 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 July 2000 Issue No. 489 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 July 2000 Issue No. 489
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region Focus International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Organising social misery
By Faiza Rady
Last week in Geneva, the UN General Assembly special Social Summit session provided a unique spectacle in the chronicle of international conferences. Rather than another round of patting each other on the back and lauding their own commendable lists of achievements, the venerable meeting of presidents and state ministers were forced to face their own dismal record and, for once, frankly concede defeat.
Convened to evaluate progress since the 1995 Copenhagen Social Summit, which pledged to eradicate global poverty and provide full employment worldwide, the high-powered delegations in Geneva had no option but to admit collective failure. Forced to confront their lack of political will to check the soaring levels of poverty since 1995, the official delegates' speeches strangely echoed the statements of an NGO and labour activists' summit scheduled to coincide with the UN summit. Dubbed the Geneva 2000 Forum, the "alternative summit" denounced the ill-fated policies of globalisation and blasted the international community's failure to implement the Copenhagen platform.
Failure was hastily, if at first reluctantly, acknowledged by government officials at the neighbouring UN special session. "Our commitments have not been fulfilled. That is a sad fact," declared Danish Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen.
The self-deprecation did not stop there. As 15 heads of state and hundreds of ministers representing 180 countries rang out a litany of pious mea culpas and accused themselves and each other of having failed to address global poverty, anti-poverty rhetoric literally became the politicians' new mantra -- at times even displacing the sacrosanct neo-liberal jargon of the past two decades. "It is touching to see the sudden neo-liberal concern with the fate of the poor in the South," commented prominent economist Susan George. In fact, neo-liberalism seems to have shifted gears as everybody jumps on the new bandwagon.
"While grinding poverty continues," deplored Swiss President Adolf Ogi, "not a day goes by without our hearing of another merger, the birth of a new giant of the economy and the disappearance of thousands of jobs."
Ogi's delivery could have easily fit into the agenda of the "counter-summit" or even on the thousands of flyers littering the Geneva streets last Sunday. Activists representing 62 countries demonstrated to denounce the ugly face of globalisation -- defined as corporate greed and the obscene disparity between rich and poor.
According to political analyst Daniel Singer, the share of the world's income held by the richest 20 per cent of world money-makers has gone up from 70 to 85 per cent in the last 30 years. That of the poorest fifth has gone down from 2.3 to 1.4 per cent. Anti-globalisation protesters in Geneva echoed the sentiment. "Three out of six billion human beings live in poverty, and wealth is becoming more and more concentrated," commented one organiser of the anti-globalisation march.
If the UN summit's new speak at times convincingly mimicked the activists' jargon both in tone and content, the rhetoric reached new heights when UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan addressed the counter-summit on the vital need for the UN, national governments and NGOs to join efforts in the struggle against global poverty. "We will remind the official delegations that economic growth is not mainly about numbers, but about people, their health, their education and their security," stressed Annan.
Beyond the exemplary speech-making denouncing unfulfilled pledges and a long list of commitments, the UN summit meant serious business. Stressing that it was "time to end the rhetoric," UN officials announced that the world body, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) -- a powerful organisation representing the world's richest 29 nations -- had jointly conceptualised a blueprint to eradicate poverty in a study entitled "A better world for all".
In the study, the North, in collaboration with the international loaning agencies, effectively concocted a rehashed version of trade, sporting a reborn "social conscience" dimension. "Poverty rates can be cut in half by 2015 if countries follow policies that reduce social and gender inequalities and create income-generating opportunities for the poor," the report said.
While UN and Western government officials lauded the report's goals and pledged to follow its prescriptions, the joint UN-WB-IMF-OECD "poverty-alleviation" project was flatly rejected by anti-globalisation activists and many NGOs as yet another neo-liberal subterfuge, scheming to dish out the same worn-out economic reforms under the veneer of UN auspices. Despite the evident failure to realise the pledges of Copenhagen and over and beyond the social summit's progressive talkfest, the North remained unabashed at Geneva.
Flaunting attractive catch-phrases like "A better world for all" and aiming to polish their image by using the prestigious UN logo, the WB and the IMF intend to continue prying open markets in the South and imposing devastating fiscal austerity measures in order to assure prohibitive debt servicing. All this while preaching the gospel of dubious micro-economic entrepreneurship in the informal sector as a substitute to employment, and limited NGO initiatives as credible and "modern" alternatives to public health and welfare programmes.
The anti-globalisation forces, however, remain on the alert and mobilisation against neo-liberalism is on the rise. "Decades of promises that just a little more short-term pain will bring long-term gain have exposed the IMF and WB as false prophets whose mission is to protect those who already control too much wealth and power," charged the US Network for Global and Economic Justice, the main organiser of the anti-globalisation drive in North America.
Using the slogan "50 years is enough" -- a reference to the 50th anniversary of the WB and IMF -- the activists are busily planning their next round of protests, scheduled for the July G-8 summit of industrialised nations, in Japan, and the September meeting of the IMF in the Czech Republic's capital, Prague.
In the aftermath of the Geneva Social Summit and in response to the much-touted corporate project for a questionably better world, anti-globalisation activists laid the talkfest to rest with the telling epitaph: "The social summit organises social misery." (see p.18)
