UN urges Europe to keep its promises on relieving poverty across the globe

Date: 05/02/04

COWS are better served by the EU's farm subsidies regime than the world's most vulnerable people, according to one of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's most senior advisors.

Some 40% of the EU's €100 billion annual budget goes to agriculture, even though farmers make up just 4% of the Union's working population.

In his recent address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Annan made plain his disquiet about the effects of both the EU's Common Agricultural Policy and America's farm subsidies, alleging "they skew market forces, damage the environment and block poor-country exports from world markets".

Shashi Tharoor, UN undersecretary-general for communications and a member of Annan's cabinet, is even more critical.

"Most European cows get daily subsidies of $2 (1.60 euro), whereas half the world's population lives on less than a dollar a day," said Tharoor, who accompanied Annan on his visit to Brussels last week.

"That shows you how stark the gulf is between what is pursued here in terms of policies and what developing countries are asking for.

"They are simply looking for a fair chance to trade their way out of poverty. Many Europeans would prefer to make a living through hard work than through handouts. So it seems to us contradictory to deny people in developing countries a chance to pull themselves out of poverty, while at the same time being very generous with development aid."

Tharoor urged a resumption of the Doha round of trade negotiations following the collapse of the World Trade Organization ministerial talks in Cancún, Mexico, last September.

Last month, European Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy reiterated his "willingness to negotiate seriously" on agriculture should the talks restart, "including by eliminating export subsidies on products of interest to developing countries".

Despite Tharoor's remarks about the obvious inconsistencies between the Union's policies on farm support and development aid, he is loath to question whether the EU is seriously committed to the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDG).

Annan has invested substantial energy in campaigning for realization of the goals - which include halving the proportion of people who live on less than $1 a day, achieving full primary schooling for children, halting the spread of AIDS and reducing by two-thirds the rate of mortality in children under five by 2015.

The EU's current 15 states have committed themselves to allocating at least 0.7% of their gross national income to development aid as part of the MDG drive. Yet an analysis by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) states that just four - Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden - have achieved that target.

Even though the EU en bloc is already the world's largest aid donor, the OECD says major aid rises will have to be made by the UK, France, Italy and Germany if promises are to be kept.

Tharoor, however, says it is a matter for EU governments themselves to adjudicate if enough progress is being made on achieving the MDGs.

"In our judgement, we have always found the EU an extremely valuable partner. We do think the EU is built on very much the same premises of international cooperation and concern for those who have suffered and are suffering injustice and deprivation."

During Annan's stay in Brussels, the European Parliament formally urged that the possibility of the EU taking one of the five permanent seats on the UN's inner sanctum, the Security Council, be considered by the Union's governments.

If that became a reality, most MEPs believe whoever holds the post of EU foreign minister - a job suggested in the draft EU constitution - would occupy that seat.

However, Tharoor points out that there are institutional hurdles that might frustrate the chances of that idea becoming a reality.

"One difficulty is that the UN is an organization of member states. We have 191 member states and the EU as such is not one of them. Will the EU as such become a member state? When you have 25 [EU] states, themselves members of the UN, it might be difficult to envisage that. You could have, though, an arrangement within the EU that one of the European member states might be able to speak for all."

Indeed, achieving any alterations to the structure of the Security Council is fraught.

This would require an amendment to the UN's Charter, which would have to be approved by a two-thirds majority of UN countries, including the five permanent members of the Security Council - the UK, France, US, Russia and China.

The question of Security Council reform has been studied in exhaustive detail - though without any concrete results.

The body tasked with assessing this matter by the UN's General Assembly is called the "open-ended working group". But because it has been meeting for 11 years now, Tharoor jokes that the never-ending working group might be a more apposite moniker.

The sidelining of the UN in the period leading to the war in Iraq has nonetheless catapulted issues of reform to the top of the organization's agenda.

As a result, Annan has appointed a separate panel of experts on international affairs to propose how the Security Council can be restructured; its report is expected by this summer.

A fundamental issue is that a wide number of poor countries are not represented in the Security Council.

According to Tharoor, the problem can be traced back to the UN's origins in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and has not been rectified in the intervening six decades.

"There is very little dissent about the diagnosis. However, there is considerable disagreement among [UN] member states on the prescription.

"The diagnosis is that the Council completely reflects the geopolitical reality of 1945, rather than 2005. In 1945, the Council had 11 members out of a total UN membership of 51. It now has 15 members out of 191. So, fewer than 8% of member states are represented. There are a larger number of countries who feel they are not represented and this has implications for the Council's legitimacy."

Born in London and educated in India and the US, Tharoor has worked for the UN since 1978.

He was close to Sergio Vieira de Mello, the head of the UN's Baghdad headquarters, who was killed in a bomb blast last August.

In a piece for the International Herald Tribune, Tharoor wrote a moving account of visiting his friend's grave in Geneva's Cemetery of Kings, where he is buried a short distance from Argentinian novelist Jorge Luis Borges, whom de Mello admired.

"It was hard to imagine Sergio, so full of life always, in this place of the most profound stillness.

"There is something closed and final about a cemetery, but Sergio had always been so open; he laughed easily, inveigling those around him into a shared complicity of his humour.

"Many of us he called his brothers, and there is no doubt at all he meant it, sweeping us into a shared commitment to the ideals of the world organization to which he devoted his entire adult life."

Annan has acknowledged 2003 was the UN's annus horribilis - both because of the splits that America's sabre-rattling over Iraq caused in the Security Council and the Baghdad explosion, the worst single attack on the organization since its inception.

But Tharoor, who combines his UN duties with writing prodigiously about Indian culture, politics and history, is far from despondent.

"The secretary-general has said the past belongs in the past and must be left behind.

"The time has long come to end the divisiveness and recriminations of the last year."

Shashi Tharoor, a senior aide to Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, discusses the United Nations' key targets.