. One is Trevor Manuel, the respectable Finance Minister of South Africa. The other is the former Managing Director of the IMF, Michel Camdessus. My jaw drops in disbelief as I hear his name. More than anyone else, he is associated with the devastation wrought by debt and 'structural adjustment' around the world, particularly in the South. Is the Secretary-General unaware that on the city streets of the South the name of Camdessus is mud? I've been ploughing through the paperwork. In earlier drafts of the Monterrey 'outcome' document I've seen some reference to 'innovative sources of finance', such as a 'Tobin' tax on currency speculation, or a global carbon tax. These would raise serious money, probably sufficient to fund the Development Goals and the UN as well, while requiring an entirely new, global system of taxation. In the latest 'draft outcome' document they have disappeared without trace � or, to be more precise, into a 'study requested by the Secretary-General'. When Kofi Annan leaves the meeting, contributions from the floor come predominantly from Scandinavia. They focus on a proposal to double official development assistance, or foreign aid. This would doubtless be a very good thing. But during the past decade aid has actually halved in value, and the trend is still downwards. The Scandinavians are the only rich people who have ever come close to spending 0.7 per cent of their annual income on aid. This is what all rich countries � except the US � solemnly pledged to do almost two generations ago. There�s nothing to suggest why they might redeem their pledge now. >From over the wall behind me comes the disembodied, amplified voice of Mark Malloch Brown, the new boss of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), which has a hard-won progressive reputation. I'm told that Mr Malloch Brown comes to the UNDP via The Economist magazine and the World Bank. He speaks of a deal, a 'contract'. Developing countries, he says, should implement a series of orthodox economic measures and 'mobilize' their own financial resources. In return, rich countries should give them more official aid. Why should the poor believe the rich? Answer comes there none. This is not to suggest that combating poverty, inequality and corruption in all societies, rich and poor alike, is a bad idea. But, not so long ago, the Washington Consensus was ordering impoverished societies to cut spending on education and healthcare in order to pay off their foreign debts. Economic orthodoxy is part of the problem, not the solution. There are more disembodied sounds from over the wall behind me. Big noises from the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO are all perched up there and they express their satisfaction with the way things are going. So does the Secretary General of the International Chamber of Commerce, the business lobby group. It's getting quite hard to believe that this is actually a UN conference, even when a growling sound comes from Roberto Bissio of the Third World Institute. He reminds everyone that children are presently dying in large numbers from preventable disease and hunger. The bankrupt Enron corporation, he says, has been treated more benevolently than the bankrupted people of Argentina. Casting my eyes across the amphitheatre I notice, however, that large numbers of seats have emptied. Our visit to the meeting over, we gather around an oval table in a panelled committee room. There's Bruno Jetin from the ATTAC group in France; Yao Graham from the Third World Network in Accra, Ghana; Marina Ponti from Manitese in Italy; Atila Roque from the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil; Friends of the Earth and Interaction from the US; and a fair few others as well. The journalist Horacio Verbitsky from P�gina 12 in Argentina kicks off with a brilliant account of the debts racked up by the rich, shipped out to benefit the rich countries, then loaded onto the backs of the people, bringing catastrophe to a country that had observed economic orthodoxy to the letter. This reminds us that the financial issues don't just involve poor countries; 'middle income' ones like Argentina and Turkey are affected too. So too are the poor in rich countries. It was, after all, the crisis of financial orthodoxy in the model 'Little Tigers' of Asia in 1997 that prompted the Monterrey conference in the first place. Atila Roque is expecting anywhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre at the end of this month; it will have to be more of a rally than a forum, he laments. Marina Ponti describes the 300,000 people who walked for peace from Perugia to Assisi in Italy after 911. I mention two huge peace demonstrations in London � and the totally unexpected popular uprising over 'Third World' debt orchestrated by Jubilee 2000. The problem, as Yao Graham suggests, is not with 'raising voices'. It is with the content and the process, the �what� and the �how�, of the conference. There is no mention of generalized debt cancellation; nothing significant on 'innovative' sources of finance or the global financial 'architecture'. Nothing, in other words, that matches the scale or the urgency of the task. My own bleak expectation is that, as things stand, global economic recession will � as it always has � hit the poor hardest, increase inequalities more rapidly and take us that much further away from those Development Goals. So there's a bit of frustration around. This is not what the people who have invited us really want to hear. And it�s not what some of us really want to say. None of us has come here to waste our time carping. Most of us prefer fresh thinking. Mark Malloch Brown comes to talk to us. He describes his job as 'campaign manager' and 'score-keeper' for Financing for Development, and he likes the sound of business plans. I suggest to him that the Washington Consensus is unravelling. It doesn�t make much sense to weave its loose threads through the Monterrey document. He says the Washington Consensus has been pronounced dead many times before, but no Santiago Consensus (a reference, I take it, to some 'innovative' financial measures adopted with some success by Chile), or whatever, has emerged to replace it. As far as he�s concerned, if rich countries have to pledge more foreign aid in order to avoid innovations like the Tobin tax, that would be a result. Not many of us show any enthusiasm for campaigning for one thing in order to achieve another. A succession of very grand people tries to persuade us otherwise. Nitin Desai, the