Proposal for the Helsinki Process

Proposal for the Helsinki Process
Susan George
TNI Website, 8 March 2005

In the draft "Helsinki Group declaration/statement [please see my proposed changes in previous message] five "baskets" are listed at the end, in no particular order:

• Peace and Security
• Governance
• Poverty and Development
• Human Rights
• The Environment

I see at least one large and potentially HP-threatening gap in this list which I'll come to in a moment.

We have been asked to draw out the synergies and inter-linkages between the baskets, but this could turn into a true maze/mess, a labyrinthine exercise. I'm no mathematician, but if you draw the matrix, you'll see that five baskets down and five across results in ten linkages, assuming each basket is related to the others in only one respect. There would be far more linkages if we tried to be at all thorough, particularly since the baskets are already multiple [poverty AND development; peace AND security; Civil and Political; Economic, Social and Cultural Rights... ]. This hardly seems to me a practical or feasible way to proceed. I propose that rather than working from a matrix approach, we determine a hierarchy, not of importance because all are important but of inclusion, or categorisation. These could be envisioned as concentric circles.

The first, all-inclusive circle: the environment

People with no land or damaged; unproductive land; depleted or polluted seas, rivers and fresh water, no energy or only environmentally destructive energy sources like forest clearing, will have little food and will remain poor, underdeveloped, disease-ridden, etc. etc. The preservation and enhancement of natural systems conditions the other goals. As we all know, a great many planetary systems [climate, atmosphere, oceans and even, increasingly, health] can only be preserved internationally. Think of the avian flu threat..

Practical Proposals for the environment basket:

• World Bank and other development banks to cease immediately funding fossil-fuel projects, substituting and encouraging renewable energy schemes.
• Public [municipal, citizen] control over water to be advocated and aided through information exchange and practical, including legal, help [see Corporate Europe Observatory, Reclaiming Public Water: Achievements, struggles and visions from around the world, CEO and Transnational Institute, 2005 for many examples].
• Agricultural yield-enhancing schemes to be implemented, in cooperation with interested farmers' organisations and regional business associations, without recourse to GMOs [see the work of Professor Jules Pretty, Essex University, who has collated dozens of local improvements using cost-free, available technology].
• Clean and materials-limiting production [for North as well as South]; [see Ernst-Ulrich von Weiszacher of the Wuppertal Institute, Factor Four for multiple examples.] In a general way, show that most necessary technologies already exist but are largely unknown [no diffusion for want of funds and political will] or even prevented by those in control of existing technologies from gaining a foothold. Devise data banks and other ways to make them available.
• Challenge major corporations to contribute a tiny fraction of their research budgets to such schemes, i.e. petroleum companies to renewable energies; GMO producers to biological low-tech agriculture; Suez + Vivendi to local water control as a test of "corporate social responsibility"; with free community access to the research results.

The second concentric circle: International human systems

This circle contains the baskets now called Peace and Security and Poverty and Development. The latter is the basket I'm least happy with. The big, potentially risky gap referred to at the beginning is that none of the baskets "contain" Trade, Finance, Information, Food, Energy, Armaments and other man-made systems which have a huge bearing on peoples' lives. The Millennium Process, from which I understand these different baskets derive, may have preferred not to mention them because issues of power would then have had to be confronted [e.g. northern agricultural export subsidies and unfair trade rules, arms trade; currency speculation, financial crises, petroleum prices and the like]. Leaving these systems aside seems to me a real cop-out-but if the other group members are adamant that they aren't to be discussed, then we shall have to do the best we can with what we have and be content with declaring yet again that poverty is A Bad Thing. I don't want to break the consensus, only to be realistic about what we are attempting to do and cannot possibly do without taking power and control into consideration, i.e. asking why things are presently the way they are when it's clear they need to be changed. As the late Bishop of Recife, Dom Helder Camara said, "When I give food to the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a communist".

