PRESS BRIEFING BY UNDER-SECRETARY-GENERAL FOR ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL AFFAIRS

PRESS BRIEFING BY UNDER-SECRETARY-GENERAL FOR ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL AFFAIRS

A meeting scheduled for Headquarters on Monday, 14 April will bring the Economic and Social Council and the Bretton Woods institutions together in the first major public occasion to review the implementation of agreements reached at last year’s International Conference on Financing for Development,
Nitin Desai, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, said today.

Briefing the press this afternoon, he said the meeting’s primary purpose was to take stock and to maintain the political momentum for implementing what had come out of the Conference, held in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2001.
He added that previous meetings between the Council and the Bretton Woods institutions had been held over the past three years on an essentially ad hoc basis and served more as familiarization exercises rather than occasions with a clear and specific purpose.

Monday’s meeting was a formally mandated part of the follow-up to the International Conference and part of the decisions taken by the General Assembly on how to follow up on Monterrey, he said.  The key point was whether the sense of partnership and dialogue built up between the Bretton Woods institutions and the United Nations development agencies –- not merely at the Secretariat level, but especially at the intergovernmental level –- could be maintained.  There was a need for coherence between development, trade and finance policies, which must be pursued with a common set of goals and objectives, Mr. Desai added.

He said Monday’s two-part meeting would begin with an opening plenary session from 9:30 a.m. to 11 a.m.  Speakers would include the President of the Economic and Social Council, the Secretary-General and the President of the General Assembly.  Also speaking would be South Africa’s Finance Minister, in his capacity as Chair of the Development Committee; Lebanon’s Finance Minister, in his capacity as the current Chair of the “Group of 24” developing countries that focuses on financial issues; Germany’s Development Cooperation Minister; and the Chair of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) trade policy review body.

Mr. Desai said that the three ministers and the WTO official would be speaking on the outcome of the Bretton Woods annual spring meetings to be held in Washington, D.C., this weekend, as well as focusing on questions raised in the Secretary-General’s report on the follow-up to Monterrey.  Senior representatives from the secretariats of the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank would also attend the meeting, he added.

The Under-Secretary-General said the meeting would then break up into four round tables, which would make it easier to hold a conversation rather than listen to speeches.  Each round table would have an intergovernmental co-chair, as well as one from a partner organization.

Discussions would continue after lunch when the meeting would hear reports from the round tables, Mr. Desai said.  Representatives of the non-governmental community and the private sector would also participate in addressing specific

questions on what actions were required at the domestic, international and systemic levels to implement the agreements reached at Monterrey.

Responding to a correspondent’s request for an assessment of achievements resulting from the relationship between the Economic and Social Council and the Bretton Woods institutions in the past year, he replied that it had injected development into the trade and finance agenda.  Today, the Millennium Development Goals and the outcomes of United Nations conferences provided the starting points for all global discussions on trade, finance or development, he stressed.

The biggest single gain was moving multilateral discussions away from a pure focus on the observance of trade rules to the substantive goals that must be pursued in trade or finance negotiations, Mr. Desai said.  There had also been reasonable progress in articulating some financial commitments, he added, noting that Washington had articulated more completely how it expected the Millennium Challenge Account –- the $5 billion in extra funds pledged at Monterrey by President George W. Bush –- would work.

Regarding weaknesses, he said many deadlines set at the November 2001 Doha trade and development talks had been missed, which was why meetings such as Monday’s were important in bringing key issues continuously back into focus.

Asked by another journalist what benefits developing countries could expect, and what outcome was anticipated from Monday’s meeting, Mr. Desai said its primary focus was to provide a strong political push in terms of decisions.  The public occasion was part of the whole exercise to provide incentives for actions to implement the public commitments made at Monterrey.

In response to another correspondent, he reiterated that the main achievement of the past year had been the injection of development more firmly into the trade and finance agenda, which was previously seen largely in terms of procedural development.  Secondly, there had been movement in terms of a more complete articulation of the way in which the extra money promised at Monterrey would be delivered.

The Under-Secretary-General pointed out that the main obstacles lay in the fact that, while Monterrey had brought everybody together, the operational decision-making processes remained separate.  The problem was how to ensure that the outcomes of joint processes and meetings had a real impact at the operational level.

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