United Nations Secretary-General terms joint approach an effective strategy for "coordinated operations", "coherent policies"
Swiss-funded Cluster Programme presented to spur tourism and related economic progress in Lao People´s Democratic Republic
Istanbul, 10 May 2011 - The Secretary-General of the United Nations, the Secretary-General of UNCTAD and the heads of several United Nations agencies unveiled Monday evening -- at a special event held at the Fourth United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) -- a policy paper for heightened cooperation to help developing countries, especially LDCs, improve the breadth and capacities of their economies.
The presentation was followed by the signing of a Swiss-funded mechanism to support such teamwork. This mechanism will be used for the first time to enable the Lao People´s Democratic Republic to expand its tourism business and to link that process to related sectors of the Lao economy, including organic agriculture and handicrafts.
The overall cooperation strategy, contained in a joint concept note adopted by the United Nations Cluster on Trade and Productive Capacity, calls for, among other things, well-coordinated programmes designed and jointly implemented with recipient governments to "enhance the economic diversification of LDCs by promoting domestic value-added processes as a core element of the manufacturing and services sectors". It also calls for steps to "refocus economic and finance policies aimed at promoting both domestic and foreign investment that enhances the productive, technological and trading capacities of developing countries, in particular LDCs". Further, it recommends increasing "the allocation official development assistance to ensure more support to the production and trading sectors" and developing "new financing mechanisms, including through domestic resource mobilization, to back the development of productive capacities and business opportunities".
The Cluster was created in 2008 by the United Nations Chief Executives Board. UNCTAD, the lead agency for the Cluster, has long advocated that stable, long-term progress in the world´s poorest nations can best be achieved by enabling their economies to produce broader varieties of goods, and more sophisticated goods, for sale and export. Currently many LDCs depend heavily on limited varieties of commodities - basic agricultural goods or raw natural resources. These goods have historically been vulnerable to destabilizing rises and falls in global demand and prices.
Opening Monday evening´s special event, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, "The joint concept note sets the stage not only for coordinated operations, but also for coherent policies among all agencies of the Cluster."
"The Cluster," he went on, "demonstrates that a new way of thinking and operating is possible for the United Nations, in a field where donor support is often sectoral and fragmented. It is our collective duty to accelerate and to deepen the actions of the United Nations system, as a whole, in this direction."
UNCTAD Secretary-General Supachai Panitchpakdi told the meeting that through the Cluster, over time, "as in a puzzle, what used to be separated pieces of individual agencies´ actions are more and more coming together in a coherent way". He added, "There are no development benefits from trade without the development of home-grown productive capacities in all sectors. If the economies of the LDCs continue to be confined to a few commodities, their integration in the international trading system will not bring development results."
Kandeh Yumkella, Director-General of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), presided over the signing ceremony of the Framework Agreement between Switzerland and the Cluster that will fund the joint programme in the Lao People´s Democratic Republic. He said the programme is being included in the United Nations Development Assistance Framework for the Lao People´s Democratic Republic. "By this inclusion, we establish a ´bridge´ between other economic areas of assistance provided by the United Nations agencies on the one side, and, on the other side, the assistance in the area of trade and productive capacity," he said.
Representing Switzerland at the ceremony was Luzius Wasescha, Ambassador and Head of the Swiss delegation to the LDC-IV Conference. Also at the podium for the signing was José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, International Labour Organization (ILO) Executive Director for the Employment Sector.
Participating agencies in the joint programme with the Lao People´s Democratic Republic are UNIDO, the International Trade Centre, ILO, UNCTAD and the United Nations Office for Project Services.
