ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COUNCIL OPENS HIGH-LEVEL SEGMENT DEVOTED TO SUPPORTING SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA

ECOSOC
16 July 2001
Morning



Secretary-General Urges Support for African Initiatives


United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the Economic and Social Council this morning that there should be an expanded international commitment to African development based on support for local African programmes for economic advancement.

The Secretary-General told the Council's annual high-level segment that few of the many past attempts of the United Nations system in Africa had been effective -- in fact, such programmes were often perceived by the African men and women who were expected to implement them as the work of remote bureaucrats with no understanding of African conditions. In the future, he said, greater efforts had to be made to listen to people on the ground.

But Africa also had suffered from decades of mismanagement during which its resources, instead of being exploited for the benefit of its people, had become a source of misery, Mr. Annan said -- wasted by incompetent governments, misappropriated by corrupt ones, and made the cause of devastating civil and cross-border wars. At a recent Organization of African Unity (OAU) summit in Lusaka, African leaders had taken a cold, hard look at that record, Mr. Annan said, and the United Nations similarly had to review its own track record on the continent.

The theme of this year's high-level segment is "the role of the United Nations system in supporting the efforts of African countries to achieve sustainable development", and Council President Martin Belinga-Eboutou (Cameroon) said in opening the meeting that the international community recognized that the collective destiny of the world was linked to the destiny of Africa and that boldness had to be shown in finding solutions to that continent's very serious problems.

Mr. Belinga-Eboutou's and Mr. Annan's addresses were followed by a policy dialogue with the heads of the financial and trade institutions of the United Nations system on recent developments in the world economy. These officials also placed emphasis on Africa.

Horst Kohler, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, said the international concept of globalization should respond to the fact that all humanity shared one world, and should lay the foundation for more broadly shared prosperity -- that above all, success in the fight against poverty was the key to stability and peace in the twenty-first century, and such a fight had to begin in Africa.

James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, told the meeting that the keys to progress in Africa were improving governance and resolving conflict; eliminating corruption; investing in people, increasing competitiveness and diversifying economies; and increasing financing for development based on African ownership of the process and on African leadership.

Mike Moore, Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), said that after decades of experimenting with sometimes disastrous models of development, one thing had been learned -- sustainable development could not take root unless countries and communities genuinely took ownership of their own development. The contribution of the WTO to African economic progress lay in improving market access and in ensuring predictability and the rule of law in trading relations between States, he said.

Rubens Ricupero, Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), said it might sound paradoxical, but the only way for African countries to overcome their aid dependency was to supply in the first instance more aid, and in a more effective way, to generate a positive momentum that in due course would make aid superfluous. For this to happen, current levels of official assistance must be doubled and maintained over at least a decade in order to allow domestic savings, experts and external private flows to pick up and gradually replace aid, Mr. Ricupero said.

Also speaking was K.Y. Amoako, Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), who said a major breakthrough for Africa was the decision to create an African economic union, which would seek to establish policies that fostered a convergence of enabling macroeconomic conditions that ensured there would be no losers in an integrated Africa; and that would try to set clear priorities for Africa's infrastructure development. Central to all this was the need to build and sustain peace and security, and to bridge the gap between conflict and normative development, Mr. Amoako said.

In the discussion that followed, national representatives speaking from the floor contended, among other things, that the natural resources of Africa were not being used for the enrichment of the African people but for the enrichment of foreign business interests and for a tiny African power elite, and even for waging wars; that poverty education had been talked about endlessly over the last decade, but at the same time had increased in most of the world's least-developed countries; that the New African Initiative was like the Marshall Plan except that instead of coming at the end of a major conflict it was being proposed while a number of conflicts were going on and in fact seemed to be multiplying; and that developed countries which were WTO members regularly subsidized agriculture, yet African countries were barred from doing so if they wanted to join the WTO.

The Council will reconvene at 3 p.m. to hold an African forum for investment promotion. There will also be three round tables on the investment climate in African countries; financing of investment; and infrastructure needs.


Statements

MARTIN BELINGA-EBOUTOU, President of the Economic and Social Council, said people used images to formulate their dreams and hopes for a better world, and no image better fit this task than the phrase "the global village"; yet the village did not yet exist; there were too many gaps and divisions. Africa was at best a building site rather than a village; at worst it was a building site that had been abandoned. There was no doubt that the international community recognized that the collective destiny of the world was linked to the destiny of Africa; it was necessary to show the strong will needed to improve the situation on that continent.

The United Nations bore a very heavy responsibility for Africa, and the Council owed it to itself to be one of the essential links in the chain, inspiring and guiding programmes and actions aimed at helping Africa, Mr. Belinga-Eboutou said. A number of recent global meetings -- on HIV/AIDS, on least-developed countries, the Millennium Summit, the upcoming Special Session of the General Assembly on children -- illustrated the United Nations commitment to Africa. And all those meetings had as their major focus poverty; poverty had to be eliminated, and African economies had to be bolstered. Also needed were peace and good governance on the part of African countries. The latest summit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), in Lusaka, had shown the resolve of African leaders to take Africa's own development in hand; the OAU had presented a consistent and transparent framework for progress, and the Lusaka manifesto was a challenge both for Africa and the international community, which had to provide the resources necessary to support this initiative.

How could there be better integration of assistance given by the United Nations system to policies and programmes for bettering Africa that were developed by the African nations themselves? How could development on that continent be energized; how could peace be created and sustained; how could the burden of African countries' external debt be eased? How could the objective for Africa set by the Millennium Declaration be achieved? It was time to find answers to those questions in a new spirit of hope and commitment and through a thorough dialogue on Africa and its problems. Boldness had to be shown in finding solutions to Africa's very serious problems.

KOFI ANNAN, United Nations Secretary-General, said Africans must not delude themselves. Even though trade and markets represented the best hope for Africa, as for other regions, in the longer term, the sad truth was that at present few African countries were really equipped to seize any market opportunities they were offered. Most African countries had long been accorded preferential access to European markets for most of their products. Yet they remained on the margins of the world economy. Indeed, for that very reason, Africa was relatively unaffected by the current slowdown. But that was small consolation, given the slow rate of growth Africa was already experiencing. Unless that rate improved spectacularly in the next few years, Africa had no hope of achieving the targets of poverty reduction and social progress set by last year's Millennium Summit. Africa suffered from decades of mismanagement during which its resources, instead of being exploited for the benefit of its people, had become a source of misery. These resources were not only wasted by incompetent governments, but were misappropriated by corrupt ones. They became the cause of devastating wars, not only among the citizens of the country they belonged to, but also between the armies of neighbouring states, which intervened in their neighbours' conflicts and cynically took advantage of their misfortunes.

Africans had many hard questions to ask of themselves and their leaders. It was satisfying to know that they were now being asked. And that was yet another reason why the theme this week was timely. If Africans were taking a cold, hard look at their own record, it was surely appropriate that the United Nations should take a similar look at its own record in Africa. Over the decades, the United Nations System had been involved in so many African development initiatives that it could not be remembered what all of their acronyms stood for. Unfortunately few, if any, had been effective. One reason for this was that, although African experts and diplomats certainly played an important role in devising these plans, they were often perceived, by the African men and women who were expected to implement them, as the work of remote bureaucrats with no understanding of African conditions. In the future, greater efforts must be made to listen to the people on the ground. There had to be less eagerness in devising and promoting United Nations initiatives, and more constructiveness in finding ways to support local African initiatives.

In the last two years, the African Development Forum organized by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) had played an invaluable role in helping African leaders focus their energies, first on the effort to make new information and communications technology more widely accessible in Africa; and later on the battle against HIV/AIDS. And now ECA would have a major role to play in the implementation of the new African initiative that was adopted at the Summit of the Organization of African Unity in Lusaka last week. That role would be essentially a technical one, but that was as it should be. The United Nations would be at the service of an African initiative, and not the other way round. Indeed, it was very encouraging to see the emergence of this serious, home grown African recovery plan at a time when Africa's leaders declared their commitment to an African Union. This could be a turning-point in Africa's history. That has been said so often before that it may seem folly to repeat it. Yet, it was believed that African leaders were, at last, taking more seriously the need to put an end to the conflicts which laid waste so much of the continent - causing untold human misery, making normal economic life impossible, and frightening away investment even from countries that were not directly affected.

After attending three African summit meetings this year - in Yaounde in January, Abuja in April, and Lusaka - there was an impression that Africans, including African leaders, were now much less disposed to blame all their troubles on outsiders and more determined to take responsibility for their own future. If they did, they were surely entitled to the international community's support. And the role of the United Nations System in mobilising and delivering that support would be crucial. The United Nations had to become Africa's advocate, not only for improved market access, but also for the reduction of the subsidies paid by rich countries to their farmers, which currently amounted to $1 billion a day. This lowered world prices, and led to lower incomes and poverty in Africa. The United Nations had to become Africa's advocate for increased official development aid, without which many African countries would not be able to develop their physical or social infrastructure to the point where they could take advantage of new market opportunities, let alone defeat the new and deadly obstacle of HIV/AIDS. The United Nations had to become Africa's advocate for deeper and faster debt relief, to end the same absurd and unjust situation where there was a net transfer of resources from poorer to richer countries. The United Nations had to become Africa's advocate for the prompt repatriation of the illegally acquired wealth which was transferred to Western banks by some corrupt African leaders and officials. The United Nations had to become Africa's advocate for a larger share of private investment. At present, the continent received a smaller share of foreign direct investment than any other developing region, while 37 per cent of Africa's total private wealth was currently held outside the continent - as compared to 3 per cent of Asian private wealth held outside Asia, and 17 per cent of Latin America's outside Latin America.

Now that African leaders were getting more serious about putting an end to the conflicts on their continent, and about improving governance and reforming their economies, the international business community should look again at the investment opportunities which Africa offered - and those Africans who did own private capital should take the lead. And finally the United Nations had to become Africa's advocate in dissuading foreign companies and governments from being accomplices in Africa's destruction, through the illicit sale of arms and the purchase of illegally extracted resources. It was good to see in this area the Security Council had taken the lead. And a major United Nations conference on the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons was now in progress in New York. These were the things the UN system could do to help Africa, if Africans were really willing to help themselves. There were sure to be many more. It was the task of this meeting to discover them. It was owed to Africa to make it truly productive.

HORST KOHLER, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said today's meeting was taking place in a difficult environment. Growth was slowing throughout the world. This could be uncomfortable for the advanced countries, but it would be a real source of hardship for many emerging markets and developing countries, and a real setback in the fight against world poverty. Of course, the business cycle was not dead, and some correction was even necessary to counteract excessive exuberance. But now the advanced economies, in particular, had a responsibility to be proactive in strengthening the prospects for sustainable growth in their own countries, and thereby to restore momentum in the global economy. Emerging markets and developing countries, for their part, should stay the course of structural reform and sound macroeconomic policies. The slowdown in world economic activity made it clearer than ever that nations were interconnected. And this served as a warning that prosperity in the advanced economies could not be sustained in the presence of widespread poverty. Integration into the global economy brought unprecedented gains in income and improvements in human well-being for most of the world. But the rising tide of prosperity had left too many behind, in particular, almost all of sub-Saharan Africa. And for everyone, talk about economic stability and poverty reduction should ring hollow in the absence of a strategy to fight the HIV/AIDS pandemic, reflecting last month's UN Special Session in New York.

All of these developments underscored the need for an integrated concept for answering critical questions about globalization. This concept should respond to the fact that all humanity shared one world, and should lay the foundation for more broadly shared prosperity. Above all, success in the fight against poverty was the key to stability and peace in the twenty-first century. And nowhere were the battle lines clearer than in Africa. Today, there was a true window of opportunity. African leaders worked together on strategies to accelerate economic growth and development, and lead the continent out of widespread poverty. It was satisfying to see that new approaches -- the MAP and the OMEGA plan -- had been consolidated into a single "New African Initiative. This initiative was firmly anchored in the fundamental principles of African ownership, leadership, and accountability in eliminating the homegrown obstacles to sustained growth. The "New African Initiative" focused on four core elements -- a clear awareness that peace, democracy and good governance were preconditions for the reduction of poverty; the need for action plans to develop health care and educational systems, infrastructure and agriculture; a reliance on the private sector and on economic integration at the regional and global levels; and an identification of concrete steps to develop more productive partnerships between Africa and its bilateral, multilateral and private sector development partners.

It was gratifying that the "New African Initiative" recognized the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) process as a core vehicle for building continent-wide priorities into national poverty reduction programmes and coordination international support. The heads of the Bretton Woods Institutions were committed to working with partners in Africa and the donor community to realize the full potential of the PRSP. The magnitude of the challenge that was facing the international community in promoting sustained development and poverty reduction in Africa should not be underestimated. But the emerging African vision and work programme provided an opportunity for a decisive step forward. This chance could not be missed. The IMF was a part of the UN family. And it was committed -- based on mandates and expertise -- to working closely with everyone to make this vision a reality.

JAMES D. WOLFENSOHN, President of the World Bank, said Africa had enormous potential and an African Renaissance mattered desperately not just to the Continent of Africa but to the peace and stability of the world. There had been progress: fourteen African countries had grown on average by 4 per cent per year during the 1990s, while another 10 countries had grown by 3 per cent; Uganda had reduced its poverty rate from 56 per cent in 1992 to 35 per cent today; economic reforms in various countries had slowly but surely improved growth and allowed a viable private sector to take root; female illiteracy had fallen; and enrollment of girls in secondary schools had doubled over the last two decades.

But there was another, darker Africa; almost half of African countries were directly or indirectly affected by conflict, and one African out of five lived daily with conflict or civil strife. Conflict shortened life expectancy -- in Sierra Leone, for example, life expectancy was now just 37 years. In addition there was the tragedy of HIV/AIDS: some 19 African countries now had infection rates higher than 8 per cent; 13 million Africans already had died of the disease and 10 million children had been orphaned by it.

Yet, Mr. Wolfensohn said, when he and IMF Director Horst Kohler had travelled to Africa to meet with 22 Heads of State in February, they had found no sense of resignation or defeat but had found people rising to the challenge of Africa and charting their own future. Leaders recognized that peace must come from within Africa -- that good governance and a level playing field were essential for setting Africa on the path to prosperity.

The New African Initiative launched last week in Lusaka stated in simple terms a challenge of enormous importance to every citizen of the world, Mr. Wolfensohn said -- it was a pledge to extricate the continent from its underdevelopment and its exclusion from a globalizing world. The World Bank would support the initiative by basing its own work on the fact that programmes for Africa must be home grown and home-owned; it would emphasize programmes that had broad local "buy-in" and consensus; it would continue to recognize that there was no "quick fix" to African development and would focus on basic matters such as good governance, health and education, the rule of law, measures to end corruption, and empowerment of women and girls; and it would be an advocate for Africa. The keys to progress in Africa were improving governance and resolving conflict; investing in people, increasing competitiveness and diversifying economies; and increasing financing for development based on African ownership of the process and on African leadership.

MIKE MOORE, Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), said the theme of this year's policy dialogue was timely and welcome. Humanity faced no other more pressing issue at the beginning of this new century than addressing the plight of Africa. Without an African renaissance, there would be no reaching the UN Millennium Declaration target of halving global poverty, of halting and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS, of halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water, or of ensuring that all children had access to primary education by 2015. What was required to make this renaissance possible? After decades of experimenting with sometimes disastrous models of development, one thing had been learned -- sustainable development could not take root unless countries and communities genuinely took ownership of their own development. Initiatives recently taken by African leaders to spearhead a "Millennium Plan" for the continent and to create and African Union with a vision of a new era of unity through economic cooperation were inspiring. And it was based on these sense of ownership that a real partnership between Africa and the international community had to be built.

The efforts of the United Nations and the Secretary-General to forge such a partnership were commendable. The international community and the family of international organizations had all been guilty of incoherence and of conflicting priorities, initiatives and advice in the name of development, in the past. Great challenges remained for the United Nations system, the Bretton Woods institutions and indeed, the WTO to coordinate and cooperate better. The contribution of the WTO lay in improving market access and in ensuring predictability and the rule of law in trading relations between states. Poor countries needed to grow their way out of poverty. Trade was a key engine for growth, but currently products of developing countries faced many obstacles in entering the markets of rich countries. For example, the 49 least developed countries (LDCs), representing 10.5 per cent of the world population, had less than 1 per cent of world exports. History showed that open markets could play an important role in lifting millions of people out of abject poverty.

At the Conference for Least Developed Countries in Brussels, the Secretary-General had called for a new Round. There were risks in not launching a new Round. The world economy was looking vulnerable. In 2001, the volume of world merchandise trade was expected to grow by 7 per cent, a marked reduction from the estimated 12 per cent in 2000. The virtuous circle of trade liberalization and economic growth could all too easily become a vicious spiral of protectionism and stagnation. The risk was that a global recession would jeopardize any chances of economic recovery and growth in Africa. Failure to launch a new Round this year could also jeopardize the multilateral trading system itself.

RUBENS RICUPERO, Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), said the urge to gain a measure of control over the present was the common thread that united a few of the recent and far-reaching decisions arising from Africa: the creation of the African Union, the MAP plan proposed by the Presidents of Nigeria, South Africa and Algeria, and the Omega Plan proposed by the President of Senegal. In fact what was represented by the merging of these plans into the New African Initiative was a Marshall Plan for Africa. Clearly something had to be done; if the benchmark of reducing poverty by half by 2015 was to be met, Africa would need to grow by 7 to 8 per cent a year, and for that to happen the current investment level of around 16 to 17 per cent of Gross Domestic Product would have to be raised to 22 to 25 per cent over the next decade. An additional US$10 billion per year was needed, and because of poverty and sluggish growth, Africans were not able to finance such investment out of domestic savings; nor could private foreign flows be relied on to fill such a gap until growth was well under way; the money had to come from official financing and from debt relief for heavily indebted African countries.

It might sound paradoxical, but the only way for African countries to overcome their aid dependency, Mr. Ricupero told the meeting, was to supply in the first instance more aid, and in a more effective way, to generate a positive momentum that in due course would make aid superfluous. For this to happen, current levels of official assistance must be doubled and maintained over at least a decade in order to allow domestic savings, exports and external private flows to pick up and gradually replace aid. That was precisely what had happened with the Marshall Plan.


Trade arrangements with the continent also had to be improved, Mr. Ricupero said, and all those who were sincerely trying to make the trading system work in favour of African countries and development in general should be helped in their efforts. Genocide, civil war, AIDS, and massive violations of human rights required a sustained international response, a "moral equivalent of war", with everyone acting as catalysts of solidarity and with a sense of interdependence with Africa.

K. Y. AMOAKO, Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), said he felt optimistic because Africa now was defining its own agenda and was moving boldly to create an economic union. The New African Initiative was a substantive effort to move Africa forward; rather than constituting a wish list of projects, it focused squarely on policies and programmes for sustainable development, and it recognized that Africa must take the first critical steps -- by putting in place sound economic policies, strengthening democracy, and rooting out corruption. The HIV/AIDS pandemic had to be overcome, and that demanded immediate mobilization on an emergency footing. Other aims of the Initiative were providing basic health services around the continent, rehabilitating Africa's educational system, narrowing the digital divide, and improving key infrastructure.

A second major breakthrough for Africa was the decision to create an African economic union, Mr. Amoako said. Several challenges needed to be addressed; policies that fostered a convergence of enabling macroeconomic conditions needed to be put in place, with this convergence ensuring that there would be no losers in an integrated Africa; and priorities needed to be clear for Africa's infrastructure development. And central to all this was the need to build and sustain peace and security, and to bridge the gap between conflict and normative development.

The ECA would be helping with the African Union by bringing to the table a wealth of analytical work. It had always been an ardent promoter of regional integration, and it intended to keep that role, working closely with the OAU and other institutions. The ECA also was launching a regular assessment of regional integration in Africa using newly devised indicators which would provide an objective base as well as a periodic report card on Africa's progress. The ECA's assessment would be captured in an annual report on the state of integration in Africa which it hoped would help keep the momentum and the policy dialogue going.

Discussion

A Representative of Belgium, speaking on behalf of the European Union, said that the Secretary-General had referred to the fact that the raw materials of Africa ended up lining the pockets of foreign enterprises and certain Africans who took the wealth that should be serving the interests of their countries and their continent. Good governance was of utmost importance. There had to be an end to illicit exploitation, and controls were needed at the international level to control flows of natural resources that were used to fuel wars.

Among the questions put to the panellists were whether additional resources could be found for funding the least-developed countries initiative; if potential donors to African countries might have their own debt burdens eased so that they could better support Africa; how the agencies represented on the panel could respond coherently to the New African Initiative so that overlap and duplication were avoided; if the Bretton Woods Institutions were reviewing their poverty-reduction policies and if average African families might expect their lives to improve over the next five years; if least-developed countries could reasonably expect to be able to join the World Trade Organization through an easing of the current stringing conditions for membership; if the international community would make a substantial effort to establish peace in Africa; if more would be done to fund and develop education systems in Africa; if African countries could reasonably expect an increase in official development assistance (ODA); how more broad support could be obtained for a new round of trade negotiations under the WTO; how general concepts for African development were going to be translated into particular actions; and who was going to persuade disenchanted Africans now carrying out conflicts, and often profiting by them, to cease violence and participate in slow-moving development programmes.

National delegations speaking from the floor also contended that leadership and guidance for bettering the situation in Africa must come from Africans themselves; that the natural resources of Africa were not being used for the enrichment of the African people but for the enrichment of foreign business interests and for a tiny African power elite, and even for waging wars; that poverty education had been talked about endlessly over the last decade, but at the same time had increased in most of the world's least-developed countries; that the New African Initiative was like the Marshall Plan except that instead of coming at the end of a major conflict it was being proposed while a number of conflicts were going on and in fact seemed to be multiplying; that UN agencies, and the World Bank in particular, should create particular instances in particular places, such as the Great Lakes region of Africa, that would allow people to move from conflict to peaceful development; that conflict in Africa too often destroyed development progress; and that developed countries who were WTO members regularly subsidized agriculture, yet African countries were barred from doing so if they wanted to join the WTO.

Responding to the debate, IMF Managing Director Kohler said, among other things, that an important issue for African development was in spreading wealth to rural areas, where agriculture was vital, yet OECD countries spent billions of dollars a year on agricultural subsidies which kept developing countries, including African countries, from exporting their agricultural products to the world's wealthier nations; that the IMF nonetheless opposed agricultural subsidies for African countries because it was a dead end, and what was important for such countries was to build agricultural economies that were self-sustaining; that it was a difficult part of his job that the IMF often had to give advice to developing countries that the advanced countries did not follow themselves, and that advanced countries had to reform themselves and not only call for reforms from poor countries; and that the IMF was committed to debt relief and to making the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative a success, but he cautioned against complete debt cancellation, and against debt relief for middle-income countries, because who would give credit to such countries in the future if they were seen as having a culture where they did not pay back their debts?

Mr. Wolfensohn, the World Bank President, said that investment in Africa could not be commanded of private investors; rather a climate had to be created that induced people to want to invest, and he felt that the plan put forward in the New African Initiative, if it was put into effect, was the only way to attract investment, as it was the only way to attract investment in other countries; that coordination of World Bank and other projects was the basis of a World Bank analysis, and already the total was at 186,000 projects -- so obviously coordination was vital; that weaknesses in World Bank programmes did exist, but a similarly great problem was weaknesses within countries, where shortages of good governance and the prevalence of conflicts could destroy any development initiative; that an example of conflict prevention was a World Bank programme on sharing the waters of the Nile so that the 300 million people in numerous countries who lived along the river's banks had a fair way of apportioning it, because if that matter was not resolved there would surely be conflict; and that the Bank was seriously involved in scaling up its efforts to enhance agricultural development in Africa.

Mr. Moore, Director-General of the World Trade Organization, remarked that it often seemed to him that the only countries that really liked the WTO were those that were not members; that the WTO facilitated what its members wanted and did not order those members around, and it was true that some of the demands of those members could be mean-spirited; that there had been major changes in WTO policies and activities to enhance the position of developing countries; that trade facilitation was win-win for everyone; that there certainly were injustices related to agriculture and a WTO round of negotiations was certainly an option, but negotiations were just a beginning; and that matters had moved in Geneva from confidence-building to conference-building.

And Mr. Amaoko, the ECA Director, said he agreed that agriculture was vital for reducing poverty -- that you could not talk about poverty reduction without focusing on that key issue; and that over the last 10 years there nonetheless had been a shift away from agricultural funding, perhaps out of dissatisfaction with the results of agricultural projects carried out in the '70s and '80s, but that he thought the pendulum now was swinging the other way.




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