Practical proposals for the second basket:

• Countries to be allowed and encouraged [contrary to IMF instructions] to impose temporary capital exit controls in order to avoid the disastrous human impact of speculative financial crises and to impose high exit taxes even during more normal periods for capital that leaves before a specified period. [Chile had such a law but the US made them get rid of it in the context of the bilateral FTA].
• HIPC countries to form a cartel to face the Paris Club with the help of "like-minded" countries in HP which are also members of the Paris Club. Hopefully they will declare unilateral debt cancellation or at least reduction of debt service payments by 25 percent/year for four years. Mid-level indebted countries in similar stance with slower phased reduction of payments. Honest calculations to be undertaken of odious debt, due to dictators' thefts, armaments purchases or reimbursement of useless but expensive white elephant projects encouraged by the World Bank or other development banks.
• Encouragement of participatory budgeting to provide public services, especially to poor people in cities [many examples in Brazil].
• An immediate stop to forced privatisation through "structural adjustement packages".
• Registering poor peoples' property rights in participating countries [cf. Hernan de Soto's work].
• Targeted aid to reduce child labour and keep children in school through "Bolsa Escola" schemes that pay the mother if the child misses less than 2 days a month. Highly cost- effective, reduces not just child labour but malnutrition and petty crime.
• Collective low-cost loans for starting small enterprise and cooperatives, especially for women [unlike Grameen Bank's individualistic approach].

I'm diffident about the following but still feel the issue must be addressed: What can be done when a large power, particularly the United States, refuses to abide by the rules it contributed to establishing? For example, the WTO Dispute Resolution Body has just declared on appeal that US cotton subsidies are WTO-illegal but it is unlikely that the US government will eliminate them any time soon [the Financial Times speaks of a "moral victory"]. Such practices continue to create untold hardship for small African cotton producers. Could we imagine an informal agreement among our HP like-minded countries that in such cases they would boycott US products when another supplier was available? And make it discreetly known they would do so? Or choose some other avenue of protest and pressure? I fear one of the greatest obstacles to attaining our professed goals will be US refusal over the next several years to cooperate in any area-climate/environment, human rights or whatever-though they may still claim to contribute to "good governance" by waging war.

Third concentric circle: The implementers

[This harks back to our initial categorisation in which "What needs to be done" was followed by "Who can/will do it"].

The implementers are Nations and groups of Nation-States, Regions, Municipalities, Households, International Organisations including the IFIs, Business, NGOs, Civil Society. This is where the notion of Variable Geometry comes in [see my rewrite of the Helsinki Declaration]. In my view, the best political concept that can emerge from the HP exercise is the recognition that no one institution, or type of institution, can solve by itself the problems we confront today, We therefore need a cooperative framework in which various actors abandon their turf and recognition wars and work together. Business is already doing this [since Rio 1992 and especially since Johannesburg]; unfortunately other sectors of civil society perceive this business-government cooperation [Public-Private Partnerships or PPPs, Private Sector Participation or PSPs and so on] as largely self-serving. There must be an honest and demonstrable element of altruism [though "image enhancement" is OK]!

We need to devote a special section of the Report to present and possible kinds of variable geometry.

Cross-cutting criteria:

All three concentric circles would be subject to the criteria of Human Rights and Governance which would thus attain a status far beyond that of mere "baskets". Let us assume that enough new funds were collected by inter alia miraculously reaching the eternal 0.7 percent goal, through international taxation, debt cancellation and closing both tax loopholes and tax havens-all of which the HP should recommend. It would concentrate minds wonderfully if the "international community" made sure such funds were distributed only on the basis of compliance with set standards of good governance and respect for human rights. I made a similar proposal to qualify for debt cancellation [the receiving government would organise the election, on a geographical and sectoral basis, of a council of its own citizens to sit alongside the government to determine priorities]. Erkki said the idea was a "non-starter". I continue to believe, however, that criteria, standards and democracy are necessary, that one can't just hand over new monies, assuming they exist, to national governments, period, and hope for the best. Let me add that such criteria should also apply to the governments of the North and to the International Financial Institutions.

See also TNI Helsinki page