Fighting Terrorism

The annual general meeting of the World Economic Forum at the snowy heights of Davos, Switzerland, in which the world's top business leaders, political luminaries and forthright academicians, like Nobel Prize-winners, participated, had a complex agenda.

The five-day meeting attended by 1,000 businessmen was spread over 235 sessions. It began with discussions on issues like security and promotion of global economic growth and ended with reducing inequity. As befits a business conclave, they did not talk of poverty in the developing countries or measures for its reduction, but of inequity which they wanted to reduce for the sake of better and larger business.

But behind the scenes, efforts for resuming a dialogue on globalization of the trade interrupted by the Cancun ministerial meeting of the WTO, continued, but without any success. The sentiment was in favour of resuming the dialogue with even US trade representative Robert Zoellick in favour of this.

James Scott Peterson, Canada's trade minister, voiced the feelings of many others when he said: "The message is we have to restart the negotiations very very quickly. We have to work very very hard." And there was agreement that the large gap between the developed and the developing countries has to be narrowed. But there was no agreement on the negotiating framework for the round. This has to be done before discussions resume and are placed on a sound track.

One leader who has been openly and strongly urging leaders of the industrial states to make concessions to the poor countries in trade is Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the UN. He made an impassioned plea at Davos to enable the poor countries get a fair deal from trade.

He wanted the leaders assembled there to use their influence to persuade the US and European Union realize that it was in everyone's interest that they give ground in areas such as farm subsidies.

He said: " Agricultural subsidies skew market forces. They destroy the environment. And they block poor country exports from world markets. For all our sake and for the credibility of the system itself, they must be eliminated." The US and Europe which spend as much as 350 billion dollars a year on farm subsidies have offered some relief but they are far from satisfactory to the developing countries which clamour for a far better deal.

But that is not the only major issue of grave concern for Kofi Annan. He sees the UN millennial goals which among others set 2015 as the year in which to reduce the world's poverty by half going out of focus of the world's nations, particularly of the rich states like the US.

He finds the increasing focus on fighting terrorism and accelerating economic growth in the industrial states bypassing those goals, which would reduce human misery in the world and make it a better place to live in.

The other key millennial goals are achieving universal primary education by the 2015 promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality by two-thirds, improving maternal health by three quarters, combating AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability and ensuring global partnership for development. But at the moment the focus is on developing global partnership for fighting terrorism.

To refocus the world's attention on these very essential goals, he purposes to convene a new business summit at the UN headquarters in New York where such critical developmental issues will receive proper attention. He finds that in their effort to fight the political and military causes of terrorism the basic causes of terrorism are being ignored.

The US under George Bush and Britain and others supporting the coalition against terrorism are not in a mood to give equal priority to fighting poverty. So Kofi Annan is trying to take them back to the real track to eliminate the basic or eternal causes of crime and ultimately terrorism. Annan wants a rule-based global order instead of one based on military might or economic strength of a group of nations.

It remains to be seen how much support Annan receives from the US and western nations as a whole for convening the business session of the UN he proposes to deal with economic and social agenda or the UN millennial goals and in pledging the requisite funds for that. Without success in fighting terrorism in such areas the US may win the war against terrorism in one area but only to lose it in another or suffer severe setbacks.

"Without accelerated action to get more girls into schools over the next two years, global goals to reduce poverty and improve human condition would simply not be reached," says the Unicef report on the State of the Children - 2004.

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