Q&A: 'International Battles Need To Be Fought Nationally'

from IPS News

Interview with Marina Ponti, director of the U.N. Millennium Campaign for Europe

ROME, After the recent inauguration of two regional centres in Africa and Asia, the U.N. Millennium Campaign arrives in Europe. The new European office -- headquartered in Rome -- will be headed by Marina Ponti, deputy director of the global campaign and director for Europe.

"The Millennium Campaign was launched in 2002 in Italy, and five years later we come back where we started," Ponti told IPS correspondent Sabina Zaccaro in an interview. "Of course, this office is going to be a regional office and is going to support activities of citizens and organisations in all European countries, but a key part of the job would really be here."

The Millennium Campaign was launched by the U.N. to help citizens lobby their governments to achieve the eight goals agreed by global leaders at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, with 2015 as a cut-off date for specific achievements.

The targets include halving the number of 1 billion people living in absolute poverty, universal primary education, promotion of gender equality and empowering women, reduction of child and maternal mortality by two-thirds, fighting HIV/AIDS, malaria and other major diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability, and achieving a global partnership for development.

IPS: Why has the Campaign decided to set up its European headquarters in Rome?

Marina Ponti: The idea of moving the regional office from New York to Europe is an important decision, which actually was taken after the very good results given by the regional office opened in Nairobi and the one in Bangkok. After those very positive results it became evident that an office had to be opened in Europe.

We chose Italy not only because it is a G7 country (group of seven industrialised nations, the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan) but because it has an extremely active civil society. There is a strong peace movement here, there are many actors involved, like local authorities and NGOs, and people really care about fighting poverty, about protecting the environment, and building a fairer international trade system.

IPS: But what kind of support do you expect from Italy, in a period of great political uncertainty?

MP: The outgoing centre-left government has shown that it strongly believes in campaign as a way to challenge institutions and foster improvement. Yes, we are now in a very unstable political situation, we are going into elections in two months...what we can say is that we really hope that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will become an issue for all parties, something they see as an important component of their political platform, and that the next government will actually build on what was done and on all the positive steps that were made by this government towards development cooperation.

IPS: In your previous work with Social Watch (a Uruguay based international NGO watchdog network monitoring poverty eradication and gender equality) you have explored the "dark side" of the international financial system. Its "darkest" side, corruption, has very negative impact on the development of poor people everywhere. Money laundering flows are reported to be in excess of 1 trillion dollars, being laundered every year by drug dealers, arms traffickers and other criminals. But this issue is absent from the eight millennium goals. Why?

MP: This is a very important question. MDGs were a deal between rich and poor nations. Poor nations had to commit, and it's their primary responsibility to achieve goals one to seven, and then rich countries have to achieve the goal number eight, addressing quality and quantity of aid and the reform of the trading system.

If you look at the Campaign's policy demands and campaigning activities in the south, in Africa and in Asia, 90 percent of what we are asking governments is to fight corruption. Accountability, and fighting corruption, and really promoting institutional reforms are a crucial component for achieving the goals.

IPS: But why are you, as a Millennium Campaign, are not discussing mechanisms of fighting corruption internationally?

MP: It's because first of all there are no such international institutions that have a mandate above sovereignty. And we do believe strongly that governments and institutional organisations are basically following whatever governments say.

We will be able to fight corruption above the sovereign states at the moment where fighting corruption will become a reality at the national level. Many people campaign against the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation and other international organisations. But these organisations reflect in a way the demands -- and they actually are dependent on the voice -- of the governments that actually govern them.

As Campaign, we need to get citizens, and groups representing citizens, to pressure governments so that they can actually change the policies at the national level, where it really matters, and also in all institutional organisations that they represent. What we ask as one of our policy messages is really the coherence of the policies. But coherence starts at home, at the national level.

IPS: Can you give us an example?

MP: We have been fighting agricultural subsidies, and one of the worst offenders in that kind of subsidies related problems is the European Commission. But we don't want to fight this battle in Brussels, because Brussels has not really the power to change policies, until the national governments, especially those from Southern Europe, change their position on this issue.

Many of the policies that we fight in international organisations actually come from political decisions taken at the national level. That is why we privilege that level.

IPS: You have denounced the lack of political will in rich nations to stimulate cooperation for development. Concretely, you have asked rich countries to work harder in poor rural areas, redefine the sustainability of foreign debt within the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and for fairer commerce practices. Past the mid-point towards 2015, has anything changed? What about Europe?

MP: In 2005 something very special vis-à-vis the MDGs happened, when Luxemburg achieved an important European agreement on how to reach the 0.7 percent (of the national budget as official development aid), and we had a very clear intermediate calendar. This has been a very important achievement towards the goals. But again, those commitments are not binding, so they will met with the reality of the policy only if governments and parliaments will perceive a very strong pressure coming from their voters.

I think that at present Europe is still matching those commitments, but in the next few years we will see whether Europe wants to really play its part. I think that it is crucial, after the midpoint, to create again a strong mobilisation and really increase any kind of pressure from the media, from local governments, from civil society, to convey the message that as European citizens we really want our government to live up to what we have promised.

IPS: What are the main points of the Millennium Campaign's strategy for this year?

MP: This is going to be a very important year, focusing on one issue which is key for the European campaign, the quality of aid.

It is easier to talk about the 0.7 percent, and to talk about quantity, because it is something we can measure and something we can ask specifically to governments. But quantity and quality cannot be separated. We want more resources not just for the sake of having more resources but because we really need those resources to achieve the MDGs, to be targeting the poorest countries in the world, to target the most vulnerable groups -- women, indigenous groups, children. I think that in the next ten years it will be more and more difficult for governments to increase resources if the citizens cannot be certain that these resources have been well invested.

I think the debate on quality is as important as the debate on quantity. In September there will be an important conference in Accra (Ghana) that will assess the progresses made by donor countries to improve the quality of their development assistance.

And 'Stand Up' (the global mobilisation against poverty) will be replicated this year as well, on Oct. 17-19. Last year, more than 44 million people joined Stand Up globally. Of these, 750,000 were in Italy.

IPS: What is the relation, if any, between pushing for development and the global crisis in the Middle East, Pakistan, Burma, Africa...

MP: We cannot ignore what is happening around the world, those emergencies are very visible in the media and in the public eye, so it is not possible to avoid the discussion.

But we also need cultural change, we must stop moving from one emergency to another, and start discussing how we can create an environment able to sustain social growth, peace, human rights, empowerment of men and women, and to sustain the planet.

As long as we only jump from conflict to conflict, without asking the very boring long-term questions -- the questions that politicians in many cases don't ask, because they may not be still in power in the long term -- then we have very little scope for success. With just a short-term view, whatever solution we may find would be a short-term solution. Of course we have to respond to what is happening in the world, but at the same time we need to know and address those long time questions and challenges that are not under the spotlight.