POVERTY, ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION SYMPTOMS OF POORLY FUNCTIONING ECONOMIC SYSTEM, UNEP HEAD TELLS ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COUNCIL
Press Release
ECOSOC/5654
POVERTY, ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION SYMPTOMS OF POORLY FUNCTIONING ECONOMIC SYSTEM, UNEP HEAD TELLS ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COUNCIL
19960702 Poverty and environmental degradation were symptoms of a poorly functioning economic system which provided incentives to lower prices at the expense of human and natural capital, the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) told the Economic and Social Council as it continued its coordination segment on United Nations poverty-eradication activities.Elizabeth Dowdeswell said that inequalities of wealth and power contributed to environmental degradation because they allowed some to reap benefits of the market while others were forced to pay non-market costs. Among the measures she called for in response were charging commodity prices that reflected the human cost of production, using social indicators alongside economic indicators, recognizing traditional land rights, and adopting land reform measures.
Tunisia's representative concurred that social progress was not merely a product of market forces; it required firm political will to invest in the well-being of people. He said it was critical to provide developing countries with access to markets, enhanced terms of trade and solutions to the debt problem, as well as transfer of technologies and financial resources.
The representative of Norway said his country had recently hosted a meeting on how to implement the "20/20" initiative -- whereby 20 per cent of official development assistance (ODA) and 20 per cent of national budgets are allocated, respectively, to social programmes. "All in all, we believe that the Oslo meeting represented a concrete contribution to the formulation of a global strategy for poverty eradication in practice, much in line with the concrete strategy and partnership called for by the recently concluded 'Group of Seven' meeting in Lyon." He added that it was paradoxical that despite a strong recognition of the need for poverty eradication, resources for that purpose were declining.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) was working with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on a five-year programme of employment generation, a UNDP representative told the Council. A representative of the ILO stressed that respect for freedom of association, freedom from forced
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labour and from discrimination, as well as the elimination of child labour, were crucial to poverty eradication.
The representative of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) said that the upcoming World Food Summit, to be held in Rome in November, would underline the necessity of food security and agricultural development as a first step towards economic growth, poverty reduction and political stability.
Statements were also made by the representatives of the Russian Federation, Ghana, Canada, Jamaica and the United Republic of Tanzania, as well as by the observer for Switzerland. A statement was also made by the Secretary-General of the second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II), just concluded in Istanbul.
The Council will meet again at 3 p.m. today to continue its coordination segment on United Nations poverty-eradication activities.
Council Work Programme
The Economic and Social Council met this morning to continue its coordination segment, which focuses on United Nations poverty-eradication activities.
As a basis for discussion, the Council has before it a report of the Secretary-General on coordination of the activities of the United Nations system for the eradication of poverty (document E/1996/61). It states that the Council should focus on promoting a multidimensional and integrated approach to poverty eradication, the importance of which was recognized at the 1995 World Summit for Social Development. It should also promote a gender- sensitive approach to poverty eradication. (For a summary of the report, see Press Release ECOSOC/5652, of 1 July.)
Statements
THELMA AWORI, a representative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), said that in Africa the agency was working with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on a framework for a five-year programme of employment generation. In Asia, the Programme was working with the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) to implement a social mobilization strategy to strengthen village organizations. In the Arab region, the UNDP had organized an expert meeting on poverty alleviation and sustainable livelihoods in February. That meeting helped foster region-wide dialogue on issues of poverty and to prepare a poverty-eradication strategy for the region.
During 1996, the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty, the UNDP would support country efforts to implement the Copenhagen agreements through advocacy and public awareness, measurement and mapping of poverty and inequality, definition of national goals and targets, the review of national policies and budgets, and institutional reform and coordination. An ongoing concern emerging from all the UNDP cooperation efforts with country partners had been the question of moving beyond structural adjustment. For many countries, those programmes had not yielded growth, leading to a certain "adjustment fatigue", she added.
SERGEI ORDHONIKIDZE (Russian Federation) said the eradication of poverty could be achieved only by a multilateral comprehensive approach. Stressing that the ways of resolving poverty were far from universal, he said that vulnerable groups had to be involved in making decisions about their future. It was notable that the Secretary-General's report highlighted the importance of national plans for poverty eradication, the gender perspective and the coordination of the multi-year programme of work of the functional commissions. The elimination of overlap and harmonization of the work of functional commissions was crucial.
