WORLD SUMMIT FOR SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT January 95

On 11 and 12 March 1995, the world's leaders will meet at the Social Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark to issue a Declaration and Programme of Action on how they plan to combat poverty, unemployment and social disintegration... The task is urgent. In the time it takes you to read this page, one hundred and twenty children will have died from causes which could easily have been prevented by adequate food, clean water and basic health care.

Action Alert:
The World Summit for Social Development

      "Cuts in essential services have meant health centres without drugs and doctors, schools without books and teachers. The very young are paying the highest price of all, because they are paying with their one chance to grow normally in mind and body."
      UNICEF 1995 State of the World's Children Report

      "The global social crisis threatens many States as much as any foreign army... Without investment in social development the foundations of peace will not be secured."
      UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali

      "The global community has long hoped for the time when it could meet the basic needs of every human being. At times this has seemed an unrealistic goal, but it is now clear that it is financially feasible. And the Social Summit now presents the opportunity to turn this hope into reality."
      UNDP 1994 Human Development Report

SEND A MESSAGE TO THE SOCIAL SUMMIT

UNICEF and UNDP say that we can meet the basic needs of all the world's people if governments change their budget priorities. By making your voice heard now, you can help make the change happen.

SUMMARY

On 11 and 12 March 1995, the world's leaders will meet at the Social Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark to issue a Declaration and Programme of Action on how they plan to combat poverty, unemployment and social disintegration.

The task is urgent. In the time it takes you to read this page, one hundred and twenty children will have died from causes which could easily have been prevented by adequate food, clean water and basic health care.

The leaders will commit themselves to the eradication of poverty. But in the draft documents for the Summit, they are vague on where the money will come from.

The poor can't eat promises. What is needed is real resources to meet the basic needs of the poor.

Meeting the basic needs of all the world's citizens is an age-old dream. But buried in the text of the Social Summit's draft Programme of Action are two ideas which, if implemented, could achieve that goal within ten years. They have been put forward by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Population Fund and other UN agencies.

The first is called the 20/20 Initiative. UNDP has calculated that if 20% of development aid from the North (up from 7% today), and 20% of government spending in the South (up from 13%), were spent on meeting the essential needs of the citizens for basic education, primary health care, clean water, sanitation, nutrition, family planning and access to credit, these things could be available to virtually everyone on Earth.

The second idea is a levy on international currency transactions, which could generate massive resources for human development. About a trillion dollars is sent across national borders every day, much of it by currency speculators. This proposal comes particularly from UNDP, which calculates that even a small tax of 0.05% would not only discourage disruptive currency speculation but would generate US$150 billion a year, more than double the current total of international development asistance.

These ideas have met with resistance from many governments in South and North, who prefer to spend vast sums on the military than to spend modest amounts on the needs of the poor.

Your government needs to hear from you that these proposals deserve support.

ACTION

Your head of government may not read many letters from ordinary citizens, but your representatives in parliament do - because they want your vote. And they can raise issues with heads of government.

Ask him or her to urge your national leader to announce at the Social Summit that:

    * your government strongly supports both the 20/20 Initiative and the proposal for a levy on international currency transactions.

    * regardless of the outcome of the Summit, in future your country will devote at least 20% of its government budget [in a Southern country] or development assistance [in a Northern country] to meeting the needs of the poorest citizens for basic education, primary health care, family planning, clean water, sanitation, nutrition and access to credit.

If possible, please also send a letter to the editor of a newspaper on this issue. Research shows that these letters get the attention of policy makers.

BACKGROUND

The Social Crisis

A few facts say it all:

    * More than 1 billion people live in absolute poverty, and more than half of them go hungry every day.
    * More than 2 million children die annually of easily preventable infectious disease.
    * 1.3 billion people, roughly a quarter of humanity, lack access to safe drinking water.
    * Over 120 million people world-wide are officially unemployed.
    * 80 million children don't even attend primary school.

Meanwhile, global military spending, despite a decline since the end of the Cold War, still equals the combined income of the poorest half of humanity.

The Social Summit

The Social Summit will be held in Copenhagen from 6 to 12 March, 1995, to consider what is to be done. The three core issues of the Summit are poverty, unemployment and social disintegration.

The actual summit meeting, to be attended by many of the world's presidents and prime ministers, will take place on 11 and 12 March. The days preceding it, from 6 to 10 March, will see pre-summit consultations by high-level government officials.

There will be a large parallel gathering of NGOs and civil society, "NGO-Forum '95", in Copenhagen from 3 to 12 March.

The assembled leaders will issue a Declaration and a Programme of Action outlining the steps they propose to take. These documents have been worked on intensively since January 1994, and should be finalized before the leaders meet.

If the language in the draft Declaration is adopted, the heads of state and government will make nine central commitments. Among other things, they will commit themselves to "the goal of eradicating poverty in the world", and to "increase significantly and utilize more efficiently the resources assigned to social development."

The Declaration will be followed by a Programme of Action of some forty pages, listing a wide range of steps that should be taken to confront social problems.

No one expects the Social Summit to solve the problems at one stroke. But the Summit does represent a crucial opportunity to press governments for new and concrete commitments to attack the poverty that so afflicts all parts of the world.

The good intentions described in the Summit documents are impeccable. The weakness in the documents boils down to the old question: who pays?

The 20/20 Initiative

One concrete financial target that is being actively discussed in the pre-Summit negotiations is the 20/20 Initiative.

