The Prime Minister
Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee, addressed the Non-aligned Movement
Business Forum on South-South Cooperation, at Kuala Lumpur,
today.
Following is
the full text of the Prime Minister’s speech on the occasion:
"I thank the
Asian Strategic and Leadership Institute and associate organizations
for inviting me to this Forum. This is a welcome initiative.
It enables business and industry from our countries to interact
with political and economic decision-makers. I am especially
pleased to be in the company of the Honourable Presidents of
Indonesia and South Africa and the Prime Minister of Thailand
at this event.
Many people question
the relevance of NAM in the changed global context. I think
the best answer to such scepticism is contained in the theme
of this Business Forum – namely, Remaking NAM by Enhancing Cooperation
and Building Bridges.
It is true that
NAM’s political agenda has changed with the end of the Cold
War. Its campaigns for de-colonisation, disarmament and anti-apartheid
achieved great success. By the very nature of things, they consumed
most of its energies in the first three decades of its existence.
However, NAM’s
developmental agenda has lost none of its relevance. South-South
Cooperation and North-South engagement were permanent elements
in NAM’s discourse. They made limited progress under the shadow
of the Cold War. Sadly, the progress on these imperatives has
not been very rapid even after the end of the Cold War.
Meanwhile, globalisation,
which has arrived as the defining trend in contemporary world
affairs, has provided a new context for redefining NAM. For
all the developing countries, globalisation has meant new challenges,
as well as fresh opportunities. It has also thrown up issues
that determine stability and security in the world in the 21st
century. Thus, our unrealized goals of development and our shared
vision for a peaceful tomorrow should unite us in NAM even more
cohesively in the era of globalisation than the political goals
of the Cold War era.
The numbers
that prove this point are numbing. 10 million people have been
annually joining the ranks of the poor in the last decade. A
quarter of the world’s population lives below the poverty line.
Over a billion people are under-nourished. Over a billion people
survive on less than 1 dollar a day. Malaria, tuberculosis and
HIV/AIDS are mainly diseases of the poor, who cannot afford
medical treatment for them.
In our Millennium
Declaration of 2000, we set ourselves the goal of poverty eradication
by 2015. At the World Food Summit, we pledged to halve hunger
by 2015. If we are to achieve these goals, South-South Cooperation
and North-South Engagement have to be more than mere slogans.
They have to be invested with sound understanding and a strong
will for action. And that action has to be mainly in the area
of economic cooperation and business interaction.
The end of the
Cold War also meant the end of statist models of economic growth.
It enabled many NAM countries to devise their own road to economic
reforms, based on the virtues of private enterprise and competition,
with the State playing a promotive and facilitatory role. Success
stories along this journey abound. One of them has been scripted
right here in Malaysia, under the leadership of Prime Minister
Mahathir.
In India, too,
economic liberalization has yielded positive results. Within
the last decade, nearly 15% of our population has been lifted
above the poverty line – and that means 150 million people.
Our economy has acquired globally competitive strengths in many
sectors, most notably in Information Technology.
Yes, globalisation
has created an objective basis for mutually beneficial relationship
among reforming economies. However, we cannot be blind to the
fact that it has not rewarded most developing countries with
growth and development. 116 Non-Aligned countries, representing
two-thirds of the world’s population, still contribute barely
20% to the global GDP. Their economic growth was slower in the
90’s than in the 70’s. In most developing countries, per capita
incomes have been falling, unemployment is rising and income
disparities are widening.
This is happening
because the systems and processes of the global economy, dominated
by developed countries, are not sensitive to the needs of the
developing countries. Volatile capital flows have sparked off
economic crises successively in Mexico, South East Asia, Brazil
and Argentina. There has been a glaring asymmetry in the distribution
of gains from trade liberalisation as developed countries find
newer ways to protect their markets. Transfers of capital resources
to Least Developed Countries have fallen sharply. Sustained
negative net capital transfers are leading these countries into
a debt trap.
The re-making
of NAM, therefore, lies in articulating a strong developmental
agenda. At the core of this agenda should be our demand for
a reform and reorientation of globalisation.
We should press
harder for reform of the international financial architecture.
Volatility of capital flows must be checked. Resource flows
to poor countries should be accelerated – through affirmative
action in certain cases, as in Africa. International institutional
conditionalities that have frequently slowed economic recovery,
rather than speeding it up, should be reviewed.
An allied issue
is the development of an objective mechanism for sovereign risk
ratings of developing countries. We need a more participatory
evaluation system, based on cooperative engagement between lending
and borrowing countries through international public institutions.
There are similarly
trade issues of crucial interest to NAM member-states. Our sheer
numbers suggest that we can influence decisions at the WTO to
promote our collective interests. For example, we can harmonise
our positions and pool our resources to –
- frustrate efforts to block technology
to treat diseases and epidemics that afflict millions;
- prevent unilateral action that
denies market access;
- fight against those provisions
of TRIPS and other WTO Agreements which impede our developmental
efforts;
- reject unacceptable trade linkages;
and
- monitor implementation of WTO
commitments by developed countries and seek redressal for
non-implementation.
