Chris Buford wrote:
>Is that not so that UNCTAD may be more of a focus for
>anti-neo-liberal third worldist perspectives than the Security
>Council?
Not necessarily so. UNCTAD has been reforming itself with great speed of late, as US proposals for UN reform have been calling for its dissolution. The US and the International Chamber of Commerce, remember, was able to axe the widely respected UN Center on Transnational Corporations a few years ago; the heat is on UNCTAD, now, to reform or perish.
Much of what UNCTAD does these days is done /in cooperation/ with the ICC: together, they are putting out a series of studies on the business climates of least-developed countries. When Asia went bust, the ICC and UNCTAD published a boosterish report showing that "investor confidence" in the region "was still high." At the lastest meeting of the Basel Convention, UNCTAD and ICC spokesmen together condemned aspects of the agreement (designed to prohibit the export of hazardous waste from developed to developing countries) and succeeded in weaking the Convention.
Also: UNCTAD has forged several new partnerships (with the WTO, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and the United Nations Development Programme) that will advise the governments of LDCs on how to attract by rewriting their regulations (bringing them in line with the global business climate).
In short, we're a long way from the NIEO. UNCTAD did some modest work in Africa last month by helping the continent's countries to formulate a united agenda for this month's WTO minesterial meeting. They've also been lending some support to OPEC nations in their bid to prop up oil prices. But a large part of UNCTAD now serves as bridesmaid for global capital and the Third World. The power brought to bear on it by the US and the Annan secretariat pretty much guarantees that its reformism will be directed mostly at the LDCs, rather than the economic order.
By the way, UNCTAD had promoted the Tobin tax, until Jesse Helms and his colleagues passed a budget rider that prohibited payment to any international organization studying any sort of international taxation. So that potato was dropped.
Not to give anything to the Security Council, though.
Hank Sims