UN conference adopts action plan to help world's least developed countries

Nearly 200 governments participating in a just-concluded United Nations conference in Brussels have committed themselves to fighting poverty in the world's poorest countries while improving the lives of the 600 million people there.

The Third UN Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), which wrapped up on Sunday, adopted a political declaration and a decade-long program of action spelling out specific measures that address development assistance, debt cancellation, and private investment in the 49 LDCs.

By the Brussels Declaration on LDCs, governments stressed the need for a "transparent, non-discriminatory and rules-based" multilateral trading system in helping poor countries to reap the benefits of globalization. They called for facilitating the accession of LDCs to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and decided that the WTO's November meeting in Doha, Qatar, should be used "to advance the development dimension of trade."

Governments also committed themselves to seizing the opportunity of the UN Conference on Financing for Development in March 2002 to mobilize resources. They further pledged to reverse declining levels of official development assistance (ODA) and to provide special debt-relief initiatives to the world's poorest States.

The 60-page Program of Action for the Decade 2001-2010 calls halting the marginalization of the world's LDCs an "ethical imperative." It outlines a broad range of measures to be taken by the developed nations and the LDCs themselves in such areas as good governance, trade and mobilizing financial resources.

The Conference, which opened on May 14, was attended by more than 6,500 representatives of governments, UN specialized agencies and civil society. It followed on two earlier conferences on LDCs -- in 1981 and 1990 -- both held in Paris.