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Statement by Kemal Derviş, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme On the Occasion of the United Nations Ministerial Conference
“Making Globalization Work for the LDCs”

Your Excellency, Benjamin Mkapa, Former President of the Republic of Tanzania,
Excellencies,
Distinguished Delegates,
Colleagues and friends,

It is a great pleasure to be here with you in Istanbul, my native city. I must say it is also a special pleasure to follow His Excellency Benjamin Mkapa. He delivered a wonderful speech; I agree with his message and I will try to complement it. I got the chance to know His Excellency during the UN High-Level Panel on System-wide Coherence deliberations, and I dare say he has become a friend, and he already was a mentor for many of us.

I. Voice, Participation, and Power of the LDCs

The first message that I do want to reinforce is the need for voice, participation and power: the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) must have a stronger voice and must participate more in an overall reform of the international architecture, the international governance system, within the United Nations and more broadly. Without that voice and without that participation, many of the reforms and many of the paths we are trying to find cannot be realised. We do live in a world where of course problems are always local and citizens feel them locally. But the international system constrains and determines a lot of things and unless the LDCs have that voice, unless they have their weight in the international institutions, unless they can cooperate and coordinate among themselves to express that voice, I think many of these reforms will not take place. There will be a lot of talk, as President Mkapa said, but not much action. So I do hope that this conference and other meetings of this sort mean that you will work more closely with each other and also with us your partners in the United Nations system to develop that new architecture and to make sure that the needs of the citizens of LDCs are really felt in the international institutions.

II. Resource mobilization

The second point I would like to make is the importance, still, of resource mobilization. A lot of promises are made at summits such as the G8, 2005 World Summit and other summits, and there has been some progress I must say since the late 1990s. But that progress is now slowing down in terms of aid flows going to LDCs and in fact to development in general. As you probably know, the numbers published by the OECD-DAC for 2006 show an actual decline for 2005 and the projections of ODA for 2007 are that there will be another decline. So, far from the accelerated increase that the messages that the G8 summits and elsewhere were giving us, we are actually seeing a small decline. Now of course the numbers are complicated: debt relief is part of it, and debt relief is accounted differently in different countries, so one has to be careful in the way we judge them, but overall the situation is not good and we need to redouble our efforts at the United Nations and elsewhere.

President Mkapa rightly underlined that if the debt relief given through the multilateral development banks is not replaced by new resources which will allow these banks to lend and provide new grants for development, then in fact debt relief would lead in the long-term to a decrease in resources in development, rather than an increase.

III. Trade and development

The third topic which is important is trade and development. The Deputy Secretary-General of the World Trade Organisation, Ms. Valentine Rugbawiza, is here with us and gave us her message: trade remains extremely important. A trade system that truly encourages development, that truly gives developing countries and LDCs in particular, not only access to world markets but the capacity to compete, is I think critical in the development agenda. Here too, progress has been very slow, if not nil. We are at a critical stage, we hope still that there will be a breakthrough that will truly take into account the need of the LDCs, but unfortunately success is very far from assured. It is frustrating for all of us who are interested in development, to see those who preach free trade and liberal markets sometimes take the most drastic protectionist measures in rich countries, measures that completely falsify the workings of markets and cut down the opportunities for developing markets; and it happens again and again.

IV. Policy space
 
The fourth message that I would like to give is about policy space. After decades of studies and research in development, it is quite clear that there is no one truth, no one single model that works for everyone. Countries are different by their geography, by their history, by the structure of their economies, by their assets, their locations; therefore it is absolutely necessary that each country, looking at their own particular circumstances, chooses a path to development that reflects the needs and the necessities of that particular country. Of course, in choosing that path, in choosing that strategy, it is very important to look at international experience and I think that organizations such as mine, the United Nations Development Programme, can bring a lot of the experience to bear, and share with our development partners what has worked, what has not worked; we can analyze the reasons of failure and of success and in choosing the national development strategy in each country, these experiences are invaluable. But then taking all that into account, I think that each county - the citizens in each country and societies in each country- have to choose their own path, and have to be free to do so, free to choose it in a way that it is truly a national path and truly a national strategy.

