EuropaWorld 6/7/2001 Making the Figures Add Up: The Challenge for Annan's Second Term

It is not only politicians that have to run for election. The Secretary-General of the United Nations is not a politician, he is a civil servant, there to do the bidding of the 189 member states that make up the world body. At least that is the theory. Nevertheless, the Secretary-General still has to run. And the job, of course, demands political skills of a high order.

It must therefore have been particularly pleasing to Kofi Annan to have been re-appointed to the post of Secretary-General by acclamation. First the Security Council made a unanimous recommendation to the General Assembly who in turn endorsed the recommendation at the end of last week. As someone said, the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations has turned out to be the best, the most accomplished and the one about whose re-appointment there was never any doubt.

The endorsements that flowed from all sides last week give Annan substantially more clout to strike out boldly in continuance of the agenda that he has made his own - an agenda of reform, of increasing the relevance of the United Nations to the peoples of the world and of promoting a global consciousness.

But here the Secretary-General has to tread a tightrope. He can only work with and through the governments of the member states. It is their decisions that ultimately will control events. He needs their endorsements and their backing. He can only move at the speed they are willing to follow.

So far he has been highly successful. The United Nations, and he personally, now has a profile that is growing in respect. The great issues facing the world - human rights, AIDS, food security, environmental degradation, climate change, conflict - are slowly registering on national political and even corporate agendas. The great UN dinosaur is slowly warming up in the sunlight of public scrutiny. The pace, while still lumbering, is brisker and more determined.

It will be Annan's challenge to control this leviathan without losing important partners over the side. To maintain the focus on global issues like poverty, AIDS, climate, while developing a spirit of international democratic co-operation and security that allows countries to feel confident enough to want to forego short term advantages for a longer term greater good.

So what are the real challenges facing Annan in the next five and a half years? Or rather what could derail the Annan project, if it went wrong. During his first term world leaders have made pledges, and globally expectations have been raised, that the next ten years will see a substantial reduction in world poverty with corresponding increases in health, in educational standards, in food security, better human rights and so on. Last year's Millennium Summit was a triumph in this respect.

However, the generous sounding pledges that were made then have not generally been followed by a commitment to new resources. UN appeals continue to be significantly underfunded by donor nations very few of whom come anywhere near meeting the UN's own target for spending 0.7 per cent of the Gross National Product on development assistance. There are not even financing plans in place to show how such levels of expenditure might be met in the future. Even the target set by Annan for the Global AIDS Fund - between $7 and $10 billion a year - looks distinctly optimistic in the light of the limited pledges so far made.

The truth is that there is a gap between what the developed world wants to spend and what it needs to spend if it is to deliver on the 'oneworld' goals pledged at the Millennium Summit. And this gap, unless it can be bridged, is the greatest threat to the Annan project.

For it is not a little more money that is needed - it is a lot more money; a quantum leap.
To make progress Annan has ride this divide - to find ways of reconciling the financing aspirations of the developed and developing world, while preserving good relations with each.

It may be worth remembering here that Annan started is UN career as a budget officer (actually with the Geneva based World Health Organisation). He knows the significance of this financial divide and this was partly why he had the foresight to establish, late last year a high level panel to identify practical means to fulfil international anti-poverty commitments. That panel is led by Ernesto Zedillo, the President of Mexico. It has just reported and its conclusions will be considered by, among others, a special UN conference being held in Mexico next year that will look at the whole question of financing development.

The panel calls on the upcoming conference to consider the merits of an international levy on carbon dioxide emissions. Funds so obtained, they say, would pay for 'global public goods' - such as services to combat global epidemics - that cannot be administered effectively by any single country.

This is significant in that what is being proposed is a species of 'world tax'. True it is not the tax that many NGOs have been calling for, which is a low-level worldwide tax on speculative financial transactions. Zedillo's panel were sceptical of this, despite the increasing seriousness with which it is being taken. The European Parliament, for instance rejected the principle of such a tax by only a single vote.

Nevertheless the levy on emissions is a tax as opposed to a voluntary payment and as such it is bound to be controversial and resisted strongly by those who have the most to lose. Annan will be watching how far he can go on this. Whatever the Mexico conference does or does not come up with, the subject will need all his very considerable persuasive and diplomatic powers. If he can reconcile the rich and poor nations of the world around common ideals he may be remembered in hearts and minds as a world statesman long after the present generation of national leaders has been written into the history books.