All MDGs impossible to achieve: UNCTAD

Representatives of civil society organisations, businesses, universities, and Parliaments lamented this morning the enduring effects of the global recession on developing economies and urged financial reform and new thinking to help the world's poor even as the Greek debt crisis shows that the current world economic recovery is fragile.
UNCTAD secretary-general Supachai Panitchpakdi said in opening the organisation's second annual public symposium that since the crisis hit in 2008, some 53 million people in the developing world have fallen below the poverty line "and more than 100 million additional people are going hungry.
These numbers are not moving in the right direction."

"Prior to the crisis, the chances of achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were deteriorating," he told the meeting. "Now, after the crisis, it will be near to impossible to achieve all of the MDGs." The goals are centred on the target of halving extreme poverty by 2015.

The secretary-general said developing countries should look to one another for support, noting that `South-South' regional trade and financial arrangements have been vital in recent years for providing investment, stable economic arrangements, and climbing trade. He cautioned that it is unlikely that industrialised economies "will constitute reliable sources of recover from the current crisis.

He also said impetus appeared to be dwindling for deep and meaningful reforms to the international financial system, and urged that the United Nations, rather than just the G20 group of countries, be given a lead role in devising reforms. "A truly inclusive multilateralism must be based on the G192, the number of all member States of the UN," he said.

In a panel discussion on "Responding to global crisis: new development paths" that followed, the secretary general termed developing countries "the innocent bystanders of the most severe recession in 70 years. We cannot just go on with business as usual. We have yet to see `human recovery' from the recession."

Jean Feyder, president of UNCTAD's Trade and Development Board, said, "We consider that States should play a major role in development" as poorer nations struggle to recover, noting."

"It is very important to put more money into agriculture," as productivity, especially in Africa, has lagged far behind farming yields in more developed regions. When food shortages surfaced in 2008," Olivier De Schutter, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, said adding that the result was that these countries were unable to respond.

Anne Jellema, International Policy and Campaign Director of ActionAid International, South Africa, told the meeting that international financial markets `dictate for many countries what is and what isn't possible' and described those markets as `a global casino'.

Speakers from the floor cited such issues as the extent of extreme poverty, now estimated at 1.5 billion people and the effects of financial speculation.