If donor nations devote 20% of their development assistance to meeting basic human needs, and developing country governments devote 20% of their budgets to these goals, this would generate additional funding on the order of $30 to $40 billion a year. The UN calculates that this would make it possible over the next ten years to achieve the following goals:

    * Everyone has access to basic education.
    * Everyone has access to primary health care, clean drinking water and sanitation.
    * All children are immunized.
    * Maternal mortality is halved.
    * All willing couples have access to family planning services.
    * Adult illiteracy is reduced to half the current figure, with girls' education on a par with that of boys.
    * Severe malnutrition is eliminated, and moderate malnutrition halved.
    * World population moves towards stabilization at 7.3 billion by 2015.
    * Credit schemes are extended to the poor to enable them to seek self-employment and a sustainable livelihood.

The 20/20 Initiative, of course, only addresses people's most basic needs. To have a fair chance in life, the poorest citizens need a complete education (not just primary education), full health care services, adequate housing, training and support for small-scale farmers and producers, and empowerment through support for citizen and community groups, among other things. Many NGOs are pressing Northern governments not only to devote 20% of development assistance to basic needs, but a full 50% to human development and social spending.

You might think that any Southern government would consider it worth 20% of its budget to meet the most basic needs of its citizens. You might think, too, that Northern governments would have no difficulty devoting a mere 20% of development aid to these needs. But in fact, most countries in North and South fall well short of these targets. Southern governments collectively devote to these concerns less than half of what they spend on the military.

Many governments aren't keen to change their priorities. The 20/20 Initiative has been hotly debated in the preparations for the Social Summit. A group of countries, including Benin, Chile, Colombia, the Philippines, Kenya and a number of other African countries are actively promoting it. They are supported among the Northern nations by Austria and the Netherlands among others, who are constrained only by needing to form a common policy with countries such as Britain, which is firmly resisting the idea. The Group of 77, made up of developing nations, is generally unenthusiastic, with India expressing many reservations.

Some of the reservations have to do with the idea of setting international targets for national budgets (though this has been done before with development assistance). But the reality is that 20/20 would require a major shift in priorities away from military and other expenditures towards meeting the needs of the poor. Despite much rhetoric to the contrary, many governments apparently prefer to build dams and buy fighter planes rather than to care for the health and education of children.

A number of alternative wordings have been put forward for the section of the draft Programme of Action dealing with the 20/20 Initiative. Some of them are intended to weaken or eliminate the 20% commitment. The wording will go through more revisions before the Summit opens.

Whatever the outcome in Copenhagen, what matters most is the decisions governments take in their own national decision-making. Even if there is no global agreement on the 20% goal for all countries, there is no reason why individual governments should not commit themselves to meet it.
A levy on currency transfers

Meeting essential human needs is a fundamental priority. But much more is required if we are to build a more just, peaceful and sustainable world community, and the Social Summit is focused on this larger task too.

Many governments agree on the desirable goals: narrowing the economic gap between North and South, protecting the land from degradation and the forests from destruction, investing in job-creating and environmentally sound technologies, building a stronger international system for war prevention, to name just a few of the most critical tasks facing humanity. But the question again arises: who pays?

So often when concrete proposals are put forward in any of these areas, the answer is the same: there's no new money for it.

When we look at the scarcity of resources for sustainable development, or at the world's failure to pay even for the UN's current peacekeeping operations, we cannot be optimistic that major additional resources will be found within national budgets. If we are to solve humanity's most pressing global problems, we need to look to new sources.

The UN Development Programme is advancing a bold proposal for generating international revenue to meet the most urgent global priorities. The proposal is for a small tax on international currency transfers.

A version of this idea was first put forward by the Nobel-prizewinning economist James Tobin. He suggested a tax of 0.05% on all international currency transfers. This would have two important economic benefits. First, it would discourage the currency speculation - now practised on a massive scale by the world's financial elites - which is so disruptive to international commerce and investment. Second, it would give national governments greater autonomy to set interest rates at a level appropriate for their own country.

Even more important, however, is the revenue that such a tax could generate. An estimated $1 trillion a day crosses borders. A tax of 0.5% on currency transactions, which would yield hundreds of billions of dollars a year (even allowing for the reduction in speculation that the levy would bring about.) UNDP estimates that even a tax of 0.05% could raise around $150 billion a year. While modest compared to global military spending of some $800 billion a year, this is nevertheless funding on the scale that we need to combat poverty, protect the environment and keep the peace. UNDP proposes that the proceeds should be received and distributed by a new global human security fund.

One question, of course, is who would decide how such large sums should be spent? Many people might have qualms about entrusting the task to our current international financial institutions, which are not particularly democratic in their structure. When deciding how substantial resources should be spent to meet the most pressing global priorities, the people of the world should have their say.

Perhaps the answer at the global level is the same as that at the national level (or the regional level in the European Union): the people should be able to elect representatives directly to a global parliamentary body, which would adopt a budget for the expenditure of these global revenues.

This is a big idea. But, given the scale of humanity's problems, perhaps it is time to create common institutions with the resources and the democratic legitimacy to help ensure the security of all the world's citizens.

Whatever the decision-making structure, the actual expenditure of the funds should be carried out in the most decentralized way possible, and not through any large global bureaucracy.

There has been discussion of this proposed tax in the preparations for the Social Summit. The working draft, as it stood at the start of 1995, says: "In addition to augmenting the flow of resources through established channels the Economic and Social Council [of the UN] should be requested to consider new and innovative ideas for generating funds for social development including the possibility of raising finance through international taxation of certain types of international activities, such as financial transactions, air travel and telecommunications."

The Summit itself is unlikely to do more than agree to study the idea further, but the support this proposal receives from individual heads of government in Copenhagen will be crucial if serious negotiations on its implementation are to be launched.