The Subversion of Development in Monterrey
Posted on March 19 2002 |
 The Financing for Development process is a disaster for development. The Monterrey Conference is a festival of words that in no way brings the United Nations’ FFD process closer to its goal of ensuring that financial resources are made available to achieve commitments made, including radically reducing poverty, in landmark UN conferences and summits in the 1990s.
UN member states are mouthing the pious rhetoric of poverty reduction and the like while unashamedly seeking the financial and political favors of the multinational corporations and banks. The same corporate interests that maintain that official aid is a waste of money and that development is best left to the dictates of the “free market.”
To speak about the paucity of resources for development is a cruel joke at a time when military budgets have reached historically unprecedented levels. On top of an already bloated war budget, US$ 30 billion alone will be spent by the United States to “finance the war on terrorism.”
FFD Off the Track
Resources are badly needed to fight the war on the institutionalized terrorism of poverty suffered by women, men and children in the developing world. In most cases, the required resources are and have always been present in the countries of the South. But in the light of debt bondage, corporate welfare schemes, structural adjustment and the legalized theft that takes the form of privatization of public goods, it is no surprise that peoples are deprived of their own resources to finance and determine the shape of their own development.
Financing for development would not be a problem if Northern “creditors” were to cancel the co-called debts of the South, if more democratic governments in the South can find the political will not to pay these illegitimate and odious debts, if trade and financial liberalization did not undermine the possibilities for sustained domestic accumulation. If this were so, we would not be talking about (external) finance for development, but rather the protection of national capacities and national resources to democratically finance sovereign participatory development.
FFD divorces poverty as a national fact from impoverishment as a global process. The FFD consensus document even speaks of “sustainable debt financing” without addressing the use of debt as an instrument of domination and exploitation of the South. The document enshrines economic prescriptions that are standard debt conditionalities including privatization, investment liberalization, promotion of free trade, and the marketization of land and resources. These are the same prescriptions that have ran the economies of the South to the ground.
UN’s FFD is squarely and deliberately framed in the process of corporate globalization. The Monterrey Conference has made a difference, not to those crippled by the debt burden and maldevelopment, but to the corporations and the IMF and WB who must seek legitimacy after the recent economic debacles in Asia, Argentina and other parts of the world.
Instead of leveling the playing field between North and South, between corporate interests and international civil societies, FFD has further tilted the playing field of global power relations towards profit-centered interests.
If there were any hope that the United Nations could provide political space for alternative development thinking, that hope is being buried in Monterrey. The UN is steadily backpedaling on the multi-sector consultations, let alone the key declarations of the social, population and women’s summits.
In essence, FFD marks the official acceptance of the privatization of development financing.
The FFD process fails to address the key issues of global economic governance and systemic injustice that are at the root of poverty and the financing gap. This constitutes economic subversion, even terrorism, against the people of the South.
Monterrey is a disaster in global terms because not only does it abandon development as a sovereign process of justice and redistribution, but because it goes on to legitimize through the UN the outright abandonment of development to the paradigms and power of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization.
In the context of the UN-supported, IMF-WB-WTO-defined FFD process, it has become crystal clear that civil society groups in the process are being used to legitimize an essentially illegitimate and anti-development paradigm. FFD should be a wake-up call to those who naively believe that fundamental changes in the dominant neoliberal paradigm can be achieved through reasoning and collaboration.
Take Back the Future
The battle for development, however, will not be won or lost in Monterrey. It will be fought and won where social progress has always been fought, that is at the level of the people themselves through the organization of popular power.
We call on peoples’ movements and non-governmental organizations, therefore, to stand in opposition, as they have done at the World Social Forum, to a process of globalization commanded by corporate interests and by the governments, North and South, at their service.
We call on the United Nations to firmly establish its integrity and independence from the purveyors of the neoliberal system, the IMF, WB and WTO.
We further call for the United Nations to move forward in addressing development issues by taking the bold step of acting on the debt issue, a problem that has caused poverty for millions around the world. Towards this, we call on the UN to:
- form a global commission with more than 50% representing civil society (and others from governments and the UN) to review the work of the IMF and other International Financial Institutions
- pass an International Covenant regarding stolen wealth
- launch an international investigation and inquiry into Governments and IFIs responsible for illegitimate, odious, onerous, fraudulent and criminal loans and other similar economic issues
- adopt a Declaration and/or international convention to criminalize government policies that lead to the genocide and/or mass impoverishment of whole populations, whether directly on the part of a local government or through the action of accomplices such as creditor governments and institutions.
- ensure compliance of member states and international institutions with existing human rights norms and mechanisms, including the supervision of the way in which external debt leads to the gross and systematic violation of civil, cultural, economic, political, and social Human Rights including the rights to self-determination and development.
We further call on movements in the South and the North to vigorously promote an economic vision that is based on human values, plurality, cooperativeness, concern for others, equality and the right of communities to exist.
End the subversion of development for the peoples of the South and all marginalized peoples of the world!
JUBILEE SOUTH
15 MARCH 2002
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