7:55 AM Jan 17, 1996

FOCUS ON FUTURE NEGOTIATIONS, IMPLEMENTATIONS

Geneva 17 Jan (Chakravarthi Raghavan) -- Future activities at the UN Conference on Trade and Development should focus on preparations for a multilateral agenda of future negotiations on trade, investment, competition, environment and technology, with emphasis on the development perspective, and in helping countries to implement results of negotiations, according to UNCTAD Secretary-General Rubens Ricupero.

Ricupero's views are in the report of the Secretary-General to the Ninth Session of the Conference (UNCTAD-IX) to be held at Midrand in South Africa (27 April to 11 May).

The new head of UNCTAD took office last September, when the process of preparations for UNCTAD-IX had advanced considerably in the intergovernmental machinery and within the secretariat.

In presenting some "preliminary and tentative" views on the future work of the organization, reflecting the current state of thinking within the secretariat and of himself, Ricupero has put forward the report as a 'working document' and inviting comments and inputs - from governments, multilateral institutions, universities, private sector and NGOs.

"Such an open and dynamic approach is the most appropriate, and perhaps efficacious, way of coming to grips with a rapidly and constantly changing world political and economic scene," he adds in a foreword.

The backdrop to the effort to define the work of UNCTAD on the threshold of the next millennium, Ricupero says, is the profound historic movement giving substance to the vision of unification of markets and of economic space on a planetary dimension, but a complex phenomenon fraught with contrasts and contradictions.

While this vision began with the European age of maritime exploration five centuries ago, it was also the dream of the Phoenicians, Vikings, Chinese and other great trading peoples.

With the fall of ideological walls, and convergence taking the place of confrontation, institutions like the IMF, World Bank and GATT/WTO, long seen as relevant only to one bloc in a divided world were becoming the backbone of a single, generally accepted world economic system. On the other hand, competition and trade frictions, once moderated by national barriers and regulations, have been exacerbated to a point never seen before. Eventually, that might jeopardise or reverse the progress achieved so far.

Globalization was a powerful force for both integration and marginalization. It promises to bring fully into active participation in the world economy two billion women and men in the fast-growing developing countries.

But hundreds of millions of other individuals fear that the same forces threaten to shut them out, perhaps for ever, from the promise of prosperity. They are the unemployed or low-wage earners in sectors of industrial economies lagging behind in the process of change. They are too the poor and jobless in many developing countries depending on a few commodities barely touched, if at all, by globalization and liberalization.

Bringing his own eclectic philosophy to bear in presenting some personal reflections on future work of UNCTAD on the threshold of the next millennium, Ricupero has evoked Gramci and Herzen -- to argue for action-oriented research and analysis and concentrating on the realistic and practical.

Antonio Gramci (1891-1937) was a leading Italian writer, thinker, co-founder of the Italian Communist Party and a well-known Marxist theoretician. Alexander Herzen (1812-1870) was a Russian political thinker who originated the theory of the unique Russian path to socialism and advocated Russian progress through adoption of European rationalism and civic freedom. Known as a left-Hegelian, before long he came to believe that Europe's role as a progressive historical force was finished and western institutions were in fact dead.

In describing the reactions to the current globalization and liberalization debates, Ricupero has evoked Gramci to make the point that it is no wonder that in this intervening period between the old and the new, all kinds of morbid symptoms come to the surface, that fear and insecurity thrive alongside hope and bright situations.

In advocating concentration of work at UNCTAD on "the realistic and practical -- not on over-ambitious and remote grand designs, but on precise and limited objectives within reach", Ricupero quotes Herzen "... a goal which is infinitely remote is no goal, only .. a deception; a goal must be closer - at the very least the labourer's wage, or pleasure in work performed."

In this view, he suggests that analysis in UNCTAD has to be action-oriented in two complementary directions.

The first is the preparation of the multilateral agenda for future negotiations on trade, investment, competition, environment and technology.

"Here, the specific contribution of UNCTAD will be to provide a development perspective, one which will balance the overall picture by taking into account the needs and interests of countries at different stages of integration into the world economy. "This work will be pursued in a cooperative and complementary manner with that of other international institutions, among them the World Trade Organization vis-a-vis which steps have already been taken to demonstrate our willingness to work in tandem on issues of mutual interest."

The first opportunity to put this goal into practice will be the contribution UNCTAD-IX has been asked to make to the Singapore WTO Ministerial Conference, in accordance with the UN General Assembly resolution of 8 December 1995, he adds.

