UN body must work for world economic integration: Gore
UN body must work for world economic integration: Gore
JOHANNESBURG (Reuter): The UN Trade and Development Conference (UNCTAD) must work to ensure the least developed countries are speedily integrated in the world economy, U.S. Vice President Al Gore said yesterday.
Meanwhile, Singapore and Japan supported proposed budget cuts applying to the UNCTAD, while Indonesia and Malaysian officials said the body should retain a large role in boosting trade for poor countries.
In a video address to the ninth UNCTAD conference, Gore paid tribute to former U.S. commerce secretary Ron Brown, who died in a plane crash in Croatia last month, saying he would have led the U.S. delegation to the UNCTAD meeting.
"I want to share what I know would have been his priority goal for this critical meeting -- to speed the integration of the developing world into the world trading system...in conjunction with sound environmental and economic strategies," Gore said in the message to the 2,500 delegates on the third day of the two- week meeting.
He said the United States has "close and cooperative relations with both South Africa and UNCTAD" and he welcomed South Africa's "resumption of leadership in the UN system".
U.S. delegate Melinda Kimble told the conference that after agreement on the United States' budget this week the United States will pay "in full" its regular 1995 contribution to the United Nations easing the immediate cash-flow crisis.
At the start of the UNCTAD conference there was widespread concern that the United States would seek to pull out of some UN agencies. Last month the United Nations announced it had run out of money for daily running expenses.
The UN total budget is some US$2.6 billion plus peacekeeping contributions, but it is owed $2.8 billion from member states. The United States, the largest debtor, owes $1.5 billion and Russia owes $400 million.
Kimble said the United States saw three distinct functions for UNCTAD -- economic analysis, "policy dialogue that emphasizes the sharing of experiences" and technical cooperation.
Addressing concerns among developing countries that many were becoming marginalized by the trend to global markets, Kimble said it was those countries with the most open, liberalized economies which grew most from 1980 to 1994.
She said developing countries grew 3.9 percent a year from 1990-94, more than twice as fast as developed countries. Their exports grew "impressively", with the U.S. imports from developing countries growing 40 percent from 1991-4 to reach nearly $300 billion.
On Wednesday, Indonesian Minister of Mines and Energy Ida Bagus Sudjana opposed calls to downscale UNCTAD, saying the organization "is still as relevant as ever before."
While northern countries pursue "a level playing field, they deliberately ignore the need for an appropriate (trading) arrangement for unequal levels of players," he said.
"UNCTAD ... is imminently qualified to inject a sense of direction into the globalization and liberalization process toward a world economy that will be ... more just and equitable," he said.