Round Table at Ministerial Level B4

As members of the civil society committed with the development of our countries, we call your attention on:

The existing incoherence in the document The Monterrey Consensus, between the demand placed on our countries as the main responsible of our own economic and social development and, on the other hand, the accepted interference of the conditionalities imposed by multilateral bodies. This interference is done through Country Assistance Strategies (CAS) and the widely implemented programs of structural adjustment, PAE, HIPCs, PRSP, that have demonstrated their incapability to generate sustainable growth as it was announced, but in fact have increased and extended poverty in our countries.

These programs impose, with some variations, obligations to privatize strategic business, public services, natural, biological and genetic resources of native indigenous communities and peoples as well as to reduce import tariffs of food, agricultural products and first consumption products, generally subsidized in most of the countries where these programs are applied in the most developed countries.

These conditionalities do not facilitate development but rather they obstruct it. In our Latin American countries, for example, after 15 years of permanent implementation of structural adjustment programs poverty has increased and the possibilities for people and populations to develop their abilities have decreased. Also, our natural resources have been depleted creating conditions for the traffic and destruction of biodiversity and genetic resources.

Increasingly, the access to education, health, social security and provision, drinking water is not viewed as an universal human right but as a need that people try to meet in a private, familiar way, assumed as responsibility of women. Programs oriented to support families in extreme poverty are mostly exposed to political patronizing from the governments. Cuts in social policies increase the work of poor women who are committed in community activities. These activities compel poor women to be solidary with the poor, but release private and public capital of this responsibility.

Far from relieving their poverty, conditionalities to least development countries for the services of foreign debt obstruct its decrease. Though their negative impacts are well known, policies have not been reformulated.

We call to our governments to commit with the responsibility of our development; to multilateral bodies to remove these conditionalities; and, to the international cooperation to a larger and sustainable commitment with development.

Rosa Guillén,
Grupo Género y Economía – Peru,
Red Latinoamericana Mujeres Transformando la Economía - Remte