Friday, April 17, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: North-South Meets, More Reforms Needed for MDGs
Raúl Pierri
- The leaders of the industrialised North and the developing South must hold regular meetings, and global reforms must be instituted if the Millennium Development Goals are to be achieved, according to the Helsinki Process meeting at the fifth World Social Forum (WSF).
The WSF, the giant civil society meet currently under way in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, has brought together over 120,000 representatives of non-governmental groups from around the globe to reflect on strategies for creating an alternative world order.
The Helsinki Process on Globalisation and Democracy, an initiative of the Finnish government in cooperation with the Tanzanian government, was launched in 2002 to promote “solution-oriented cooperation” between governments, civil society organisations and the corporate sector.
On Thursday, three Helsinki Process reports were released simultaneously at the WSF in Porto Alegre and the World Economic Forum (WEF) taking place in the Swiss alpine resort of Davos.
The reports address the issues of global governance, human security, and the mobilisation of resources to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adopted by the international community at a special session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2000.
Tanzanian Minister for Community Development, Gender and Children Asha Rose Migiro, who presented the reports in Porto Alegre, expressed her concern over the lack of political will to achieve these goals among the world’s governments.
“The dynamics of globalisation will bring prosperity to some, and misery and marginalization to many others, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, and the entire South,” she warned.
“Sustainable prosperity is shared prosperity. Sustainable security rests upon cooperation between states,” she added.
The eight MDGs, meant to be achieved by the year 2015, include ensuring universal primary education and reducing by half the proportion of people in the world suffering from poverty and hunger and living without sustainable access to safe drinking water.
The 189 U.N. member states at the time also pledged to promote gender equality, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, and ensure environmental sustainability.
More than one billion people in the world today live on less than a dollar a day, while another 2.7 billion earn less than two dollars, and 11 million children die every year of preventable diseases like malaria, diarrhoea and pneumonia, according to U.N. statistics.
The Helsinki Process underlines the need for all sectors of society to work together to change this situation.
“Achieving the MDGs by 2015 in all countries will require a major unified effort by each of the three sources of transformational change: the private sector, the state and civil society,” says the Helsinki Process report on the Millennium Goals.
“Only simultaneous, substantial effort on multiple fronts will generate the high yield outcomes necessary to achieve the MDGs,” it adds.
José Olivio Oliveira, assistant secretary general of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), which participates in the Helsinki Process, told IPS that there is an ongoing debate over how to obtain funding for measures aimed at meeting these goals.
“Some propose imposing taxes on certain activities, but we would have to study this strategy carefully to ensure that it serves as an incentive. There couldn’t be taxes on weapons sales, for example, because that would mean that the eradication of poverty would depend on the continuation of this trade. A tax on this activity should be used to curb the arms trade,” he explained.
Oliveira, who took part in the drafting of one of the reports, stressed that a series of profound changes are needed to achieve the MDGs.
The Helsinki Process advocates adopting reforms in international agricultural trade, cancelling the external debt of the world’s poorest countries, and pressuring the industrialised North to double the resources devoted to official development assistance, for which the current target is 0.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
According to Oliveira, the three reports were released simultaneously in both Porto Alegre and Davos in order to stimulate discussion in all relevant arenas – civil society at the WSF and heads of state and corporate executives at the WEF.
“There are things aimed at civil society, there are things aimed at governments, and there are things aimed at the business sector. Once it is determined that a problematic situation exists, you need to establish a process to change it and establish the actors who need to be involved. This is what we are doing,” he said.
In its report on global governance, the Helsinki Process calls for expanding the Group of Seven – the group of the world’s seven most powerful nations plus Russia – to create a forum with genuine international representation.
“The current periodic G7 gathering of the world’s richest and most powerful, if not most populous countries, occurs without any formal status in an international constitutional sense, wields substantial direct influence in such global economic institutions as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation, and can justly be characterised as an oligarchy, not a democracy,” states the report.
“We recommend the replacement of the G7 with a broader grouping, a G20 (or thereabouts) annual summit of the heads of leading governments from the North and the South. This informal leading-level group should assume a sense of responsibility for the functioning of the world economy and its principal institutions,” it adds.
With regard to human security, the Helsinki Process calls on governments to adopt measures aimed at ending gender-based violence, the use of children in armed conflicts, the trafficking of human beings and the illegal trade of firearms.
Print
|
