We are indeed deeply honoured as the SACP to have been invited both to address your very important conference and be able to participate in its proceedings. As the SACP we wish to salute the Jubilee 2000 campaign for its courageous stand and campaigns in the interest of the working people and the poor of the South. Indeed you have also scored enormous achievements in placing the question of debt and poverty at the centre of international debates and capitalist globalisation. There are number of lessons that we have to build upon from the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which 1 hope this conference will deliberate upon, and take very concrete and specific resolutions. Secondly, and related to the above, your campaigns have further highlighted and underlined the reality that the biggest threat to humanity today is poverty, which is not an accident but an integral component of globalisation.
Globalisation can only deepen if poverty also becomes globalised.
This is clearly an unsustainable system that needs to be fought by all progressive forces in the world today. But neo-liberal ideology and its measures of poverty continue to distort the realities of poverty such that millions of poor people are today excluded from the category of the poor. This is clearly ridiculous. Much more disturbing about the application and definition of poverty is that this measure is only used for developing countries. In the Western Countries, the measure for poverty is the minimum living level, which, in many instances, is 10 times more than the measure used for developing countries.