LONDON: Wealthy nations received a stark warning in the middle of last year about the dangers lurking in a world where globalization was allowed to heighten inequality and poverty. Within months, September’s terrorist atrocities in the US brought the message home with a dreadful impact. The warning came last June in a UN report to be presented to a forthcoming summit in Mexico that will seek to address the challenge of how best to finance development and poverty eradication.

It makes chill reading now: “To imagine that, in a globalized world, the rich can cocoon themselves away for ever, serenely enjoying the fruits of their advancing technology, while a large proportion of humanity continues to live in squalor and misery is a dangerous fantasy.” Whatever the motive for the suicide attacks of Sept 11, many in the West now realize that issues of poverty and inequality in developing countries are directly linked to international security.

The UN report, from the high-level panel on financing for development, underlined the urgent need for a radical shift in aid donors’ attitudes. The panel, chaired by former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, accuses rich nations of reneging on their commitments to the poor, and makes radical proposals to place before the International Conference on Financing for Development to be held in Monterrey on March 18-22.

It will be the first UN summit to address the key financial issues related to world development, and the first to actively involve such global institutions as the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organization. A UN commission will meet in New York in mid-January to finalise proposals. It is expected to support many of the calls in the Zedillo report.

Among specific proposals is a call for a doubling of development aid by wealthy Western donor nations to around $100 billion a year. Without this, the panel points out, key UN development targets - such as slashing extreme poverty and infant mortality rates, putting AIDS into reverse and achieving universal primary education by 2015 - cannot be met.

It suggests a system of international taxation to help pay for development in poorer countries. This could include a levy on all foreign-exchange deals along the lines of the widely touted Tobin Tax proposals - or, more promisingly perhaps, a tax on carbon emissions. It calls for a summit devoted to globalization and for the possible formation of a commission on global governance. It also wants a greater say for developing nations in world trade.

“It’s easy to call for (fresh) global funds,” says a spokesman for the World Development Movement, a London-based campaign group. “But we’ve failed to come up with money for the HIV and AIDS fund, failed to meet our promises on cancelling Third World debt and failed to do anything on bettering pro-poor trade.”

There are signs of change in the US. A bipartisan senate resolution has been introduced, calling for a trebling of the amount of money the country sends overseas over the next five years.

“After Sept 11, people are looking at the issue with fresh eyes,” says Mary McClymont, president of Inter Action, a coalition of more than 160 US-based relief agencies. Even if the calls for a doubling of Western aid are met, there needs to be a complete re-evaluation of what constitutes aid. Measures are now being sought to ensure the effective use of aid so that it genuinely helps the poor. Even the more doubtful nations are starting to acknowledge that no war on terrorism can succeed without substantial gains in the war on world poverty. —Gemini News