Second Committee: Economic and Financial; Big questions with no easy answers.

• Author: Hagen, Jonas
• Position: 58th General Assembly Session - Includes related article: UN-HABITAT

How to create more equality in a global economy where one quarter of the world's 6 billion people consume more than half of global resources, how to assist people and countries out of crippling debt so they too can benefit from the globalization of wealth: and how to keep rising sea levels from swallowing small island States--these are some of the enormous and complex matters the Second Committee tackles "These are big questions, and there are no easy answers", Committee Chairman Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury of Bangladesh told the UN Chronicle. "To know what to ask is to know half the answer in some ways."

A total 37 resolutions were recommended to the General Assembly for adoption: 35 of them were adopted without a vote in the tradition of consensus within the Committee.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)--whose aims include halving by the year 2015 the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water: eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005; and developing an open, rule-based, nondiscriminatory trading and financial system--framed Committee discussions. Burkina Faso, Yemen, Venezuela and other industrializing nations asked donor countries to fulfil the promise made at the International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey Mexico in 2002, where leaders from donor countries agreed to increase official development assistance (ODA) to 7 percent of their countries' gross domestic product

In the Committee debate, Nguyen Thanh Chau of Viet Nam pointed out that although ODA had risen by 4.8 per cent, to $57 billion in 2002, that was still far short of the $100 billion the World Bank estimated was needed to finance the MDGs in the developing world.

Ambassador Chowdhury said that although the donor community must keep its promise on ODA, developing countries had the obligation to use aid effectively. He said: "In the 1970s, Bangladesh was able to evolve homegrown ideas, such as micro-credit and non-formal education. This, coupled with fairly good governance, pluralistic institutions and a strong middle class, gave society the where-withal to absorb external assistance." He added that over a period of time, his country had achieved a steady growth rate of 5 to 6 per cent, along with social goals such as gender mainstreaming. "It is an extremely successful paradigm of how a traditional society is being modernized by empowering women. The numbers of educated Bangladeshis have gone up extremely high all girl-children have free education". the Ambassador said.

Donor nations tend to place conditionalities for good governance and professional accounting of donor aid. In fact, in the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD)--a homegrown plan by Africans for the region which the General Assembly endorsed in 2002--a peer...