Eradication of Poverty

SESSION OF THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 2003

Intervention by Anna Karamanu in the Commission’s statement on “World Hunger and the Elimination of Trade Barriers with the Poorest Countries in the World”

Karamanou (PSE) –It is a tragic realization that 50 years of development aid have not helped a single country escape underdevelopment and poverty.

Many argue that globalization is the cause of the poor economic conditions in the poorest countries. The truth is that the protectionist policies of the North, rather than unlimited globalization, contribute to the strangulation of key economic sectors in the South.

The perception that poor countries can reach the income levels of rich countries without international trade, without inflows of capital and investments, is absolutely mistaken. If poor countries rely only on their own savings or wait to develop capabilities and technology on their own, it will take them centuries.

Hunger and extreme poverty are of the feminine gender, placing gender inequality as a major obstacle to development: in the last decade, the number of women living in absolute poverty has increased, a fact linked to reproductive health problems, as the poorest women also have less access to healthcare services and more unwanted children. Nearly the entire half million women who die from maternal causes are in the developing world, and they die not because they choose to become mothers, but because they are poor. The likelihood of a woman dying from such causes is less than one in 3,000 in developed countries, and reaches one in 19 in Africa.

These numbers suggest that the benefits of globalization have not reached a large number of people. Ongoing poverty hinders this process of globalization through open trade. The only solution is to defeat the two biggest enemies: on the one hand, the resistance of many political leaders in the North, who refuse to abolish barriers to the free movement of goods and people. On the other hand, the resistance of many political leaders in the South, who refuse to grant their citizens basic political, economic, and human rights, which are a necessary condition for development.