PHA-Exch> "International Cooperation, Development Aid… Just What Are We Talking About?" (CETIM SYMPOSIUM 2007)

[Claudio Schuftan]

FINAL STATEMENT of THE CETIM SYMPOSIUM

7-9th December 2007

We, the undersigned associations, organizations, parties and social
movements, gathered on the occasion of the symposium "International
Cooperation, Development Aid… Just What Are We Talking About?", 7-9th December
2007, in Geneva.

Noting:

· that the policies of trade liberalization and privatization imposed in the
course of the last decades have created ever greater inequalities, within
each country and between countries, affecting first and foremost women and
children;

· that in spite of the possibilities offered by the prodigious advances in
scientific knowledge and technological progress, the scourge of hunger is
only increasing throughout the world and that, paradoxically, farmers are
among the primary victims;

· that "globalization" such as it has been understood and practiced by the
dominant powers has not kept the promises of its promoters;

Are convinced that the various commitments made during the U.N. summits held
in New York in 2000 and in 2005, whatever appraisal might be made of them,
will not suffice to change fundamentally an orientation to a form of
worldwide apartheid;

Note also that these policies, and the mode of production and consumption
that they support, have already led to irreversible environmental
degradation and that, if they are pursued, will lead humanity, especially
its most vulnerable strata, to disasters of immeasurable magnitude;

Believe that the sudden awareness of the environmental crisis – alas,
belated! – cannot deal with the real problem, which is one of the dominant
model of "economic growth", and will, on the contrary, only serve to open up
new areas for profit-making; in this regard, the example of biofuels, the
promotion of which has already done much harm to food production and
small-scale agriculture, as well as the expansion of CO2 markets, granting
the right to pollute in return for the "transfer" of technology, show the
limits of such "solutions";

Note:

· that the debt burden – not to mention the environmental debt – being paid
off worldwide and very often unnecessarily continues to crush most of the
peoples of the Third World;

· that the cosmetic measures adopted for most indebted poor countries are
grossly insufficient, often ineffective and, on the contrary, full of
conditions that violate the principles of self-determination and of the
equality of peoples and nations;

· - that the fiscal policies of several countries of the North as well as of
the South, sap the development capacities of the poorest countries and that
the only international fiscal policy really in force is that of tax
reduction ad infinitum;
*

Consider also:
*

· that the right to intellectual property – this human right according to
which the benefit of an invention or a creation should be acknowledged as
belonging to its creator, whether individual or collective – has been
completely perverted from its objectives in the service of commercial
profit, thus privatizing collective knowledge and monopolizing knowledge and
technology;

· that discriminatory migration policies encourage a brain drain from the
poor countries to the industrialized and "developed" countries, to the
detriment of the interests of the "developing" countries and in contempt of
the efforts that these countries have made;

Note finally that, in violation of international law acquired at great cost
through murderous world wars, the unilateralism of great powers and the
greed of great transnational corporations create or stoke armed conflicts
almost everywhere in the South, producing countless victims, displacing
entire populations, destroying infrastructure and ruining in short order all
that has been accomplished in development, results obtained only over a long
period of time.

We call for support and promotion of the following appeal through its joint
publication or separately from the present declaration.

APPEAL FOR ALTERNATIVE INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION

We, the undersigned associations, parties and social movements, concerned by
the current course of globalization, call for pressure on our respective
governments and on the international forum that is the United Nations, so
that governments:

· support the demand for food sovereignty of the world's peoples and for the
concept of local agriculture and small-scale farming;

· support the carrying out of national and international audits on the Third
World debt so that its settlement, with a view to its cancellation, may be
based on the principles of equity and justice;

· combat the destructive race to the bottom for non-taxation, fight
resolutely against the various forms of fiscal and legal paradises and
against fiscal competition, bring pressure to remove bank secrecy where it
exists and to repatriate the ill gotten wealth;

· place the progress derived from knowledge, science and technology, which
are the common work of communities, at the service of all humanity and
consider the defence of the common heritage of humanity as a priority;

