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afrol.com, 2 July - Agreement was reached on a wide array of initiatives to reduce poverty and spur job growth in the global economy at the United Nations General Assembly special session on social development that ended yesterday in Geneva. Trade unions, however, were disappointed with the failure to achieve better compliance with international instruments on multinational enterprises. At a time of widely diverging interests between developing and developed countries over trade and economic issues, countries managed to agree on a series of measures to promote social development while mitigating the adverse effects of globalisation. The resulting agreement provides specific targets and strategies that will have major ramifications for national governments and international institutions in setting and achieving social development objectives. Globalisation Reducing poverty, promoting job growth, and ensuring the participation of all people in the decision-making process were the main objectives of the agreement. To achieve these goals, countries endorsed actions to ensure improved education and health, including in times of financial crisis. The special session marks the fifth anniversary of the 1995 World Summit for Social Development, that was held in Copenhagen, Denmark, a conference that decidedly promoted the social development agenda as an international and national priority. Yet in reviewing developments since Copenhagen, countries agreed that progress in reducing poverty and unemployment had not materialized, and that countries were still far from reaching internationally set goals on health and education. Without renegotiating the outcome of the Social Summit, the special session managed to go beyond Copenhagen to reach agreements on ever more sensitive issues, such as national taxation, new and innovative sources of finance and on the need for greater openness, transparency and accountability in national governments and in international organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Trade unions disappointed "Overall, the conclusions of the Session give the UN an important mandate to do more for social development to address the poverty of billions of people," said Bill Jordan, ICFTU General Secretary. "But the references to basic workers' rights have been watered down significantly because of that small group of authoritarian countries. The Session's main Political Declaration does not even mention the new ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, adopted in 1998." The final Political Declaration adopted yesterday makes a series of proposals to reduce world-wide poverty by half by 2015. Yet, says the ICFTU, it fails to lay down concrete measures and a calendar enabling progress to be kept under scrutiny. Although Brazil, Namibia, South Africa and a large group of moderate, democratic developing countries had tabled a proposal to look into the social problems caused by globalisation, they were in the end defeated by the Egyptian-dominated hard-line group. HIV/AIDS Delegates further agreed to support the G8 decision made in Cologne in 1999 to reduce the debt of the 41 poorest countries and to reach the UN objective of 0.7% of GNP to be devoted to development aid. And while the Declaration remains vague about new resources to finance development, a proposal was adopted which will enable the UN to undertake research into the benefits of a capital transaction tax, known as the Tobin tax, which was supported by trade unions. The Declaration draws attention to the particular situation of women who are the hardest hit by poverty and proposes improved access for girls to education. It refers to the need to eliminate the worst forms of child labour and calls for improvement in the situation of migrant workers and tribal populations. The needs of disabled persons are listed among the documents' recommendations. The Declaration also supports new actions by the UN to address the issue of corruption and transnational crime which undermines efforts and resources for social development. "While the trade union movement welcomes the renewed attention given by the international community to social problems, we feel extremely disappointed that a golden opportunity to adopt tangible global measures seems to have been lost", the ICFTU General Secretary concluded.
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