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As for the resources for poverty eradication programmes, those should be predictable and continuous, he said. The Russian Federation's ministry for social security was preparing a report on ways to overcome poverty. The State's system of minimum social standard would include criteria for minimum wages, pensions and allowances and would identify strategic areas for eradication of poverty. A plan to increase minimum social guarantees was already under way. The Russian Federation favoured an enhanced role for the Council in poverty eradication and believed that its secretariat and bureau must be strengthened. It also favoured strengthening the social aspect of international cooperation with the United Nations playing a leading role.
JACK WILMOT (Ghana) said that the resident coordinator system should be strengthened to enable it to achieve the integration of various forms of assistance at the country level. The participation of all representatives of the United Nations system in the work of that system was crucial. It was regrettable that, despite a strong interest in the efforts of the United Nations system in poverty eradication, persistent declines in levels of finance made it difficult for multilateral institutions to effectively confront the challenges of poverty eradication.
Ghana believed it imperative that the United Nations system include the Bretton Woods institutions in any effort to promote the mainstreaming of gender perspectives in all poverty-eradication programmes, he said. The gender perspective was essential if those programmes were to achieve the goals of sustainable development. Since the eradication of poverty was an essential element of all the recent United Nations global conferences, policy guidelines should embrace the work programmes of all the functional commissions.
ELIZABETH DOWDESWELL, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), said the demand for improved coordination in the field of poverty had grown stronger over the years in light of new mandates adopted at recent United Nations conferences. The requirement had gained further urgency in the context of constrained resources. Alleviating poverty while protecting the environment was a key challenge, since poverty was a cause of environmental degradation, as well as one of its effects. No environmental programme could make headway without addressing the underlying problem of poverty. The numbers of people living in absolute poverty would continue to grow unless a fundamentally new approach was adopted.
She said that the definition of development must change; it must recognize local circumstances, as well as traditional knowledge, and must be inherently geared towards sustainability. Natural capital must be viewed as a limited resource and not as a free good. Until recently, the economy had been defined in market terms, without due attention paid to cultural aspects of human activity. "This must change." Poverty and environmental degradation were symptoms of a poorly functioning economic system which provided incentives to lower prices at the expense of human and natural capital. "We
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should be aware that such a system only leads to poor working conditions, low wages and environmental degradation." Inequalities of wealth and power contributed to environmental degradation because they allowed some to reap benefits of the market while others were forced to pay non-market costs.
Commodity prices must reflect the human cost of production, she went on. Social indicators must be used alongside economic indicators. Traditional land rights must be recognized and implemented. Land reforms must be adopted to ease pressure on soil. The UNEP had squarely confronted the reality of poverty-environmental linkages. Its new integrated approach focused on the sustainable use of natural resources, sustainable consumption and production, a better human environment, and globalization. Cooperative action was undertaken with the relevant United Nations organizations. "We are highly sensitive to the need for a coordinated and cost-effective approach." Investments in human capital were critical to stemming the spread of poverty. Particular attention should be paid to the role of women.
WALLY N'DOW, Secretary-General of the second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II), said that Conference, held last month in Istanbul, had been a fitting finale to the continuum of United Nations conferences. While the event did not magically solve all habitat problems in the world, it did begin the process of change. Agreement had been reached on the right to adequate housing.
He said the Conference had brought together different viewpoints for the greater common good. Above all, Habitat II had demonstrated the need to involve all actors in society, including the private sector, women and youth groups, labour unions, non-governmental organizations and the academic and professional community. "The opportunities before us are boundless, and we cannot stop now. That is why your help is so urgently needed, as, indeed, is the help of our partners in civil society."
KATHERINE HAGEN, Deputy Director-General of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), said her organization was concentrating on country-based employment reviews, not only in its own activities to follow up on the Social Summit and other United Nations conferences, but also in its work with the inter-agency task force on employment and sustainable livelihoods. It was hoped that the task force initiatives would contribute to an improved interaction between directions coming from Headquarters level to the field and the input from the field back into the system. The civic involvement in successful implementation of reforms directed to employment promotion and equitable income distribution was important.
