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MONTERREY,
Mexico -- Looking deceptively relaxed in casual
clothing, Nitin Desai, UN Under Secretary General
for Sustainable Development, took a moment to
speak with The Earth Times a day before the opening
of
the International Conference on Financing for
Development. Desai, who is responsible for the
conference, said
that he was happy to be coming into the conference
with such a strong consensus paper.
"We
already have a product," he said leaning back
on a bright blue couch in the Holiday Inn lobby, "so
we hope to focus here on finding what we need to
implement all the things already there in the Monterrey
consensus."
Indeed,
the draft document is strikingly without
controversy,
something Desai said would have
been hard to imagine a few years ago. Development
has always been a contentious issue, he said,
and each stakeholder has a different view on
how, when, where and why it should be done. "We
have a consensus, and that is important, although
you will still hear in the individual speeches
people focusing on different issues within
the paper. I was at the NGO forum yesterday.
Most of their views are very strong," he
added, "but I pointed out to them their
important role in getting things moving on
issues like ODA."
ODA, or Official Development Assistance, refers
to how much money donor countries give to developing
nations annually.
"On ODA the whole process has changed.
A few years ago it seemed unsure that levels
could have been maintained, let alone rise,
but now there is an acceptance that more ODA
is needed to achieve the Millennium goals," said
Desai.
The Millennium goals were set at a similar
conference in New York in September 2000. One
of them was a pledge to halve poverty by the
year 2015. UN Secretary General Kofi A. Annan
has called for a doubling of ODA in order to
achieve this.
While Desai acknowledged that a world where
the 23 rich, or donor, countries committed
0.7 percent of their annual Gross National
Product to ODA was hard to imagine in the near
future, he did feel that this conference would
be making progress.
"This is the first time that we can see
some real movement," he said. "I
can see governments coming around in time.
The basic issue is the difficulties in knowing
how best to use the money. We know now what
ODA is for, and we know we need more, and we
know it needs to be spent more effectively."
Indeed he cited the US and European pledges
last week as proof that donor countries acknowledge
that more must to be done. Last week US President
George W. Bush pledged an additional $5 billion
in ODA over the next three years; the European
Union followed up that announcement with a
pledge of its own.
While
such money in terms of figures seems enormous,
it actually is only a tiny fraction
of the budgets of the US and European Union
budgets. Desai, like others, is looking forward
to seeing what happens after Monterrey. For
Desai the road is clearer than for most; he
is also responsible for the upcoming World
Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) due
to be held in September in Johannesburg. The
WSSD is also known as Rio +10, or the ten-year
anniversary of the Earth Summit where the idea
of sustainable development was first developed. "Johannesburg
is too far ahead to predict," he said, "but
it will deal with the actual 'how-to's' of
development rather than the financing behind
it."
For now, Desai is busying himself with the
daily logistics of running this global summit
that for the next five days will be attending
some 12,000 participants, 300 ministers, and
58 heads-of-state and government. Given how
smoothly everything is running for this conference,
Desai can only wish for the same spirit of
harmony and cooperation for the WSSD.
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