Change and the bewildering issues associated with it will be hotly debated in Havana this week. Some 3,000 officials from 133 countries of what used to be called the Third World–along with huge numbers of NGOs–are gathering for the biggest summit that developing nations have organized for themselves. The summit is being organized under the rubric of the G77–which now consists of 133 developing countries, but continues to use the moniker chosen 36 years ago when the group was founded to give emerging states a stronger voice in world affairs.
Why Havana in this day of democratization and expanding free markets? It couldn’t be just the geography. Fidel Castro’s predictable effusive hospitality aside, the charm of the Malecon could scarcely compete with the Place Pigalle. Nor could it be a desire to pay homage to Castro, the longest-ruling patriarch in the developing world. His Marxist ideology is widely deemed irrelevant. Yet, more than 100 world leaders are showing up, among them tough-minded democrats such as Nigeria’s president, Olesegun Obasanjo, who suffered years of incarceration without trial in his own country–not unlike some of Cuba’s political dissidents.
But if the visitors no longer buy Castro’s militancy, they at least know they can count on his eloquence in articulating poor countries’ aspirations. The G77 are coming to Havana because the developing world–now known in development parlance as the Global South–is seized by a growing panic concerning economic and social progress. Nearly 2 billion people– a third of the globe’s population– live on less than $1 a day, according to the World Bank. And yet, as Donald Johnston, secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, pointed out to NEWSWEEK, wealthy countries continue to scale back the aid they give. Johnston wants his so-called rich man’s club of 29 countries to work more on debt relief and on issues such as transfer of affordable technology.
Johnston’s worry about aid is amply shared by the Global South. Consider these statistics about official development assistance, or ODA, as it is more popularly known: in 1975 the annual grant figure was almost $80 billion; in 1999 it had fallen to barely $45 billion. This year the rich countries will give barely $40 billion to G77 members. Only four countries–Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden–meet a longstanding international aid target of 0.7 percent of gross domestic product; the U.S. aid figure of $10 billion annually represents barely 0.1 percent of its GDP.
Isn’t private capital making up the difference? Dream on. Foreign direct investment tends to go to those countries already possessing good infrastructure and skilled labor–China, India, Brazil, South Africa, for example. The Chads of the world remain basket cases, yet their populations are growing; and with such demographic growth comes rising social expectations that can be politically explosive. (More than 90 percent of the world’s annual population growth of 100 million occurs in the G77 countries.)
The G77 will certainly raise the question of forgiveness of $1.6 trillion that its members currently owe to governments and other sources in the industrialized countries, according to Qazi Shaukat Fareed, a senior Pakistani diplomat. Although the United States and the European Union favor some debt relief, the Global South’s leaders will be deluding themselves if they expect a collective pardon of the debt–and implicitly, of the misgovernance and malfeasance characterizing so much of the developing world. And yet, some G77 members must channel up to 95 percent of their hard-currency revenues into debt service each year. “Historians are not going to be extremely kind to us,” Chief Arthur C. I. Mbanefo, Nigeria’s ambassador to the United Nations, said last week. “We have to leave behind something constructive.”
Alas, in Havana the G77’s leaders are unlikely to leave behind much more than well-intentioned communiqués. Sure, they’ll deliberate on aid, debt, globalization, technology and enhanced economic cooperation and trade within the Global South. But it’s still a poor man’s summit in a unipolar world where the rich men call the shots. Surely Obasanjo (the current G77 chairman) and his colleagues know that Castro’s hugs don’t matter nearly as much as Washington’s handshake. Perhaps there’s still time to plan a post-Havana pit stop in the city where the real power of influencing donor and investment capital lies.
