THE rewards of bringing the world’s disaffected and desperately deprived into the global community are manifest. We have already seen the ugly alternatives - in the felling of New York’s twin towers, the continuing low-level, but lethal conflicts that rage around the world; in the haunted faces of the hungry and the homeless, which are still far too common a feature of our TV screens.

The Consensus adopted by the Monterrey Summit reaffirmed the importance of trade liberalization in empowering the developing world countries to grow their way out of poverty. The Consensus also made clear that the needs of the world’s poorest people are not just a concern of the multilateral agencies. The development dimension is now being actively taken into account by the richer countries of the world, as they come to terms with the need to help alleviate poverty by boosting economic and trade growth world-wide.

Monterrey saw us accelerate the momentum that began with the setting of the Seven Millennium goals; and was solidly reinforced by the launching last November at Doha of a new trade round. The UN International Conference on Financing for Development reaffirmed the importance of the WTO’s Doha Development Agenda. We will fail to achieve the maximum benefits and improved freedoms that flow from a liberalized trading environment, if we do not enable all the nations of the world to share equitably in global growth.

We have made important progress towards this goal. There were some criticisms by developing countries at the Monterrey Summit that their concerns were not fully taken on board; that in coming to the conference with consensus to a large extent already achieved, the developed world had pre-empted the developing countries’ concerns.

I would argue that our achievement at Monterrey was highly significant. For the first time, we were able to bring together at one event, not only more than 50 heads of state, but a stunning variety of senior ministers and officials with multi-disciplinary skills from a broad range of north and south geographies, as well as the heads of all the key agencies charged with implementing donor agendas. By agreeing a consensus on the core world economic issue of our time, we have moved towards mainstreaming development in the economic strategies of the developed world. Monterrey also helped further the growing coherence that the agencies need to respond effectively to the needs of the developed world. The summit was also significant in another way; there are an ever-increasing number of stakeholders in the international arena. In Monterrey, responsible NGOs were able to sit and share ideas at the same table, rather than shout at developed world officials across divi