Under-Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs, says Monterrey is a 'good starting point' worthy of public support. He admits that there comes a point with when all the studies have been done and there's not much to be gained from doing any more � but stops short of suggesting that this point has now been reached with the Tobin tax. I begin to wonder whether there isn�t a misconception at work here. None of us around this table controls a tap of public support that we can turn on or off at will. In our own marginal case at New Internationalist magazine, for example, for years we explained the evils of the spiralling debt crisis, its devastating impact on the lives of millions of people, to no discernible effect. I certainly never imagined that the issue would ever attract popular attention. The fact that it did came as something of a shock to me and is therefore a little hard for me to explain. Sure, the situation had deteriorated to the point where it could scarcely get more grotesque; sure, clarifying and broadcasting the hard facts about an ugly truth was important. But what really made the difference, and ignited the Jubilee 2000 campaign, was a combination of growing public unease with the clear idea that illegitimate debts must be dropped, cancelled altogether. This isn't about sloganizing. It means slaughtering a sacred financial cow, the sanctity of debt. That, I think, is what's now needed by the world's financial systems as a whole. People are not fools. They know when they're being hoodwinked. To my mind, the era of the UN as a mere sum of its parts is drawing to a close. Whether the UN likes it or not, globalization is giving it an identity of its own. You can, as ATTAC have done in France, campaign successfully for a global Tobin tax on currency speculation. You can say that the great majority of the world's nations and peoples would be beneficiaries, and wonder why there is as yet little sign of support from their governments. But you also need the UN take a lead, if only because of the common-sense objection that there's no point in confining a global measure to your own country. This applies not just on the grand scale, but at the practical level where most of us live our daily lives. For example, in all the propaganda for 'free' trade in the Monterrey documents, I could find no mention at all of the fair-trade movement. I may have missed it, and I admit this is a hobbyhorse of mine. But, in my experience, it is one of the very few ways the people of the North have a direct, practical connection with the people of the South � or have the ability to act. If the principles and practice of fair trade were developed with even a tiny fraction of the resources that currently go into promoting 'free' trade at the WTO, or UNCTAD, or anywhere else in the UN for that matter, much more progress might be made, and faster, than anyone currently imagines possible. The point is not that the tiny fair-trade movement can save the world. It is that the movement is just one of many. All of them look at some time or another, and more or less critically, to the UN. It may be that change is underway. Perhaps the cynics have been proved wrong by progress on some of the issues � women, social justice, the rights of the child, the environment � on which the UN has staged major conferences during the past decade. But now the crunch has come: the prevailing, narrow orthodoxy of global trade and finance has to be broken. Without radical change here, progress will be impossible anywhere else. There is, in truth, just one bulky interest group standing in the way. You don't have to portray transnational corporations as the only villains of the status quo to know that they are its chief beneficiaries. No doubt they have their uses. But they are well able to look after themselves. They don't need democratic governments. People do. I've never heard anyone suggest, for example, that left to their own devices transnational corporations would have come up with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I have no idea exactly how far corporate influence reaches, or to what extent it accounts for some of the otherwise inexplicable policy preferences of the UN.* If the Enron case in the US is anything to go by, so much political influence can be bought on every side of a �mainstream� political system that it disappears altogether. What I do know, for example, is that there's an article lying in my top draw. It describes how as many as 600,000 people in Tanzania have been evicted from their land to make way for transnational mining corporations. Most of these people once made a living. Now they have been made destitute, in the name of 'development'. Courageous people in Tanzania have been speaking out, and are suffering the consequences. The article stays in my top drawer because, for the time being, we are unable to publish it. The corporations involved are anxious to be known as litigious. Under British libel law they could swat New Internationalist like a fly, even if we proved every single word to be absolutely true beyond all reasonable doubt. As a result, our readership remains in the dark. Our readers know perfectly well that the world's media are, for the most part, just another arm of corporate endeavour. But they cannot know what they are unable to read. If the UN � or anyone else for that matter � finds it difficult to get inconvenient messages out through the 'news agenda' of the corporate media, that should come as no surprise. The answer isn't to distort or delete the message altogether, let alone embrace transnational corporations still closer. The UN can have corporate support or it can have popular support: it can't have both. The Washington Consensus is dissolving because it has done enormous damage and doesn't even work. The only question now is what will replace it. As for Monterrey, if the UN is right and the Financing for Development conference is a good starting point, those of us who believe a better world is not just possible but currently under construction will not remain in ignorance of it much longer.� To reply: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To start a new topic: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To login/unsubscribe: http://forum.oneworld.net:8080/~debtchannel ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Get your FREE credit report with a FREE CreditCheck Monitoring Service trial http://us.click.yahoo.com/ACHqaB/bQ8CAA/ySSFAA/NJYolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
