Seoul to host conference on development aid, goals for next millennium

from Yonhap News

South Korea is to host an international conference here early next month on eradicating global poverty and how to steer the world for the next 1,000 years, conference organizers said Thursday.

Organized by the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), an international aid arm of the Foreign Ministry, the conference on "Searching for Effective Measures to Achieve Millennium Development Goals" will be held on March 7, a KOICA official said.

Adopted by an unprecedented unanimous vote by 189 member states of the United Nations in 2000, the Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs, aims to achieve eight major goals, including halving extreme poverty and halting the spread of acquired immune deficient syndrome (AIDS), by the target year of 2015.

This conference "holds significance today, as the MDGs have already become serious and pressing global issues, and the Korean government has committed to join the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD by 2010," the KOICA said in a press release.

The Development Assistance Committee is an international organization through which the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), also known as the rich nations' club, deals with cooperation for developing nations. South Korea joined the 30-member OECD in 1996.

The one-day conference will consist of three separate sessions. The first includes a special lecture on the meaning and assessment of the U.N. millennium goals by Jeffrey D. Sachs, a professor of health policy and management at Columbia University, followed by a discussion session with Park Beom-seok, chief of the Foreign Ministry's International Economic Affairs Bureau, and the British ambassador in Seoul, Warwick Morris, another KOICA official said.

The second session will deal with the main theme of the conference -- searching for ways to achieve the MDGs.

It will be chaired by Cho Hyun, deputy head of the South Korean mission to the U.N. Adrian Davis, head of the British Department for International Development's Beijing office, and the assistant secretary-general of the U.N. Development Program, Bruce Jenks, have been invited to speak during the session.

Foreign Minister Song Min-soon will host a dinner for the participants after they wrap up the meeting with a session on ways to share and exchange development experiences among countries, at which Richard Carey, OECD director for development cooperation, will give a lecture.

"With internationally recognized development experts...I am convinced that this conference will serve as a superb opportunity to enhance public understanding of the MDGs," KOICA President Shim Jang-bum said in an invitation letter, also made available Thursday.