Italy

Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs

Sen. Rino Serri

Geneva, June 28, 2000

The choices made in Copenhagen in '95 represented a most important moment in the international reflection and discussion on development problems.

Some trends considered market mechanisms are alone sufficient to solve development economic and social problems. In this respect Copenhagen and the UN world conferences following stressed once more the need to bring social problems back to the basis of economic development: human development, the fight against poverty, unemployment and social isolation, the need for environmental protection and reproduction, a new role to be played by women, children's rights.

Although we have started along this path, we are just at the beginning. There are still many hindrances and difficulties to be overcome and strategies to be redefined.

First of all, I believe that experiences gained over the last few years proved that the aims of development aid, fighting poverty and affirming rights and human dignity cannot be effectively achieved unless the whole field of economic, financial and trade policies implemented in the present world is involved. This is even more true if we consider the globalization process, which had huge consequences which on the lives of people, as well as engendering wide aibeit contradicting movements and protests, as was the case for example in Seattle.

As a matter of fact, the question is not whether to prevent or stop globalization processes. However, it is now sure that these processes must be governed both in view of a greater stability of economic growth and in order to guarantee within it the priority to be attached to human development and social and civil growth for every community.

This requires new relations to be established at worldwide and regional levels among political authorities - first of all the United Nations - and the financial, monetary and trade ones. New, more representative and fairer balances of power must be created among developed and developing countries and even more with the least developed ones, which still have too a limited influence on decision-making mechanisms.

In this process the international agencies and organizations belonging to the United Nations or connected with it can play those functions of inspiration, guidance and coordination which are not merely confined to the technical or sometimes bureaucratic aspects. Only in this way can the objectives set in Copenhagen and in the following conferences be met since they become choices affecting the economic and financial policies and benchmarks for their real results.

It is necessary to move urgently in that direction. Humanitarian crises and emergencies risk moving faster than our ability to prevent and avoid them through brave solutions, appropriate resources, and innovative spirit. It suffices to think of the tragic aspects involved in migration flows - as was recently the case in Dover - and the new criminal phenomena connected to them.

We must tackle the new phase looming large for our work and more direct responsibilities with the same philosophy.

The experience gathered in the last few years teaches us at least three essential things:

1 - it is increasingly necessary to move from a development cooperation conceived as a sum of separate and independent projects to a cooperation based on objectives and shared strategies an on far-reaching and coordinated actions which can be a reference and guidance point for national and regional policies.

2 - it is necessary to aim at new dynamics between unified and coordinated initiatives which, however, can go beyond rigidly sectoral, centralized and sometimes still purely welfare practices and invite to a new participation by partners and their communities in a widespread and decentralized way with a new role to be played by democratic institutions and by all of the organized forms of civil society. For these reasons Italy decided to organize, in concomitance with this Special Session of the U.N. General Assembly, a Special Event over two days to discuss decentralized cooperation.

3 - the third lesson is a consequence of the others. In today's world, because of the new inter-relations being created and of the new potentials of communications and new technologies it is of the utmost importance to find new forms of convergence and even integration between the private and public sectors, the economic and social events, business dynamics and community and solidarity values in the richest moments of social life. Along these lines, it will be useful to think also of new forms of international cooperation.

With its huge potential of resources involved in Public Development Aid, the EU is called upon to provide a contribution which might turn out to be decisive for the social and political culture it carries precisely in order to achieve the objectives set in Copenhagen.

We are trying to get the Italian Cooperation sector to be involved along these lines by going back to increase resources for PDA and through a new balance between the bilateral and multilateral cooperation. The latter is the most suited tool to implement the necessary innovations in the development policies, provided that it avoids red tape and spurs a real dialogue with all of the protagonists.

To this end, Italy is already cooperating with UNDP and other International Organizations to implement framework programs for human development, which are mutually coordinated in fourteen countries in the world. For the year 2000 we have already allocated more than 150 million dollars for new framework programs explicitly aimed at reducing poverty and for the other Copenhagen objectives.

Italy wants to support these new forms of cooperation and, therefore, we have decided to participate in its launching through special financing made available to the Trust Funds set up by UNDP and ILO.

In response to the indications emerging from the Special Event on cooperation taking place in conjunction with this Assembly, Italy warmly encourages the Secretary General of the United Nations to continue consulting Governments and other cooperation collaborators. This with a view to creating an international group of partners which, together with UNDP, ILO and other International Organizations, intend to actively engage in the greatest utilization of cooperation instruments to achieve the objectives established at Copenhagen and now reaffirmed and re-enforced here in Geneva.

To conclude I would like to repeat that all of this will have a real impact if also from this meeting in Geneva and the ensuing actions a new stimulus will emerge to upgrade, integrate and amend economic and trade policies as well as the financial ones starting from the reduction and cancellation of debt. This should no longer be conceived as a "oneoff' but rather as the beginning of a new phase which prevents debt from increasing and offers new sound and lasting bases for development also for those countries and populations which up to now have remained, partially or completely, on the fringes of it.