The human rights dimension constituted a powerful and often neglected lever to deal with poverty eradication, she said. Respect for freedom of association, freedom from forced labour and from discrimination and elimination of child labour was crucial. Adequate means for monitoring and
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evaluating activities in terms of gender-related outcomes must be provided. In spite of the general autonomy of the specialized agencies, the Council's mission was to reduce the distance among them, something it could not achieve if information was not fully shared among all parts of the United Nations system. The inter-agency task force on employment and sustainable livelihoods was scheduled to complete its work with a synthesis report of selected country reviews by the end of the first quarter of 1997.
CLAUDE BAILLARGEON (Canada) said his country placed poverty firmly at the core of its foreign and development assistance policies. It encouraged approaches to poverty which were enabling and systemic. That meant breaking down the artificial divisions between social programme sectors and social groups. Human rights, democratic development and good governance were necessary conditions to sustainable poverty eradication. Promoting women's equality and empowerment was also essential to achieve that goal.
Canada supported the 20/20 initiative which should be pursued between interested developed and developing countries, he said. Partnerships should be reinforced at the country level, and the United Nations' activities should focus on providing policy advice, enhancing information bases and supporting the development and the provision of basic social services and other services directed at people living in poverty. It was surprising that the Secretary- General's report had downplayed the importance of the UNDP-led round tables and the World Bank-led consultative mechanisms. While the specific problems with such mechanisms should be addressed, the important role they could play in coordination should be recognized.
He stressed that country-level activities, domestic savings and appropriate budgetary allocations were an important source for poverty strategies. Gender-desegregated data could serve as an important analytical tool at all levels. The Council should be the primary intergovernmental forum for poverty eradication, and the Commission for Social Development should support its integrating function. The report's recommendations on country- level coordination and on intergovernmental coordination were artificially separated and could be linked, among other ways, through the three task forces. Further efforts to enhance the Commission for Social Development were needed.
SLAHEDDINE ABDELLAH (Tunisia) said poverty eradication was a major objective of all United Nations development-related conferences of the current decade. The scope and complexity of poverty required the mobilization of all protagonists in society. The United Nations family had before it a colossal task. By harmonizing the work programmes on poverty eradication of all relevant parts of the United Nations system, a consistent approach could be adopted. Tunisia welcomed the new level of coordination attained at the country level through such mechanisms as the resident coordinator system. A
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collective commitment on the part of all agencies was required. Incentives should be in place to encourage institutions to work together.
It was critical to provide developing countries with access to markets, enhanced terms of trade and solutions to the debt problem, as well as transfer of technologies and financial resources, he stressed. Tunisia pursued development in a manner which recognized the importance of protecting the environment. By placing the very weakest elements of society at the forefront of the country's concerns, Tunisia fostered social solidarity. The international community was unanimous in wanting poverty eradication; the problem was that the contribution of international financial institutions had been steadily declining. It was critical to ensure a predictable and adequate flow of resources if poverty eradication was to move beyond being a pious sentiment to being a reality. Social progress was not merely a product of market forces; it required firm political will to invest in the well-being of people.
PATRICIA DURRANT (Jamaica) said that all United Nations global conferences had underscored the urgency of addressing the fact that one fifth of the world's 5.7 billion people lived in extreme poverty. While national governments had primary responsibility for defining and implementing poverty eradication strategies, the United Nations should play a critical supportive role. Those eradication strategies would require adequate resources, an enabling environment, a gender perspective and a harmonized and integrated approach to intergovernmental anti-poverty efforts.
The serious decline in multilateral official development assistance (ODA) was of great concern, she said. Her Government endorsed the recommendation in the report of the Secretary-General that poverty-eradication activities of the United Nations system should receive a substantial increase in funding. Harmonization and coordination at the country level was critical to anti-poverty efforts. She had noted the collaboration taking place between the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the United National Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the Bretton Woods institutions. For that cooperation to be successful, coherent policy guidelines must avoid overlap and duplication. The civil society, including non-governmental and community-based organizations, should be integrated into programme development, implementation and monitoring.
