Jungtinių tautų vystymo programos atstovės įžanginis žodis

Madam Minister,
Colleagues,

The world at the beginning of 21st century offers sights, sounds and experiences that continue to astonish anyone born even a few decades ago. Space and time have been shrunk by a multitude of communication devices. Geneticists decode and tinker with the alphabet of life. And millions of people each year casually soar across continents in search of work and new experiences. Billions of people have the capacity to know and do things of which their parents or grandparents could barely dream.

But progress is not inevitable or universal. We started the new millennium with over 1.2 billion people in extreme poverty, over 100 million children not in school and nearly one in every three countries in the world poorer than they were at the beginning of the previous decade.

Last March in Monterey, Mexico at the World Conference on Financing for Development, the leaders of the states forged a new Global Deal, built around a partnership of mutual self-interest aimed at building a safer, more prosperous and more equitable world for all. One of the major successes of this conference is that both the European Union and the United States announced increasing development aid by approximately $7bn and $5bn a year respectively over the next four years, which represents a 20-25% rise in total ODA, the first significant increase on both sides of the Atlantic since the 1960s.

With a politically significant step taken to shift the debate on aid to making the most effective possible use of a steadily increasing resource base, the world has entered a new era. And it is an era, which will finally allow us to break out of the constraining box of minimalist agendas and declining resources we have been locked into for too long and pursue much more ambitious partnership agenda for development, making the battle against poverty a collective responsibility to be undertaken by the entire world.

This new vision is being built on the cornerstone that has global support but is firmly focused on country level success: the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Born at the historic United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000, they mark an unambiguous commitment by all countries across North and South to meet series of critical development targets - from putting children in schools to tackling killer diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria - with the overarching aim of halving extreme poverty by 2015. As to tackling killer diseases, last June, at a summit organized by the United Nations, the world signaled a new determination to fight the AIDS epidemic with the establishment of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Today, the Fund has committed up to $ 616 million over two years for prevention and treatment of the three diseases in severely affected countries.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is charged with helping countries to achieve this target. On our part, it means drawing on UNDP's pioneering experience in helping countries draft and manage Poverty Reduction Strategies. It means using closer links with civil society to ensure a genuinely wide and deep consultation on priorities and policy choices.

It means sometimes offering real alternative views or analysis to governments and partners as they seek to make the tough choices needed to map out their own development strategy. It means emphasizing that equity matters for poverty reduction because high inequality inhibits economic growth, contributes to poor policy-making and often delays pro-poor policy reforms.

The problem of poverty has no easy solutions, only dilemmas and tough choices that have to be made. It is also more than a financial issue. Accessibility and increased client-orientation of public services, cooperation with the larger civil society, the private sector and the media as well as self-help/motivation programmes are crucial in this context.

Even though the reduction of poverty is more than a financial issue, budgets still are basic tools for fiscal policy making at both national and local levels. National development strategy and budgetary policy reflect the balance of power within society and if constructed without consideration of the effects that they may have, they can perpetuate or aggravate structural injustices such as gender inequality, poverty and environmental degradation.

Overcoming human poverty requires a long-term vision. Short term negative effects of economic, social and political transformations may be reduced by micro and macro responses such as the protection of public expenditures and social safety net programmes. However, to mitigate the long-term negative effects on human poverty, and to protect the achievements that have been made in Sustainable Human Development over the years, long term social policies aimed at improving effectiveness and efficiency of the social sectors must be in place. These policies should be formulated around more equitable distribution of income, wealth and human resources. Governments have to ensure that their expenditures on education and health reach the poor and access to microfinance is improved. Development strategies need to focus on rural areas where poverty tends to be higher.

It goes without saying that growth must be encouraged. But the benefits of growth must also be distributed more widely as inequalities in turn impact on macroeconomic performance variables, growth among them, with further implications for the design of poverty reduction policies.

The current global context has led to intensified policy debates with regard to macroeconomic and international economic policies and their social impacts as well as increased dialogue on institutional arrangements at the national, regional and global levels. It is becoming increasingly clear that national level poverty reduction policies have to be formulated and priorities set by taking the dynamics of globalization into account.

New and creative thinking is required to adequately connect between the financial architecture of global economy and social architecture of the global and national economies. Such thinking requires policy dialogue, which include not only national policy makers, but also private sector, civil society, particularly those speaking from the vantage point of the poor and disadvantaged.

In September 2002, the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) will take place in Johannesburg, South Africa. The summit will provide an important platform for the international community to rally support for sustainable development. Achieving sustainable development is not an easy task as it requires the integrated management of the economic, social and environmental dimensions of development. Because of the close links between economic and social development on the one hand and the use of environmental assets and resources on the other, poverty reduction is not just a matter of ethical and moral responsibility and international solidarity, but also a contribution towards securing the future for ourselves and for future generations.

I am very honoured to be here today to welcome you at the discussion "Explaining and Reducing Poverty in Lithuania: Prospects and Reality", organized together with the Lithuanian Free Market Institute. I hope this discussion will facilitate policy dialogue and respond to the need to enlarge the set of policy options to reduce poverty in Lithuania.

Thank you for your attention.