‘Oil rich’ urged to share aid burden (06/12/2004)

‘Oil rich’ urged to share aid burden

By Bonnie James UNITED Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Administrator Mark Malloch Brown has called upon the ‘oil-rich’ countries to come forward to contribute developmental assistance. “The traditional donors should be joined by new donors like Qatar,” the third highest-ranking official in the United Nations system told Gulf Times in an exclusive interview yesterday. “Now more than ever, the ‘oil-rich’ countries could be leaders by giving sharply increased volumes of developmental assistance,” he said. Such a gesture will be a signal to the traditional donors that burden sharing is at hand, he added. Brown is in town to attend the Doha High-Level Forum on Trade and Investment which began yesterday. “With the price of oil at the moment, a major gesture of support is more possible than in quite a while,” he said. Increased donor assistance is expected to materialise next year, Brown pointed out. A number of critical things are in place on the agenda of the G8 and Europe. “Then we have the Millennium Plus Five Summit to review progress, which has a real ability to embarrass governments into taking pre-emptive steps of increasing their aid levels,” he said. Earlier addressing the opening ceremony, Brown stated that the Forum is taking place three years after the current Doha world trade round began and less than a year before the New York meeting to take steps to get the world back on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. “The world has to make a quantum leap on a range of issues if we are to fulfil the commitment made by all UN member states at the Millennium Summit in 2000 to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, as set out in the MDGs,” he said. This includes lifting the trade barriers that prevent many developing countries from working their way out of poverty. While 2015 is the deadline, 2005 is critical in achieving the MDGs for two reasons. “First is that if we do not have at least a decade of steady promotion of the right policies with the right level of resources to back them, we will not get the required outcomes to correct the path of development towards meeting the MDGs in the next 10 years,” he said. Second, the pledges and commitments made in a number of forums in 2005 can be geared towards securing success at the UN high-level summit next September when world leaders will meet to review progress on the MDGs as well as the restructuring of global security called for in the Secretary General’s High Level Panel on new Threats which reported last week. “The deadline of the five-year review will, we hope, compel action in a number of forums towards that end between now and September, including the South-South Summit here (Doha) in June,” Brown said. While progress on the MDGs is being made across many parts of the world, with China and the East Asia and Pacific Region seeing GDP per capita more than triple between 1981 and 2001 and the proportion of people living in extreme poverty fall from 56% to 16%, development progress remains uneven amongst developing country regions. “For the poorest developing countries, the majority of which are in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as least developed countries in other regions, development gains have literally bypassed hundreds of millions of people,” said Brown, who has been at the helm of UNDP since 1999. Between 1981 and 2001, the period which saw a dramatic transformation in Asia’s development, the number of people living in extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa nearly doubled from 164mn to more than 300mn. “The world’s poorest countries are quite simply trapped in poverty because they are too poor to save and invest at the necessary rate,” he said. There is not a sufficient surplus of income above people’s basic needs, to invest in roads, power, health or education, let alone in creating businesses. “Here, the challenge lies not only in instituting the good governance reforms and the swift expansion of a job-creating private sector, and there is also need for substantial international public investment,” the official said. For these countries, increased Official Development Assistance to at least a doubling of current levels would help to finance the increased investments in infrastructure, the environment and human capital. “Some concrete suggestions on Qatar’s role as a donor might range from institutional follow-up to this meeting with a trade and development centre, to becoming a knowledge centre for good governance in the region,” said Brown. Other critical deficits identified in the Arab Human Development Report such as higher education and gender equality also provide opportunities of leadership for Qatar. “Also we hope we might see more young Qataris joining international work, perhaps by participating in the UN’s Junior Professional Officer Programme by sending young professionals interested in pursuing a career in development to contribute to international efforts to share technical co-operation,” he said. Brown stressed that if the Doha Trade Round is to have the development focus so vital to tackling global poverty and achieving the MDGs, a real change in progress is critically needed. The collapse of the WTO ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico last September was a tremendous setback for the vision of building an inclusive globalisation. The enormous subsidies and other trade barriers imposed by developed countries continue to price even some of the most efficient poor farmers and entrepreneurs out of key global markets. “Interim deadlines have been repeatedly missed and the next 12 months before the WTO ministerial meeting in Hong Kong in December 2005, represents the last realistic window of opportunity to repair the damage and lay the necessary foundations to meet the MDGs by the 2015 deadline,” Brown said. The UNDP administrator expressed hope that the Millennium Plus Five Summit in New York can set the stage for a breakthrough by putting global political support behind a trade and aid package that will allow the investment and growth the developing world needs. “If the promise of the new trade round is to be revitalised and met on deadline, the next WTO ministerial meeting must be a moment when the world recommits the promises made at Doha and agrees a firm timetable to implement them,” asserted Brown.