MONTERREY, we are being told by those who attended the recent United Nations Conference on Financing for Development as well as those who have analyzed its outcome, is a turning point in developed world’s relations with poor countries. Close to 50 heads of state or government went to Monterrey.

Unlike a number of other UN conferences held in recent years, there was a palpable sense of excitement in the weeks and days leading up to this meeting. Vicente Fox, the President of Mexico and the host of the conference, wrote an article published on the eve of the conference in which he spelled out his expectations. “This week in Monterrey we have the duty to take steps to ensure that future generations in the developing world can be spared the poverty and suffering that until now have been their inevitable destiny. We also have an opportunity to build a bridge between what we promise developing countries today and what we can accomplish tomorrow. It is not a matter of becoming our brothers’ keepers, but simply their partners,” he wrote in a newspaper article.

The Monterrey Consensus, the title given to the document signed by the world’s leaders at the concluding ceremony, is being billed as “an unprecedented accord between rich and poor on the best use of aid that will reverberate for years.” What happened at Monterrey to elicit such rapturous reviews of the conference’s outcome? In what way The Monterrey Consensus will guide the still evolving relations between the world’s rich and poor nations? What is Monterrey’s relevance for a country in Pakistan’s situation — one of the world’s poorest countries caught sitting on a piece of geography where a number of global fault lines meet? In what way the “selectivity” approach embedded in the document issued at Monterrey help Pakistan in accelerating its rate of growth and reducing the incidence of poverty? How should Islamabad respond to the opportunities created by Monterrey as well as the challenges posed by it?

To provide good answers to these questions we should step back a little and look at the forces and interests operating in many parts of the globe that brought so many leaders to Monterrey and produced The Monterrey Consensus. The growing indifference among many quarters of the developed world about the worsening situation in many regions of the developing world was checked by the terrorists’ attack on the United States on September 11, 2001. These attacks started a debate on an issue that was much discussed in the second half of the 20th century but was nowhere near a resolution when the terrorists struck. The substance of the debate revolved around the following question. What can and what should the world’s rich countries do to help those that are poor? This question acquired great significance for those who came to believe that poverty was one of the causes of global terrorism.

The link between poverty and terror was made unequivocally by President George W. Bush in his speech at Monterrey. “We fight against poverty bec