July 06, 2007	Friday	Jamadi-us-Sani 20, 1428

GENEVA, July 5: An anti-corruption watchdog on Thursday warned business leaders at a United Nations summit to urgently tackle corruption costing the global economy some 2.5 trillion dollars (1.8 trillion euros) to help lift millions out of poverty.

Huguette Labelle, chairwoman of Transparency International and board member of the UN Global Compact, said the amount that the World Bank estimated was lost by corruption would be “quite enough to help us remove those that are at the edge of survival around the world to a much different level.”

The core concerns of the Compact, such as corruption, transparency and corporate and social responsibility, are “matters of life and death for today and tomorrow,” Labelle said at a press conference.

The Compact “provides the stimulus for businesses to act with social responsibility, with environmental sustainability, and with transparency and integrity,” she added.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon stressed the same point and urged the 4,000-odd businesses who have signed up to the Compact to implement its 10 principles at all levels of their operations.

Apart from anti-corruption measures, the Compact's 10 principles cover labour relations, human rights and the environment.

The UN's first ever survey on the Compact published this week revealed major shortcomings in a sample of about 400 participants, especially in human rights and anti-corruption, despite overall progress.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, addressing the opening session of the Compact, said there were limits to what it can achieve given its voluntary nature and hinted that legally-binding resolutions might be necessary.

“Given that countries are increasing the number of constraints in the aim of making environmental responsibility a legal imperative, can corporate and social responsibility be limited to a self-defined code of good conduct?” he asked.

Compact director Georg Kell acknowledged this voluntary aspect limited its capacity to influence corporate behaviour.

“The Compact is only a complementary tool, it can never substitute for effective regulation at country level, that goes without saying,” he said.

Meanwhile, the UN's top climate change scientist on Thursday urged the world body to take greater account of the impact of global warming on hunger and poverty.

Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said the world's poor would be the first to suffer from predicted increases in global temperatures, rainfall and extremes like drought and flooding.

“There'll be two types of impacts on poor and the hungry -- firstly the increases in temperature, because we've predicted an increase in heatwaves.

“The other major impact would be on agriculture -- and about two-thirds of the world lives in rural areas and the bulk of them are in developing countries,” Pachauri added.

The Indian scientist underlined that even the most vulnerable in European countries with well-developed health care systems had struggled with heatwaves in recent years.

The IPCC's predicted decline in rainfall in tropical and sub-tropical areas would affect the “very large majority” of people in developing countries who depend on agriculture, he added.

In Africa, “we can project that there would be a decline in the availability of water,” Pachauri said.

Already sparse agricultural yields would be cut, food stocks which are already vulnerable to flooding and drought would decline further, while food prices would rise, he said.—Agencies