Agence France Presse | By SAM DAGHER | September 23, 2003
World Bank president James Wolfensohn called on rich nations Tuesday to provide more aid and facilitate trade with poor countries to combat an alarming rise in poverty and make the world a safer place.
"We must address the fundamental forces shaping our world. In many respects, they are forces that have caused imbalance," Wolfensohn told delegates from 184 countries, attending the World Bank/International Monetary Fund annual meetings in this Gulf emirate.
"It is time to take a cold, hard look at the future. Our planet is not balanced," he added.
"The recent impasse in Cancun is a case in point," he said, pointing to the failure earlier this month of vital World Trade Organization (WTO) talks in the Mexican resort.
"Two thirds of the world's poor people depend on agriculture for their livelihood. As the developing nations see it, rich nations put forward proposals that did not respond to their central demands in this crucial area," he said.
"At Cancun, developing nations signalled that for there to be peace and sustainable development, there must be a set of different priorities. We need a new global equilibrium, a new balance in the relationship between rich and poor nations."
Delegates from African countries expressed last week their "anger and dissapointment" at the failure of the Cancun talks in a memorandum addressed to Wolfensohn.
Wolfensohn said rich countries were spending a mere 56 billion dollars a year on assistance to the poor, compared with 300 billion dollars they spend on agricultural subsidies and 600 billion dollars on defense.
But the European Union (EU) and the United States blamed influential developing countries such as Brazil, India and Egypt for the collapse in Cancun.
EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy wrote in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal the EU "showed its readiness to move across the board" and had arrived at a "joint policy framework" with the United States.
"But a group of nations led by Brazil and India wanted to pull the text in a different direction. We will never know how far we would have got if the negotiations had continued for another day or so. But I really felt that we were on the verge of a major breakthrough," he added.
He said the current Round of WTO talks "is on a life-support machine," after the failure of the Cancun talks, and is unlikely to be concluded by the end of 2004.
US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick accused Brazil, Egypt and India of trying to divert attention from their own trade barriers, in an article Monday in the Financial Times.
In Dubai, Wolfensohn sounded some alarming figures to highlight the disparity between the rich and poor, and to the low level of aid to developing nations.
He said about one and a half billion people will be added to the population of poor countries over the next 25 years compared with 50 million people in rich countries.
One billion of the world's six-billion population survive on less than one dollar a day, while another one billion control 80 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP), according to the bank chief.
He said sub-Saharan Africa, with a population of 600 million, will fare the worst in the world, adding that the "number of people (there) living in absolute poverty will increase, not decrease."
One in six of Africa's children will die before reaching the age of five, according to Wolfensohn.
But he also slammed the poor countries for spending a total of 200 billion dollars on defense, "more than what they spend on education."Agence France Presse:
