Africa News | February 20, 2002
Next month, Zambia joins the rest of the world in Mexico to explore the means of paying for social and economic progress in developing countries and finding solutions for sustainable development.
Enroute to this New Global Economic summit, the Financing for Development (FFD) conference for heads of state, individual countries have found themselves in various stages of preparedness, for some, and unpreparedness for others.
For Zambia, two major issues may work to expose whether the country has done enough to get the benefits and advantages of participating in this conference.
As preparations get underway for the Monterrey summit which President Mwanawasa is expected to attend, it has become apparent that external debt burden of most developing countries and international trade issues are set to be very critical for sustainable development. Throughout the past two decades, debt reduction, including relief, and internal trade have been stressed in all the preparatory meetings. It may be one of the loudest cries from developing countries at the conference.
And now it seems the meeting will pick the issues of debt reduction and stimulating international trade as the pathway to sustainable development.
Apart from debt reduction and international trade, the meeting will also discuss the following components:
* Mobilising domestic financial resources for development.
* Mobilising foreign direct investment and other private flows.
* Official development assistance.
* International monetary, financial and trading system.
These two issues, debt reduction and international trade, featured prominently and appeared contentious at a fourth preparatory meeting held in New York recently.
The rationale behind the new policy direction is to lay down commitments that will lead to national strategies of reducing debt vulnerability.
It is envisaged that the move will help in avoiding serious mismatches between financing needs and debt repayments, positioning countries towards a sustainable debt path and, hopefully, enhance development.
Zambia feels that debt sustainability needs to be measured in terms of the country's capacity to raise the finance needed to achieve the millennium's development goals.
The Zambian delegation was noted by other participants in the last meeting for inviting further bilateral and multilateral initiatives to reduce the indebtedness of developing countries.
Some lapses have already been noted. Among these are the exclusion of some important aspects like additions to the criteria for assessing debt sustainability, reduction in the administrative costs and human resource costs associated with HIPC.
They also dropped the proposal on the need to use freed resources consistent with development, but emphasised on changing the phrase from sustainable debt financing and external debt relief to external debt relief. They felt this would make it more focused.
An attempt to revise the heading appeared to be very contentious with developing countries arguing that this failed to fully reflect the spirit of this section as debt management issues were not reflected in the title. They simply changed the title to "debt relief".
At one point Zambia, which had taken a very special interest in this subject as a HIPC country and peculiarly affected by the issues under discussion, formed an alliance with Uganda and Mozambique within the developing countries camp.
This followed blanket statement that continued efforts were needed to reduce the debt burden of HIPCs to sustainable levels and opened doors to further adjustments on the initiative. Zambia was unsatisfied with the development.
On international trade, developing countries, and Zambia in particular, felt that trade issues will not be adequately addressed at this meeting organised by the United Nations and should be left to mandatory bodies like the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
Perhaps Zambia has a point. It is a well-known fact to those that have followed the happenings at the WTO meetings that developing countries have had to get a raw deal with the declarations because they seem to favour north-north trade.
Zambia feels that although the draft text of the Monterrey Consensus took on board many issues that were of particular concern, the level of implementation was doubtful.
This apprehension arises from whether the imbalances detected could be dealt with favourably at the United Nations meeting when this had failed at WTO meetings.
It appears the discussion of trade issues at this meeting will be very contentious. No developing country sits on the negotiating table for international trade and gets some thing in its favour.
Whatever the outcome of this round of negotiations, the issues of the debt burden and international trade distortions seem to be the ones that will haunt developing countries for a long time, and will continue to be raised at major economic international fora.Africa News:
