9:30 PM Apr 24, 1996

DISAGREE OVER THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMY

At a weekend panel here organised by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) and the U.N. Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat), mayors and urban experts alike worried that municipal governments have fewer tools, and fewer funds, as a result of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs).

Participants at the forum, called 'Cities for People in a Globalising World', contended that the Habitat II 'City Summit' to be held in Istanbul Jun. 3-14 will have to grapple with the special challenges of urban poverty.

In a statement to the round table, U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali asked, "Is it possible to envisage poverty-free cities in the 21st century? Is that a realistic goal?"

That task, some experts say, may mean coming to terms with the new challenges of globalisation.

"Scaling down the public sector...invariably means people losing their jobs and going out on the streets to fend for themselves," argued Amar Nuno-Amarteifo, mayor of Accra, Ghana.

The pressures on municipal purse-strings has put too much responsibility in the unreliable hands of the private sector, he contended. "In Africa and most developing countries, companies are still struggling tooth and nail to establish themselves, and lose sight of their moral imperative," Nuno-Amarteifo said.

"What we're seeing in the Philippines is that our land becomes a land of shopping malls and export processing zones, while our people are becoming a nation of overseas workers," added Sixto Roxas, chairman of the Foundation for Community Organisation and Management Technology. Manila is just one of the cities caught in that bind, Roxas said.

The United Nations estimates that more than half the world population will live in cities within the next few years, and a majority of people living in the South will reside in cities by 2015.

Fu-Chen Lo, deputy director of the United Nations University in Tokyo, said that SAPs, by cutting subsidies for rural agriculture, also were helping to force in the South "a compressed process of urbanisation". About 45 percent of Africa's people are now urbanised, he noted, as well as some 70 percent of Latin America's population.

The combination of rapidly growing cities and municipal cutbacks, participants in the Marmaris forum claimed, could spell disaster.

"We're in the dark ages," Dr. Carolyn Stephens of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said of the SAP-linked cuts in urban health. She said that an estimated one out of every eight people now living in Lusaka, Zambia, is HIV-positive -- roughly 125,000 people.

Even in New York City, she noted, poorer sections like Harlem and the South Bronx, plagued by crowded housing and a shortage of public clinics, have been home to a rise in tuberculosis, especially among black and Latin residents. Men in Harlem, she said, have fewer chances of reaching the age of 65 than men in Bangladesh, despite their respective nations' gap in wealth.

After a three-day discussion of urban poverty and globalisation, however, the panelists could only come to a consensus that the new global trade offers both advantages and problems to cities.

Nancy Barry, president of the non-governmental group 'Women's World Banking', said that the modern mayor will become less the central planning and funding authority behind a city and more "a catalysts and promoter...working closely with private financial institutions."

With investment bankers and micro-enterprise groups dealing directly with urban projects on an increasing basis, argued Michael Cohen, a senior advisor on environmental issues at the World Bank, "maybe local government is not relevant."

But many experts remain wary of placing too much trust in private institutions' handling of urban crises. "We can't wait as cities become more polarised between rich and poor," argued Janice Perlman, executive director of the New York-based MegaCities Project.

Some parts of the world already feel the pain as cities expand past their municipal authorities' ability to fund them. Several mayors at the Marmaris talks, including Awn al-Shawa of Gaza City and Florence Dillsworth of Freetown, Sierra Leone, added that political crises and tussles with national governments made the handling of urban affairs even tougher.

Nuno-Amerteifo worried that, in Africa and much of the South, the next century's predicted surge in urbanisation would make the challenges acute very soon. "If we fail, we are going to develop some of the worst living arrangements ever created by humankind," he said.

Perez Alfonso, the oil minister who, along with Abdullah Al-Tariki from Saudi Arabia, founded the Organisation.