Global Policy Forum

By Haider Rizvi

When government leaders from around the world gathered in Copenhagen in 1995, they pledged to take decisive action to end extreme poverty and bring gender equality for women in all walks of life. Ten years later, with few concrete changes in the lives of the poor and women, similar promises are being made at another international meeting being held at the U.N. headquarters in New York that concludes on Feb. 18.

"We reaffirm the Copenhagen Declaration and Programme of Action," declared ministers from nearly 40 countries last week after holding series of discussions on the outcome of the World Summit on Social Development, organised by the 46-member U.N. Commission for Social Development.

At Copenhagen, more than 100 world leaders recognised poverty elimination, full employment, gender equality, universal access to education and healthcare, and social integration as essential steps to achieve meaningful social development. While noting that some progress has been made in ensuring gender equality, development experts believe that most governments have failed to match their words with deeds in terms of eliminating poverty by ensuring employment. "The issue of employment has been left out of the international discourse," Gloria Kan, a senior official at the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, told IPS. "It has not been at the forefront of international issues. It was forgotten by the international community."

A report released by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Monday endorsed Kan's observation. The report, "Global Employment Trends 2005", points out that last year there were more than 184 million people in the world who had no jobs at all. "The best way to get people out of poverty is to provide jobs," says Aart-Jan de Gues, the minister for Social Affairs and Employment of the Netherlands, who led one of the roundtable discussions before the adoption of the declaration. "Countries should develop national action plan for employment."

But experts caution that merely ensuring jobs does not mean poverty will be eradicated. "Employment itself is not an answer to poverty," says Lawrence Johnson, who launched the ILO report. "The answer is providing decent jobs." According to ILO, nearly half of the world's 2.8 billion workers do not earn enough to lift themselves and their families out of poverty. Johnson thinks that achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) could be hard in the absence of policies ensuring full employment, a view that has been set aside by the proponents of free-market economic globalisation, who argue that economic growth is the main path to poverty alleviation.

The MDGs include a 50 percent reduction in poverty and hunger; universal primary education; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; the promotion of gender equality; and the reversal of the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, all by 2015. The Declaration adopted last Friday says "macro-economic policies should support employment creation and that the social impact and dimension of globalisation deserve further attention," a reference to the growing concern that inequitable globalisation is driving the widening gap between the world's rich and poor.

The Commission on Social Development recognised that a decade after Copenhagen, the world community has failed to pay due attention to Africa and the least developed countries, which continue to suffer from massive poverty and illiteracy. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan made a similar observation in a statement last week. "The situation 10 years after Copenhagen is mixed," he said. "Many hopes and expectations (were) left unfulfilled, especially in Africa and the least developed countries."

According to a background paper circulated at the meeting, unevenly distributed economic growth, high unemployment, heavy external debt, trade barriers, high income inequality and commodity dependency are the main obstacles to poverty reduction. "Achieving social development continues to be characterised by a display between intentions and actions, proclaimed objectives and the actual orientation and international policies," Annan said. Annan sees achieving the MDGs as different from the comprehensive approach to social development affirmed in Copenhagen, since the centrality of employment to economic and social development is absent in the goals.

But he thinks that the MDG campaign has contributed to "better" multilateral action and national policies because they involve specific targets and a timeframe to achieve them. However, he adds that the MDGs cannot be viewed as a "substitute" for a comprehensive social development agenda. "The world situation has not improved not because of a lack of decision," he says, "but because implementation still falls short of the intended targets."

A summit due to take place in New York in September this year is likely to consider the recommendations of the Commission for Social Development. But it is unclear how far that will advance the agenda on development. "There's no recipes to find solutions. There's no magic formula," Ana Maria Romero Lozada, Peru's Social Development Minister, said at a news conference last week. "If we don't take the responsibility as a whole, then we would be discussing the same in the next 10 years."

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C íŸ 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.