I thank the committee very much for the excellent questions, which we will take in order. Indeed we have a strategy of working very closely, particularly with the European Union and a number of other regional organisations, including those providing arrangements for free trade in Africa, for instance, and Latin America and Asia. We supply a great deal of assistance to the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries, the ACP, in their negotiations with the European Union. At the same time, we have a working relationship of assistance with the smaller organisations for regional co-operation and with the European Union. We have a partnership in order to promote trade as an instrument of development.
I will give the committee a concrete example. Two years ago in Brussels we organised the third United Nations conference for the least developed countries because UNCTAD is the focal point in the United Nations system for the 49 poorest among the poor, the countries where most of the population lives on under €1 a day or, at a maximum, €2 a day. Of those 49 countries, 34 are in Africa, so there is almost a match between the poorest countries and the African countries. We organised this conference in Brussels and it was the first time the European Parliament agreed to offer its premises for an international conference.
We worked very closely with Commissioners Nielsen and Lami, and most of the support, including financial support, for this conference came from the European Union. At the same time, the European Union encourages UNCTAD to work also on regional integration and to try to help the agreements, particularly in Africa, that exist among countries but where there is an enormous need of technical assistance in order to help them to move ahead in dealing with reduction of tariffs or harmonisation among different groupings.
We are working in the area of regional integration with regional organisations, and at the same time we try to help countries that are participating in free trade negotiations to make those negotiations within the global rules. As one can see, we are engaged in a wide array of activities in regard to co-operation with regional groupings aimed at achieving different goals.
It is true that conflicts may arise. This possibility explains the usefulness of having an institution like UNCTAD which is separate from the WTO. The WTO is purely a trade organisation and its members repeat that it is not a development agency. The main goal of the WTO is to promote free trade as quickly as possible. The basic constitution of the WTO is the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the objective of which is trade entirely free of any kind of barriers.
In trying to promote this goal the WTO services negotiations. In acting as the secretariat for negotiations it must be impartial and cannot take sides. The difference with us is that, not being a negotiating agency, we have more freedom to support developing country members, something the WTO cannot do because it would be accused of taking sides in the negotiations. Our role and membership is universal. Although our membership is universal, UNCTAD's membership is even bigger than that of the General Assembly. We are a subsidiary body of the General Assembly of the United Nations, but we have an even bigger constituency. Switzerland is a member of UNCTAD, for instance, and until a few years ago it was not a member of the General Assembly, and there are a few other such members.
Although we are members of the General Assembly and our constituency is universal, it is well understood that UNCTAD tries to promote development through trade. Therefore it is accepted that we should help and try to assist the developing companies in their negotiations.
It is true that from time to time some conflicts do arise. I will give a concrete example of this from the opening only a few months ago in Geneva of ECOSOC, Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, where in the first meeting devoted to rural development and problems of agriculture I made a strong statement criticising the damage done by the cotton subsidies, first and foremost from the United States - there are also some cotton subsidies, although on a much smaller scale, in the EU for Spain and Greece and also in China. I devoted a good part of my statement to the problems that those cotton subsidies were creating for some of the poorest countries in the world like Benin, Mali, Burkina Faso, Sudan. It happened that on the same day US Ambassador Negroponte had a meeting with me a few hours later and of course he was not entirely pleased, to say the least, with what I had said. In a case such as this I see it as my duty, without any wish to create new antagonisms, to tell the truth.
We have to help bring about rules in trade that would be fairer to those poor countries. Therefore from time to time we may have those different perspectives but a solution can always be found if one does not lose sight of the fact that our main goal is promoting development through trade, not trading of itself. This is why we do not always support shock therapy for countries to raise their trade regimes irrespective of the consequences, for instance, in terms of increasing unemployment. We are more careful in trying to assess the social impact of trade measures that one knows are very important, not only in developing countries but even in developed societies.
Turning to the question of democracy and corruption, there is now much progress under way in trying to link good governance and practices with an appropriate response by the international community in terms of foreign aid. For example, under the current scheme for debt relief, the so-called heavily indebted poor countries, HIPC, initiative one of the requirements for a country to qualify for debt relief is exactly its performance in a number of governance indicators which have to do with good practices, including fighting corruption and having a participative kind of system which is democratic, and openness to criticism and to dialogue. I do not mean that this is an ideal solution to the problem of promoting institutions that are democratic and free from corruption, but increasingly as one can see in NEPAD, the New Partnership for Africa's Development, there is now an awareness by the African countries themselves of the need for them to have ownership of those governance practices and to try to improve the quality of the political system.
On the question on the supply capability and marketing, etc., I would highlight that Ireland, in this respect, is an extremely positive example for many developing countries. These countries are perfectly aware that Ireland has had the fastest rates of growth in the European Union for a long period of time, that the Irish economy went through a profound transformation and that one of the elements of that transformation was the success of Irish policies in targeting foreign direct investment and in bringing investment that would create new sources of employment which also would bring to Ireland the possibility of building a very successful export platform. Of course we know that very few countries in the world could replicate Ireland's conditions in terms of political institutions, legal and judicial system, level of education and many other aspects which, in Ireland's case, go a long way to explain the success.
Ireland's example, however, has been extremely useful to our organisation because UNCTAD works hard promoting foreign direct investment and we were actually instrumental, together with another UN agency, United Nations Industrial Development Organisation, UNIDO, in the creation of the first world association of investment promotion agencies which now is a completely autonomous entity. This association was for a long time chaired by the director of the Irish public entity that dealt with investment promotion. Therefore all the work that has been done in this area of promoting investment has taken to a large extent the Irish model as an inspiration, although we are very acutely aware of the difference. This leads me to the second part of the question, namely, whether these experiences can be replicated. What one can do is always relative in terms of trying to transfer experiences from a particular national setting to a different one. The interest of members in Africa was referred to. It is good to have this interest because the biggest challenge we all face relates to the development of the least developed countries. As can be seen from my statistics, most of the least developed countries are African. This is increasingly becoming an African problem. Africa is where the international community will face the biggest challenge in meeting the so-called millennium development goals to halve poverty by 2015, reduce infant mortality, increase the number of children in school and increase the number of girls in school. This is where the problem lies. In Africa there are not many of the institutions which favoured the development of Asian countries.
I want to concentrate on one aspect of the problem. In my personal experience with development, if I had to sum it up in a few words, I would say that development is a continuous learning process. It is something that will never stop. The main difference between the Asian approach, starting with Japan in the 19th century and going straight through all the other experiences up to China nowadays, and what prevailed in other areas in Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean, is exactly a sort of intuitive understanding that development was a learning process, something that one had to approach, beginning with education and investment in human resources - not any kind of education but education that would lead people to learn how to compete and improve the workings of the economy.
Unfortunately, this approach is not widespread. In many countries there was a tendency to concentrate on the role of the state as promoter of development. The state has an irreplaceable role to play in promoting development. It can only do so, however, if it has a clear priority on development as a learning process, something that will always challenge one and which never ceases. In our work, we try to persuade countries that this is a fundamental and decisive factor. There must be a capacity to learn from other people's experience and to try to make the best possible use of natural and human resources. I hope I have addressed some, if not all, aspects of the problem.