OLE KRISTIAN HOLTHE (Norway) said there was a need for a significant increase in the resources allocated to social development, and, at the same time, those resources must be utilized more effectively. In that regard, it was critical to use tools which had been developed to improve field-level coordination, such as the resident coordinator system and the country-strategy note. The United Nations System-wide Special Initiative on Africa would provide a test case of coordination. "It must be emphasized that the
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initiative -- if implemented fully -- will contribute greatly to improving the quality of the utilization of scarce resources." Several aspects of the Initiative must be clarified, including the degree of cooperation with African authorities, as well as the use of existing mechanisms.
He recalled that the Social Summit had urged States to agree on a mutual "20/20" commitment, with the allocation of 20 per cent of ODA and 20 per cent of national budgets allocated, respectively, to basic social programmes. Last April, a meeting had been convened in Oslo to discuss ways of translating that initiative into action. "All in all, we believe that the Oslo meeting represented a concrete contribution to the formulation of a global strategy for poverty eradication in practice, much in line with the concrete strategy and partnership called for by the recently concluded 'Group of Seven' meeting in Lyon."
He said it was paradoxical that while there was a strong recognition of the need for poverty eradication, the general trend of declining assistance made it extremely difficult to respond to the problem. "The activities of the United Nations system in the area of poverty eradication require the mobilization of new and additional resources", he stressed.
FREDERICK WEIBGEN, of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), said that 800 million people in developing countries today faced chronic under- nutrition. Ironically, most of those people lived in rural areas where food production was centred. Because of inadequate land and water resources, the rural poor were resorting to environmentally unsustainable practices such as overgrazing, farming unsuitable mountainous land and forgoing traditional fallow periods.
To address the food deficit problem in developing countries, FAO was participating in inter-agency bodies such as the subcommittee on rural development of the Administrative Committee on Coordination (ACC), as well as its inter-agency task forces established to follow up on the United Nations' global development conferences. A new initiative, the FAO Special Programme on Food Security in Low-income Food-deficit Countries was seeking to rapidly increase food production on a sustainable basis in order to help meet predicted increases in demand. In that Programme, FAO was collaborating with governments, donors and various United Nations agencies. A fruitful partnership between FAO and the World Bank was also part of that programme.
The World Food Summit, to be held in Rome in November, would underline the necessity of food security and agricultural development as a first step towards economic growth, poverty reduction and political stability. Preparation for the Summit had allowed governments, intergovernmental and non- governmental actors to collaborate in preparatory meetings and the development of background papers.
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JEAN-JACQUES ELMIGER, observer for Switzerland, said he believed that strengthening the coordination of United Nations system's activities was important in efforts at poverty eradication. Although the United Nations system did not have a monopoly on poverty eradication, it was important that it coordinated its activities with donors. Some aspects of poverty, including the growing pauperization of the world and the feminization of poverty, were matters of concern. A multidimensional approach was crucial to do away with poverty. In fact, the Copenhagen Declaration constituted a major gain at the end of the century in the fight against poverty. It had to be recognized that economic and social development went hand in hand. Switzerland supported efforts to achieve the 20/20 principle.
Recognizing the importance of the country-strategy note, he said poverty, which adversely affected women, led to scourges such as child labour and imbalances in the labour market. He attached great importance to the work of the functional commissions and believed that all countries should have a chance to participate in their work. Especially important was the work of the Commission for Social Development, he added.
DAUDI MWAKAWAGO (United Republic of Tanzania) said his delegation associated itself with the statement by Costa Rica on behalf of the "Group of 77" developing countries and China. His Government had adopted various economic, social and political measures aimed at eradicating poverty. It was also preparing a country economic memorandum on poverty alleviation in collaboration with the World Bank. The memorandum would analyse the socio- economic situation and suggest policy measures for sustained economic growth and poverty eradication.
Continuing to review measures taken by his Government, he said a poverty-eradication division had been formed under the Vice-President's office, and the Government was formulating a national policy on poverty eradication. A gender-sensitive task force of representatives from government, academia, non-governmental organizations and other actors from civil society had been formed to draft the policy.
For its poverty-eradication programmes to be successful, the Tanzanian Government would need the help of the international community, he said. A steady flow of grant money and soft loans would be needed. Donor countries, development agencies and multilateral banks should review their lending programmes with a view to increasing the share of resources devoted to human development. He commended the governments of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands for having surpassed the target of 0.7 per cent of gross national product for ODA.
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