Financial support to South-South cooperation: the caracas programme of action and the Perez-Guerrero trust fund.

• Author: Praselj, Eduardo

South-South cooperation has been a key initiative of the developing countries, aimed at contributing to the achievement of social and economic development of their nations and peoples by forging economic and technical ties between them.

Exchanges and communication routes that linked the southern world can be traced back to ancient times, but cooperation among developing countries as an organized process is much more recent, dating back some five or six decades.

In this regard, the Group of 77 (G-77), established in 1964 on the occasion of the first United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) as a negotiating mechanism with the North on economic matters, became the main expression of the developing countries in the promotion of South-South cooperation with the adoption of the transcendent Caracas Programme of Action (CPA) in 1981, which brought the concept of collective self-reliance to the operational stage. This concept was initially launched by the Non-Aligned Movement in 1970.

While several cooperative programmes were agreed upon before the adoption of the CPA and implemented to varying degrees by various sub-regional, regional and interregional groupings in the developing world, the CPA appears as the synthesis of the great project of South-South cooperation that had been brewing in all discussions between the developing countries and constitutes the more appropriate and natural framework for cooperation.

The CPA identifies a set of priority actions in the fields of trade, technology, food and agriculture, energy, raw materials, finance, industrialization and technical cooperation. Actions in these sectors are accompanied in the CPA by the adoption of a set of mechanisms that had no precedent in the history of South-South cooperation related to coordination, monitoring, follow-up and evaluation, aimed at providing an operational base and ensuring the effective implementation of the Programme. These priority actions were later expanded by other gatherings of the Group, in particular in the Havana Programme of Action adopted by the First South Summit of the G-77 in 2000.

Cooperative actions identified in the CPA required financial support and to this end the G-77 presented resolution 38/201, adopted by the United Nations General

To date, member countries have contributed more than $1.8 million and in the past five years additional resources that were mobilized increased by 75 per cent the available resources coming from...