UN economic, social chief reviews Vanuatu preamble
Updated
The Pacific seems to have a new champion in the boss of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.
Dr Noeleen Heyzer is in Vanuatu for this week's series of meetings on the Global Economic Crisis and the Pacific. She says that after two days of talks with Pacific government ministers and officials she has a much better grasp of the issues confronting the region.
At the conclusion of one of the preliminary meetings which dealt with a strategy for sustainable development in the Small Island Developing States, Dr Heyzer summed up the results.
Speaker: Dr Noeleen Heyzer, chief of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific
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HEYZER: What came out is that we've been talking about aid effectiveness, in fact the flow in terms of aid as one-point-three billion US dollars a year, that's a lot of money. But then at the same time what we also discovered from the island states is that there is also an outflow of money because of debt repayments and because of all other kind of arrangements, and therefore what we need to do is to ensure that the Pacific Islands states will have the capacity to use these development aid in a very effective manner to build up the economic sector and the social sector and the environmental sector.
One of the things that came up was that one always talk about, especially when it comes to trade agenda or the economic agenda or the agenda of providing social services is there's a lack of capacity. But the Pacific Islands voice that came up for me that was interesting was that they keep saying as we develop our management capacity your rules and regulations and procedures, even to access the aid gets more and more complicated, and therefore how do you coordinate, simply so that we can access this aid as quickly as we can. So that's at the international level. There are also new monies coming in and we need to make sure that the allocation of new resources from the climate change agenda that came out of Copenhagen, it has to be fast-tracked for small island states, because they are at the forefront of this change. And it has to be prioritized, their voice and their concerns will need to be centre to that agenda.
Now at the regional level there's a lot that would need to be done because the ocean has isolated, there are built-in forms of constraints due to isolation, due to the difficulty of transportation, the high cost of energy, the difficulty of building the infrastructure for sustained accelerated high growth for many of these countries because the markets are extremely small. But how that you deal with it regionally in terms of managing the ocean as a resource, so new regulatory frameworks, how do you manage in some countries, we're talking about even managing the tuna trade matter but in a cooperative way? How do you deal with the regulatory framework to deal with ocean resources? How do you make sure that you collaborate in terms of even to get the right prices for your commodities? How do you build in systems of bulk buying for energy and so on and so forth?
But there are also new opportunities, when you talk of the region what I'm saying is that it should not just be the Pacific, it should be Asia Pacific, and therefore Asia Pacific, Asia is rethinking itself in terms of green growth, green technologies, new markets, new drivers of growth, new connectivity, and how do you make sure that then that discussion the Pacific agenda and the interests of the small island states are also on that agenda. I think really looking at the ocean not as an ocean of isolation but an ocean of wealth if you like, and how do you manage that at the regional level in a more collective way would be very interesting.
There are lots of things that have to be done at national level itself. How do you make sure that the international commitments, the MDGs, the Mauritius strategy, and all these different strategies that have come out of the United Nations process from the regional processes, like the Pacific Plan and so on will get incorporated into national planning strategy. So that it's not an added on, but it is a commitment with budgets, with national budgets that governments and donor partners can actually contribute to. So how do you integrate them into your national planning process and into your national budget process. And how do you build up capacity to deliver on the core services and to build up the human resources that are absolutely necessary for the implementation, and at the same time to address the social needs of the different communities. I think the issues of disparities also came up and the need for social protection. We talked about wealth generation, we need to look at wealth generation together with social policies.
