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U.N.-EU Conference On Developing Countries
BRUSSELS, May 14 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - An army of U.N. and EU officials, politicians and NGOs converged in Brussels Monday for a week-long conference aimed at breaking the cycle of misery and despair in the world's poorest countries.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan on Monday opened the conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDCs).
"For all too many of those people, life is a continuous struggle against hunger, malnutrition, polluted drinking water, infectious disease, ignorance, oppression and violent conflict," said Annan.
"They would like to join in the global market as producers and consumers... but they cannot do it without our support," he told the hundreds of representatives of LDCs, industrialized countries and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
In the 20 years since the first LDC conference, and the 11 years since the second, "the list of LDCs has grown longer, not shorter," he said.
"The challenge is great," said President Goeran Persson of Sweden, whose country holds the current EU presidency.
"We live at a historic junction where global progress is within reach," he said. "This open window in history will not last forever. If we do not seize the moment of opportunity, the window may close and that is a loss for all of us."
"Across the world," said French President Jacques Chirac, "a billion people are eking out a bare subsistence and have no hope of ever transcending the poverty line.
"Two billion people - a third of the human race - have less than two euros ($1.7) a day to live on," said Chirac.
"These stark numbers reveal the terrible insecurity of lives blighted by hunger, the shortage of safe drinking water, illiteracy, illness without health care, armed conflict, political oppression and untimely death."
The high-profile Conference on Least Developed Countries (LDCs), the third in 21 years, targets 49 nations classified by the U.N. as the poorest of the developing world. The goals are predictably familiar: new programs on debt cancellation, investment and production, nutrition, health care and sanitation.
An overriding aim this time is to rivet world attention on the fact that some 610 million people are born, live and die in misery, deprived of the most basic of essentials, forlorn and forgotten by a world striding confidently into a new millennium.
"If we didn't hold this conference, these countries will run even more of a risk of being marginalized in globalization," Paul Nielson, European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Development, said last week.
But the NGOs present, groups including the International Committee of the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and hundreds of other non-profit aid groups, made clear in a scathing manifesto here on the weekend their views on the world's treatment of its least advantaged.
"Although the LDCs are denied most benefits of globalization, their contribution to the multinational companies operating in developing countries is evident," it said, alluding to "a dramatically growing scorn for economic, social and cultural rights" in these countries, where "standards of living have fallen steadily."
Most of the LDCs are in Africa (34), including Angola, Burundi and Ethiopia, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Sudan. There are nine in Asia, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Laos. The five in the Pacific are Kiribati, the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Tuvalu and Vanuatu, and in the Caribbean, Haiti.
In a memo to the European Council, the European Commission recalled that efforts to aid LDCs date to the 1960s, but never really took hold.
"It was of course hoped that as development efforts increased, countries would, one by one, graduate from the LDC group," it said.
But in that quarter-century only one - Botswana - has managed to pull itself up even to the grade level of a developing nation. The rest, since the first U.N. LDC conference in 1980 and the second in 1990, both in Paris, remain in abject poverty, fraught with disease and crime, illiteracy and political turmoil, lack of schools and commerce and hope.
At a weekend meeting, Mike Moore, director of the World Health Organization (WHO), said that the removal of trade barriers would add $1.9 thousand billion to the world economy but some representatives were skeptical about western governments' insistence on requirements like minimum environmental and labor standards, seen by poor countries as protectionism.
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