FINANCE FOR DEVELOPMENT -- AND COWS WILL FLY
By 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 PrepComm.
A rather satirical (and frightening) description of an event that
has failed, he highlights, to attract the public attention it should
have (slightly shortened article. Original article available at
New
Internationalist web site).
“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 Página 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.
ends.
|
