Written  8:01 PM  Sep  9, 1994 by icpd:ngonetny in igc:icpd.general
	---------- "Back Words with Action" ----------

	Copyright Women's Feature Servic, All Rights Reserved

	Back Words With Action, UN Officials Urge
	Anne Shepherd

The string of world conferences leading up to Cairo -- and those
which will follow -- represent a new, human-centred view of
development with potentially far reaching implications, asserted
senior UN officials.
   
But in a panel discussion yesterday, reflecting on the link between
the Children's Summit held in New York, the Rio Earth Summit, the
Vienna Conference on Human Rights, ICPD underway in Cairo, as well
as the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen and the
Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing next year, officials
expressed concern over the need to accompany words with action.

While there was a new global consensus on the centrality of the
individual to development, noted UNICEF Executive Director James
Grant, "the big question is, will the resources follow ?"

Noting that official development assistance has declined since the
Rio Earth Summit in 1992, United Nations Development Assistance
(UNDP) Administrator, James Gustave Speth, urged that the Cairo
agenda "not be underfunded."

Putting in a plug for the upcoming World Summit for Social
Development, Speth said he hoped the general agreement reached in
Copenhagen could be concretised by a Treaty -- similar to the
Convention on Desertification that emerged from the Rio Conference
to be signed in Paris next week.

In an interview after the panel discussion, the UNDP Administrator
declined to specify what this treaty might call for.
(Industrialised countries have been urged to devote 0.7 percent of
their GDP to development assistance. Among the paragraphs in square
brackets in the ICPD Draft Programme of Action is a call on donor
countries to devote 20 percent of development assistance to social
programmes.)

But, underscoring his concern over conferences that raise
expectations but fail to deliver, Speth said he hoped the
Copenhagen conference would lead to "a campaign against poverty
like the campaign against slavery 150 years ago."

Introducing the panelists, Denmark's Minister of Development Co-
operation, Helle Degn, compared the Cairo conference to a pearl in
a "string of pearls" -- rather than another show in an "unending
travelling circus".

The themes of children, women, environment, population, and poverty
which have received such unprecedented attention in the last few
years were all about "making the world a better place for you and
for me," she said.
The thread that links the chain of pearls, observed UN Under
Secretary General for Policy Co-ordination and Sustainable
Development, Nitin Desai, is development.

The understanding of development, added Grant, is today "in very
sharp contrast" to when the UN was founded. In the 1950s, the
UNICEF head recalled, the World Bank did not even consider
education and health as sectors to which it would loan money,
because these were "subsidiary, welfare issues."

Just two years ago, before the Rio conference, added Gertrude
Mongella, Secretary General of the upcoming Fourth World Conference
on Women in Beijing, women had to stay up all night to try and get
mention in key documents. It was only in Cairo that women had begun
to take their rightful place (thanks in no small measure, she
suggested, to the efforts of the conference Secretary General, Dr.
Nafis Sadik).

Such efforts have made it possible to conceive of the Copenhagen
conference referring "not to a section of people, but to men and
women, because women will have entered the mainstream," Mongella
observed.

What the world has learned, Grant said, is to "place the individual
at the centre of the problem", such that issues of empowerment,
choice and knowledge naturally follow.

This made the 1990s potentially one of the most "exciting and
satisfactory" periods in history. But such hopes would be quickly
dashed he warned, if high sounding words were not backed by a
better standard of living for the vast majority of the world's
people still wallowing in poverty.