· promote a policy of emancipation for women and a policy for youth, based
on a spirit of planetary and international solidarity;

· ratify promptly the United Nations Convention on the Rights of All Migrant
Workers and Members of Their Families, which entered into force in July
2003;

· accord primacy in their national and international policies, in accordance
with the Declaration of Vienna that they have approved unanimously, to human
rights for all, including economic, social and cultural rights above all
other considerations such as trade, the acquisition of markets and of power;
· consider the right to development as a human right indissociable from all
other human rights, civil and political, economic, social and cultural,
implying the full realization of each person and of all;
· take up again and make their own the definition of "development" as it was
formulated by the Declaration on the Right to Development so that it may be
a global economic, social, cultural and political process, aiming to improve
continuously the well being of all of the world's population and of all
individuals;

· place the human being and the peoples of the earth at the center of
development;

· reaffirm the necessity of respecting absolutely, in international
relations, the principle of the equality of nations and of peoples and their
inalienable sovereign control of their natural resources and wealth and make
sure that these resources are not exploited or consumed to the detriment of
other nations and peoples;

· abstain, at the international level, from supporting any policy whose
results could be contrary to these objective, abandoning the logic of
competition in the interest of international cooperation;

· promote participative democracy, effective international solidarity,
renounce the arms trade and militate for general disarmament with a view to
the improvement of the well being of all, on an egalitarian basis;

· attain (for those countries with a high GDP) without delay the minimum
level of 0.7% of GDP devoted to public aid to development, while adopting
coherent national economic policies that take into account that aid to
development is only one mechanism for change among many;

· draw inspiration from alternative economic initiatives such as the
Bolivarian Alternative for the People of Our America (ALBA) or the Bank of
the South; if they are pursuing their declared goals of financial autonomy
and cooperation based on solidarity and complementariness, they deserve
praise.

For this, we also call upon governments to put into practice the Declaration
on the Right to Development that was adopted 6 December 1986 par the United
Nations General Assembly by an overwhelming majority of countries
representing 85% of the world's population, to stop opposing it with
delaying stratagems and to acknowledge the rightness and pertinence of its
basic principles and concepts. The Declaration, the fruit of some 30 years
of effort by the countries of the South in the aftermath of decoloniztion
and by the Non-Aligned Movement, is a source of inspiration that is more
relevant than ever if we are to prevent the world from sinking yet deeper
into irreversible impasses.

Finally, we call upon all the citizens, the individuals, the associations,
the movements and parties dedicated to justice in the world and
international progress to mobilize, to organize and to act in the fi eld, in
the street as well as in the voting booth and in institutions to attain
these goals.

SIGNATORY ORGANIZATIONS ARE (23 JUNE 2008):

Alliance Sud, Switzerland

Asociación Nueva Utopia, Switzerland

Association internationale des techniciens, experts et chercheurs (AITEC),
France

Association pour la transaction des transactions et pour l'aide aux citoyens
(ATTAC), Switzerland

Association Survie, France

Centrale sanitaire Suisse romande (CSSR), Switzerland

Centre de recherche et d'information pour le développement (CRID), France

Centre Europe – Tiers Monde (CETIM), Switzerland

Comité pour l'annulation de la dette du Tiers Monde (CADTM), Belgium

Comité pour l'annulation de la dette du Tiers Monde (CADTM), Switzerland

Commission Tiers Monde de l'Eglise catholique (COTMEC), Switzerland

Développement et Civilisations – Lebret-Irfed, France

Enfants du Malawi, France

Fondation Frantz Fanon, France

Food First Information and Action Network (FIAN), Switzerland

Forum africain des alternatives, Senegal

Forum du Tiers Monde (FTM), Senegal

France Libertés Fondation Danielle Mitterrand, France

MediCuba, Switzerland

Mouvement pour la coopération internationale (MCI), Switzerland

Plateforme pour une agriculture socialement durable, Switzerland.

Convenor: CETIM (Centre Europe – Tiers Monde), 6 rue JC Amat, 1201 Geneva,
Switzerland,

cetim at bluewin.ch, www.cetim.ch
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