UN conference adopts plan to help world’s poorest countries

Nearly 200 governments who participated in a recently-concluded United Nations conference in Belgium have committed themselves to fighting poverty in the world’s poorest countries while improving the lives of the 600 million people there. The Third UN Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), which ended on 21 May, adopted a political declaration and a decade-long programme of action spelling out specific measures to address development assistance, debt cancellation and private investment in the 49 LDCs. More than two thirds of these nations are in Africa. But while valuable work was done to map out priorities and strategies for assisting LDCs, the conference was considered disappointing by some in the scope and scale of its achievement. Rubens Ricupero, who heads the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), said that the Brussels meeting had made important progress possible in vital areas but had still been unsatisfactory in that there were no major breakthroughs on such debt relief, trade or development aid. In the Brussels Declaration on LDCs, governments stressed the need for a “transparent, non-discriminatory and rules-based” multilateral trading system to help poor countries reap the benefits of globalisation. They resolved that an upcoming meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Doha, Qatar, should be used “to advance the development dimension of trade”. Governments also committed themselves to using the UN Conference on Financing for Development in March 2002 as an opportunity to mobilise resources. They pledged to reverse declining levels of official development assistance (ODA) and to provide the world’s poorest states with special debt-relief initiatives. Eveline Herfkens, the Netherlands minister for development, called on donor countries to improve their behaviour in relation to LDCs. “[They] are not transparent as to when they will give money, how much and when,” she said. “There is too much conditionality, and often the cost of implementation is too high... We need to ensure that LDC aid recipients who have adequate policies will not fail because aid is insufficient or undependable.” Rwandan economy and finance minister Donald Kaberuka said that each LDC nation needed to do more if it was to emerge from being among the world’s poorest countries. “We have to look at what we can do for ourselves,” he said. Kaberuka said that LDC countries would be conducting reviews among themselves to ensure implementation of national policy pledges, indicating that many were unfairly stereotyped by negative occurrences in a neighbouring nation. The 60-page ‘Programme of Action for the Decade 2001-2010’ arising from the LDC meeting in Brussels calls for halting the marginalisation of these countries as an “ethical imperative”. It outlines a broad range of measures to be applied by the developed nations and the LDCs themselves in such areas as good governance, trade and the mobilisation of financial resources. The conference, which attracted more than 6,500 representatives from governments, UN specialised agencies and civil society, was a follow-up to LDC conferences in France in 1981 and 1990. The 34 African countries on the list of LDCs include: Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda and Zambia.