Naturally, in a
large and diverse community such as ours, there are bound to
be differences. We have to recognise, however, that our differences
have often been exaggerated to our disadvantage. It is a tactic,
familiar from our colonial days, of dividing us on peripheral
issues, so that we remain apart on the central ones. We sometimes
forego our long-term interests by settling for short-term gains.
On all crucial
developmental issues, almost all of us have an identity of views.
However, this has not been translated into unity at the negotiating
table.
Even where our
interests do not coincide precisely, we can build broad coalitions.
We showed this at the Doha consensus, which correctly put the
needs of the poor above the commercial interests of a few multinational
companies.
The challenge before
us is: How do we remake NAM through business and economic interaction?
I would like to offer a few suggestions.
Strengthening regional
cooperation offers time-tested framework for rapid and mutually
beneficial growth. ASEAN has shown this with striking results.
This can, and needs to, be replicated in other regions. However,
this requires one condition to be adhered to. Economic cooperation
has to be depoliticised and made immune to bilateral issues.
In our scramble
for the increasingly saturated markets of the advanced countries,
we ignore the growth possibilities from South-South trade and
investment linkages. There are countries that are leaders in
certain sectors, and at the same time there are NAM countries
where those very sectors are underdeveloped. Today, Malaysian
firms are building highways in India and Indian companies are
building railway projects in Malaysia. Such linkages can be
multiplied literally a hundred fold in the areas of energy security,
food security, infrastructure development, enrichment of human
and institutional resources, tourism, entertainment and media.
For this, we need
to devise effective channels of business and developmental interaction
with each other. Today, sadly, we do not even exchange information
and data of great mutual interest. It is a shame that valuable
developmental experiences from Bangladesh’s micro-credit institutions
or Tanzania’s malaria-controlling bednets should remain confined
to a few regions. Meanwhile, other developing countries are
either busy reinventing the wheel or importing inappropriate
technologies or services from advanced countries for the same
applications.
In the jargon of
today, most of us are fully wired. Yet we do not seem to be
connected with each other. Our researchers, businessmen and
bankers are routinely sending data, contracts and money in real
time across thousands of miles to USA and Europe at the click
of a mouse. But we do not exchange information with countries
around us on the more basic realities.
The most crying
need, therefore, is for an information exchange system. I am
told that Indian business and industry have made a beginning
in this direction by launching a NAM Business Portal during
this Summit. I believe this is a valuable initiative, but it
can prosper only if it can pick up participation from NAM countries
around the world.
Exchanges through
the Internet are cheap, effective and comprehensive. We can
better network our chambers of business and industry, and think-tanks
on international economic issues, to exchange perspectives on
the world trading system and even synchronize our negotiation
positions on important issues.
For years, NAM
has been arguing the merits and demerits of a permanent NAM
Secretariat, with competing claims for its location and disagreements
on the scope of its activities. With one website on the Internet
– or a network of such websites – we can virtually perform many
functions of a NAM Secretariat, located in cyberspace and accessible
to all.
I believe there
is another initiative, which NAM can spearhead for the reform
of the international financial architecture. We know that unstable
capital flows can severely disrupt developing economies. There
is less ready acceptance of the idea that such flows should
be regulated by an international levy. I believe this is a reform
whose time has come. It combines in one effective measure an
instrument to protect weak economies from the volatility of
capital, to enhance investor confidence through stability of
capital markets, and to generate valuable developmental resources.
Conservative estimates
of capital flows in recent years indicate that even a token
tax of a quarter percent could generate annual revenues of the
order of $300 billion. If this were to form the corpus of a
Global Poverty Alleviation Fund, we can make dramatic progress
towards the objectives, which we outlined at the Millennium
Development Summit and the World Food Summit.
It has been argued
that it would be difficult to accurately monitor financial flows
and hence to operate this tax regime. The counter to this argument
is that U.N. Security Resolutions 1373 and 1456 ask countries
to take the most stringent measures to monitor terrorist financing
channels across the globe. Such measures, to which all countries
are committed by chapter VII of the UN Charter, would be of
far greater magnitude than those required for monitoring and
taxing capital flows.
The striking conclusion
from the journey of NAM is that ours is a story of huge missed
opportunities. The one positive lesson, however, is that now
we know how not to miss the opportunity in the future.
Sometimes, people
ask: Now that the Cold War is over, where is the Peace Dividend
for NAM countries? I believe that the dividend lies in making
development the main new "business" of NAM. We know
that good business always yields a handsome dividend. There
is every reason to believe that NAM’s new agenda, based on a
partnership between government and industry within and among
member nations, as also with countries of the developed world,
would yield faster economic growth, all-round development and
a better quality of life for all. That is the long-term peace
dividend all of us should strive for.
Thank you".