To complement the agenda of negotiations, the second line of UNCTAD's activities should be directed at helping countries to implement their results. The goal would be to make the best possible use of opportunities created in trade (working through programmes of trade efficiency, TRAINFORTRADE and ASYCUDA, among others); to promote investment (through a possible multilateral framework, individual country profiles etc); to provide technical assistance to governments interested in designing competition laws; to advance positive incentives for environmentally friendly development; to conduct reviews of national policies on science and technology; and so on.

"This pragmatic approach," the UNCTAD head says, "will find one of its most telling expressions in the programme for technical cooperation on promoting trade for African countries after the Uruguay Round, put together and to be jointly implemented by UNCTAD, WTO and the ITC."

While the future UNCTAD work will be a topic of intense, intergovernmental discussions during the preparatory process and at the Conference itself, he suggests that the Conference should give attention to:

* the need for fundamental change in the manner in which UNCTAD goes about fulfilling its trade and development mandate;

* need for UNCTAD activities to be more sharply focused on a relatively small number of issues of central importance to development on which it can make a substantial impact;

* recognizing fully the common elements of the development experience, but take account increasingly the present diversity of development situations and problems ... and the distinction between those developing countries requiring assistance primarily in securing access to globalizing markets and those requiring assistance primarily in creating and expanding capacities to supply goods to those markets;

* keep under review the evolving phenomenon of globalization and inter-dependence, and to assess broad development issues against this background; assessing the implications for development of the evolution of the systems governing international transactions and to promote an evolution of those systems that is "development friendly". Consensus building is a concept of particular importance to such activities.

* intensify UNCTAD's concrete activities having a direct impact on national economies, particularly in the areas of trade, investment and enterprise developing including technical cooperation;

UNCTAD's intergovernmental machinery needs to be tightly structured, yet be sufficiently flexible to accommodate a wider range of intergovernmental reactions than in the past. "It is important that each type of intergovernmental forum engage only in those activities for which it has been designed. The initial stages of intergovernmental deliberations will need to be expertized."

With limited resources, UNCTAD would be able to make only a modest contribution to the achievement of these goals. It is in fact doubtful whether any organization or country acting alone would be able to attain these objectives since the problem goes beyond the question of resources, Ricupero says.

"For one of the major new developments in international developments in these closing years of the 20th century has been the emergence of a range of non-governmental actors that exert a growing influence on world affairs. TNCs, both large and small, private investors, NGOs, universities and research centres - sometimes working alongside governments, sometimes working independently and at times more effectively than governments - are leaving their mark on the shape of things to come.

"By and large, multilateral institutions have so far failed to give these new actors adequate room to express themselves and to make their weight felt. This oversight is all the more surprising when we remember that, as early as in 1919, in the aftermath of the first world War, the statesman and diplomats gathered at Versailles showed a remarkable openness in accepting a revolutionary innovation: the tripartite structure of the ILO, with the right to deliberate and vote accorded to representatives of the workers and employers, alongside those of governments. Obviously the rationale in this case was that one could not, and ought not, to decide on labour matters without the direct participation of those concerned.

"If this is so, a case could likewise be made in favour of providing in economic discussions, a space for the participation of those individuals - producers and consumers alike - who will put into practice decisions on production and consumption formally arrived at by governments."

However this was an extremely complex and difficult subject where simplistic solutions would not do and its far-reaching implications would develop only with time.

Nevertheless it was to be hoped that they could begin to begin the integration of the private sector and other new actors into daily operations, and help convert a conference into a real partnership for development, "making UNCTAD a model of what a truly international agency of the 21st century should be."

This was not too much of a challenge for UNCTAD. South Africa, the host country for the conference, had in recent times performed a more daunting task and "if we have nothing to teach our hosts, we certainly have much to learn from them... in particular, we can draw inspiration from the exemplary way in which South Africans have been able to overcome an almost bottomless abyss of hatred and prejudice, and are now engaged in attempting to bridge the socio-economic gap that still separates the different sectors of their community.

Work had already begun in UNCTAD in re-defining its objectives in terms of a few clear and central priorities. Its intergovernmental consultations had shown a significant degree of consensus on need to reduce the number of intergovernmental bodies and frequency of meetings. And improvements in cost-efficiency and performance of the secretariat will prepare for and facilitate implementation of the objectives and methods, serving as the instrument for the reform process.

"...however, the only justification for UNCTAD's regeneration and its sole claim for continued existence is its ability to make a relevant contribution to the tasks of fostering growth, reducing inequality, and building its capacity to make a difference in people's lives. This has to be especially true of those who need UNCTAD most - the least developed so many of whom are in Africa...

"If each society will be measured by the way it treats its more vulnerable members, then the international community in general, and UNCTAD, in particular will be judged according to the attention they pay to Africa and the LDCs as a whole. This is the central problem, the major challenge of the fin de siecle..."