V. Migration and development

 A fifth point I would like to make, and we haven’t talked about it too much this morning, is migration. Migration is part of globalization; just as capital flows impact on all economies, human migration impacts on all economies. And here too it is very important that the international community as a whole gets together and looks at issues relating to migration and development. I do not think it is acceptable – it is understandable – but it is not acceptable that each country sets migration policies entirely in its own interests. When rich countries decide on migration policies, on their acceptance of migrants from abroad, they have to take into account the broader picture: the trade picture, the skills picture and the needs of developing countries. This is far from being done; migration is viewed purely from a rich country perspective when the debates and laws take place. It is important that developing countries bring their analysis, their interests, and their way of looking at it, to bear on the international discussions. Migration can of course benefit all: migrants can improve their lot; they can relieve labour market pressures in poorer countries, but is very important that some of them come home after acquiring skills, and that the flows of migration are regulated with incentives and with policies that allow migrants who have acquired high skills to come home.  It is also important that the human rights of migrants are respected all over the world, and that there is a code of conduct that we can all support.

VI. Climate change and development

In terms of some of the policy issues, I do believe that climate change is now becoming one of the topics of this first part of the 21st Century. It is no longer a question mark scientifically: climate change is happening – slowly - but it is happening. It is slow, but it is accelerating, and I don’t think we can deny that it does represent a major challenge to the human community. It is also now established that human economic activity - the emission of heat trapping gases - is a cause of climate change. As you know, some years ago there was a debate on this within the scientific community; some denied that there was a link between carbon emissions and what was happening with the climate. Today, 95 per cent of scientists agree that there is indeed such a link, and that the large carbon emissions that have occurred in the past – the so-called carbon debt that rich countries have to the world community, about 70 per cent of the total carbon in the atmosphere – represents a real challenge for the future. It is also true that, of course, much is being added to the carbon stock and therefore an overall multilateral approach is required to deal with this problem.

The LDCs are unfortunately in a situation where they have not been contributing to the past problem; they are in no way responsible for the carbon debt that exists in the atmosphere, perhaps only very marginally and they are not even contributing to it very much today and yet the climate projections show that it will be many LDCs who will be most affected, and affected within our lifetimes – not a hundred years from now – by some of the effects of climate change. So it is an issue that we have to focus on. LDCs have to create coordinating and negotiating mechanisms so that they bring their weight to bear also on this discussion.

VII. The United Nations development family and LDCs

In terms of the United Nations development family, all the organizations, not just UNDP, are, I think, your organizations and we want to work very closely with you. Of course, we are working with rich countries, with middle income countries, and in that context I think our biggest contribution is to bring the facts to bear, to have the analysis, and to try to generate compromise solutions that will be favourable to development and that will be in line with the basic values of the United Nations.

Here let me end on two notes, and again I have to agree with His Excellency Benjamin Mkapa, coming after him is not easy because his message is so strong. I do believe that the fundamental values of the United Nations, of the UN Charter, of human rights, are fundamental human values to which we have all subscribed. It does not mean that one system has to resemble the other, or that social or political systems should be imported wholesale from developed countries. But I do believe that it is important for all countries – developing countries, low-income countries – to strongly support a human rights based approach to development that puts the human being and human development – the woman, the child, the man- at the centre of our concerns. I do not believe that any compromise on that helps the cause of developing countries. I think that developing countries must say very loudly that we are as committed to human rights as developed countries, or as anyone else in the world. I do want to underline this. Everywhere there remains human rights problems; we have to build our capacities to deal with it, all these problems cannot be solved overnight, but the message should be: we want to solve them, we want to advance them, and we want to put human beings at the centre of development.

VIII. Partnerships between Middle Income Countries and LDCs

Finally, my last message today is that I think it is very important that there is a strong partnership between Middle Income Countries and LDCs. There is much that has happened in Middle Income Countries – in Asia, in Latin America and indeed, in my own country Turkey - much that went well, much that didn’t go so well; there is a lot of experience. Sharing those experiences between Middle Income Countries and LDCS is, I think, extremely important. Often the problems of a middle income country are closer to the challenges that an LDC faces than the problems in a very advanced country. So conferences such as these that bring together Middle Income Countries with LDCs, have special significance. I am, therefore, particularly happy to be here with you, and I would also like to thank the Government of Turkey for organising this event.

Many thanks.

[ENDS]