Paul Fauvet
18 April 2008
Port Louis — While officials of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) call for high growth rates as a pre-requisite for eradicating poverty, civil society bodies are skeptical, alleging that the growth rates already achieved in some SADC members have not benefited the mass of the population.
NGOs, trade unions and religious and academic bodies met in Mauritius ahead of this weekend's official SADC Consultative Conference on Development and Poverty. The statement from this civil society gathering declared "impressive growth rates have not significantly trickled down to the general populace in ways that ameliorate poverty, promote pro-poor development initiatives, and lower societal inequalities, which are still unacceptably high".
Instead of the orthodox belief that the economy must come first, the civil society statement declared "People-centred development will only take place when economic goals are subordinated to social and political objectives".
They also alleged, again contrary to the orthodox view, that the current set of neo-liberal macro-economic policies do not guarantee job creation, but on the contrary destroy jobs, and affect workers' rights. They called for "greater attention to protect employment and worker rights".
They warned that the neo-liberal growth model, "devoid of deliberate policy thrust aimed at sustainable human development, will not assist countries to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015"
The MDGs are a set of goals approved by virtually every country in the world at the UN Millennium Summit in 2000. They include halving the number of people living on less than a dollar a day, ensuring universal primary school enrolment, and cutting child mortality by two thirds and maternal mortality by three quarters - all by the cut-off date of 2015.
The civil society document also feared that the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), under negotiation with the European Union, might have a negative impact on poor people in southern Africa, and demanded that government should publicly disclose the contents of the interim EPAs that have already been signed.
The civil society organizations insisted "that good governance is a necessary pre-requisite for the effective role of the state in promoting development". They called for "accountable, transparent and corruption-free governments that are responsive to the needs of their citizens".
As for the wide range of SADC protocols signed by the member states, the document warned that there should be mechanisms to ensure that they are observed and implemented. The civil society bodies therefore supported the SADC Secretariat proposal to set up a Regional Poverty Observatory. This should play "an important role in monitoring our efforts to address poverty, and in enhancing cooperation and accountability".
The declaration demanded that all SADC members should meet their commitment to devote at least 10 per cent of budgetary resources to agriculture, and claimed that land reform would play "an important role in addressing the poverty of rural people in the region through increasing access to productive assets and improving agricultural productivity".
But it also attacked the type of land reform that had been "implemented in an unsustainable and disruptive manner in some countries of the region".
In fact, there has only been one country where land reform could be described in those terms, and that is Zimbabwe. Yet this statement, like virtually all the public statements at this SADC conference, never specifically mentions the crisis in Zimbabwe.
The civil society bodies also call on SADC "to undergo a deliberate transformation towards a rules-based organization with the secretariat sufficiently empowered with authority to ensure enforcement of protocols and agreements".
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