Monday, November 3, 2003
The focus on funding for the U.S.-led war on terrorism is undermining the fight against global poverty, World Bank Environment Director Kristalina Georgieva told Reuters last week, stressing that governments around the world spend $600 billion on arms per year but only $50 billion on development aid.
“The war on terror is shifting attention away from making globalization work for all,” said Georgieva. “It is undermining our ability to drive forward a responsible globalization. We need prevention rather than reaction, yet we focus not on the causes but on the cures.”
Georgieva estimated that between $115 billion and $155 billion would be needed “to make a real dent in the problem of long-term environmental sustainability” (Jeremy Lovell, Reuters/PlanetArk, Oct. 31).
Georgieva’s comments echoed those of World Bank President James Wolfensohn Thursday in a General Assembly meeting on trade, aid, debt and investment. “We in our institution are concerned about the imbalance that exists in terms of the allocation of resources and the allocation of interest in the development process,” he said.
In the same meeting, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan pointed that last year developing countries made a net transfer of $200 billion in financial resources to other countries, when they should in fact be the recipients of aid, and “funds should be moving from developed countries to developing countries.”
Also speaking before the General Assembly, U.N. Development Program Administrator Mark Malloch Brown said that if donors had the same political will they had in Madrid when they raised $33 billion for the reconstruction in Iraq to help poor countries, “we could put in place the resources and the policy reforms” to meet the U.N. Millennium Development Goals by 2015 (World Bank release, Oct. 31).
UN Wire
Tags: Poverty Analysis
