inside the glass house

Booming guns and vanishing foreign aid
NEW YORK-- When the Maldives was warned more than a decade ago that it was in danger of vanishing from the face of the earth because of a projected rise in sea level, the usually ebullient Foreign Minister Fathulla Jameel quipped: "My country is like a can of tuna fish. It comes with an expiry date."

Jameel, one of the world's longest surviving foreign ministers, not only knows his onions but also his maldive fish. His joke may well have reverberated thorough the corridors of the world body last week when a meeting of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) brought into sharp focus the continued degradation of the global environment despite the longstanding pledges made at several mega conferences since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992.

A new UN report submitted to the Commission said that climate change and rising sea levels pose "a major threat to the very existence" of small island developing states (SIDS) – specifically the Maldives, Tuvalu and many other tiny islands in the Pacific, which may be submerged by the sea in the next 25 to 30 years.

"More immediately, global warming and climate change have brought an increase in extreme weather events, coral bleaching, coastal erosion, the disruption of agricultural activity and vector-borne diseases and reduced resilience of land and marine eco-systems," Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned in a 34-page report released last week.

The inherent problems and vulnerabilities of small island states, include natural disasters, fragile eco-systems, fluctuating tourism revenues, dependency on a few primary commodities and rising seas. Since one of the criteria for SIDS is a population of less than 10 million, Sri Lanka is outside the league, but Singapore and the Maldives are in.

The CSD meeting was also a preparatory forum for an upcoming UN conference on SIDS, scheduled for Mauritius August 30-September 3. The Mauritius meeting will probe the "serious shortfalls" in the implementation of the Barbados Programme of Action (Bpoa) adopted at the 1994 Global Conference for the Sustainable Development of SIDS.

Those shortfalls include a sharp decline in official development assistance (ODA) both to developing countries in general and to small islands states in particular. At successive UN conferences, Western donors have pledged to contribute 0.7 percent of their gross national product (GNP) to ODA.

But only a few countries, mostly Scandinavian, have met their targets. Current ODA averages about $56 billion annually. But both the UN and the World Bank say an additional $40 billion to $60 billion are needed every year to meet the development goals of developing nations, including SIDS.

At a news conference in Washington last week, World Bank President James Wolfensohn criticised what he called "a growing imbalance in global spending" by the international community. The world's governments now spend about $900 billion annually on the military, $300 billion on agricultural subsidies to farmers in industrial nations-- but only $56 billion dollars on development assistance to poorer nations.

The international community, accused of reneging on its commitments to increase ODA and fight environmental degradation, came under heavy fire at last week's CSD session. But most western donors, far from increasing financial assistance, have been progressively chopping their development aid budgets over the past few years.

The promises made at the 2002 World Summit for Social Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg – including additional resources, transfer of technology and rebuilding environmental infrastructure in the world's poorer nations – have remained largely unfulfilled.

The statistics cranked out at the meeting – summing up the post-WSSD global environment – are staggering. Some 2.4 billion people – nearly two-thirds of the developing world – lack access to basic sanitation. In India alone, nearly 700 million people defecate in the open, and about 700,00 Indian children die every year from diarrhoea and dehydration.

At the same time, nearly one billion people, 32 percent of the world's population, live in slums. This figure is expected to rise to two billion by 2030.

The roots of civil conflicts and rising terrorism are being traced mostly to social and economic problems. If global spending on the military and economic development are reversed, the world may be a much safer place to live.

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