Questions of development.

• Position: GA 56 - Second Committee (Economic and Financial - Francisco Seixas Da Costa, United Nations

Francisco Seixas da Costa said he had maintained the tradition of consensus in the Second Committee. As Committee Chairman, he oversaw debates on hotly-contested subjects, among others, on sustainable development, globalization and interdependence, and international migration. When the Committee finally sent its 38 recommendations to the General Assembly, 36 were adopted without a vote.

"This is a tradition that I try to maintain as much as possible in the Second Committee", Ambassador Seixas da Costa said in an interview with the Chronicle, "because this is the only way for the United Nations to go ahead with the full commitment of all its membership."

He said that this commitment was driven by a "trend inside the United Nations", which was "in favour of a global linkage between sustainable development, trade issues and also financing for development". Financing for development, he said, should consider issues of debt and institutional financial architecture, and link it to policies of sustainable development. "If we don't link that to coherent policies in terms of sustainable development, we will not achieve a consensual result", he noted.

In 35 sittings, the Committee forwarded 16 texts to the Assembly for final consideration. These related to the direction and purpose of development, trade liberalization, the multilateral trading regime and globalization. Some other texts related to the Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey in March 2002, and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in September 2002. Among the important resolutions adopted by the Committee were those on the creation of a special representative for the least developed countries (LDCs) and on a global climate convention.

Nitin Desai, Under-Secretary-General of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, in the Chronicle Interview (see page 20), said that one of the key issues of financing for development was mobilizing domestic resources. One area where finances could be generated was within countries themselves. He stressed that the Conference "is not a conference on the context of development. This is a conference on the financing for development. It's about building capacity to develop the financial system domestically".

This was an issue that Paolo Garonna dealt with in Europe. Mr. Garonna, an applied economist who started his career seventeen years ago at the University of Padua in Italy, represented the UN Economic Commission for Europe at the Fourth Preparatory Meeting...