Mr President, on the subject of aid to developing countries, and in particular to those known as the least-developed countries, what are the facts? We discovered these facts just now. The mandate for the third UN conference covers, in particular, public development aid, debt and trade. In that case, we must not try to evade the following conclusion, namely that the commitments made for the preceding decade have not been fulfilled. It has often been said, but it is necessary to repeat it, that the decrease in the flow of public development aid is unacceptable. It has dwindled by almost half during the last decade, falling to only 0.05% of the GDP of the donor countries, far below the 0.7% objective set by the UN. In Europe, only the northern countries are meeting this commitment. Moreover, the proportion of this public development aid that is spent on economic infrastructure and the production sector has also been reduced. What does the future hold for these countries, if they cannot achieve a level of development which will enable them to make choices that are truly independent? There is no need to seek further afield for the reasons for the results that have been obtained. The mere mention of the fall in life expectancy to 51 years gives an indication of the size of the disaster. Behind the experts’ reports there are men and women who are living in extreme poverty: 614 million people, or one tenth of the world’s population, who live on less than two dollars a day. Worse that this, as UNCTAD reports, the least-developed countries are caught in a downward spiral and a vicious circle of economic regression, social tensions and violence, which all reinforce one another. Thus the proportion of their GDP accounted for by the manufacturing sector has not increased, and in some cases it has even decreased. The LDCs are still, in many cases, exporters of only one or two basic products. Production capacity has been reduced in some countries. For example, the committee that is preparing for the third conference has even noted that very often the industries created to supply the internal market have been forced out of the market by the increasingly keen competition from imports which is the result of liberalising trade. The third UN conference must not be just another ritual gathering, and I believe that the European Union, which is to some extent hosting the summit, should help to make sure that it does not turn into one. Europe’s political authority is achieved from its capacity to stand up to an all-consuming globalisation governed only by the laws of commerce and of money. The effectiveness of its development policy is measured by practical action, and there are avenues which still need to be explored as a matter of urgency, such as debt cancellation, the need for urgent action to recognise the right of countries hit by AIDS to manufacture and sell the necessary medicines, the need for high-quality public education services to contribute to the crucial development of human capabilities, and the need to help these countries to become self-sufficient in food. I believe that development cannot be summed up simply as the organisation of trading relations... (The President cut the speaker off)

Political group: GUE-NGL