Global Summit on Poverty

Global Summit on Poverty

By Dr Arvind Kumar

Global Poverty Summit has just concluded its meeting at Johannesburg in South Africa. The discussions at the summit were marked by skepticism on whether the Doha Development Round of negotiations at the World Trade Organization could help decrease the number of poor people in developing countries. The Doha talks, which began in 2001, are designed to reduce obstacles to market access throughout the world, with the development of poor countries at the heart of their agenda. They look at three main sectors - agriculture, intellectual property and services.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize-winning economist, in his address to the summit, said that improving income levels did not automatically imply better lives for the poor in any country, as other factors such as the implementation of policies that benefit the poor within countries matter a lot more. While citing the USA as an example of where gross domestic product had grown substantially but not filtered down to the poor, who were worse off than a decade ago, Stiglitz said: "It [high economic growth levels] had a trickle-up effect."

While pleading for the rapid elimination of export subsidies, especially for cotton, sugar, groundnuts, dairy products and fish, the Johannesburg summit called for the setting up of an annual reporting mechanism on duty and quota-free (DFQF). It warned, however, that “the length of time that the [Doha] negotiations have taken threatens to render aspects of the agenda obsolete."