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Article Excerpt
M2 PRESSWIRE-31 October 2003-UN: Pointing to 'mixed report card', Secretary-General urges UN partners to step up efforts to implement development financing commitments -- Part 1 of 2(C)1994-2003 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD
RDATE:10302003
Referencing the international community's "mixed report card" on development financing over the past 18 months, Secretary-General Kofi Annan today urged senior United Nations officials and finance ministers meeting in New York to help reverse the "negative balance sheet and fix the system so that all countries, and all people, especially the poorest, can benefit".
While official development assistance (ODA) had increased to some $57 billion in 2002, the modest gains had been dramatically offset by the largest-ever net resource transfer -- some $200 billion -- from the developing world, he said, addressing the General Assembly's High-level Dialogue on Financing for Development. The meeting kicked off yesterday and aims to provide an opportunity for a broad spectrum of stakeholders to discuss issues relating to trade, investment, aid and international financial architecture.
"Even taking all subtlety and nuance into account, the overall result defies common sense", the Secretary-General said, adding that funds should be moving from developed countries to developing countries, but those numbers revealed the opposite was occurring. "Funds that could be promoting investment and growth in developing countries, or building schools and hospitals, or supporting other steps towards the Millennium Development Goals, are instead being transferred abroad", he continued.
With that in mind, he said there was no shortage of urgent work ahead, recalling the recommendations he had included in his report.
Ultimately, progress depended on leadership: leadership that could overcome domestic constraints, that recognized the deeply fused fates of the world's people and was committed to multilateralism as the pragmatic path to shared prosperity.
General Assembly President Julian Robert Hunte (Saint Lucia) said the Monterrey Consensus, adopted at the 2002 International Conference on Financing for Development, held in Monterrey, Mexico, reflected the critical decisions taken "to address the challenges of financing for development around the world, particularly in developing countries".
Its distinctive approach had made...
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