Mr. President, honourable ministers, ladies and gentlemen:

This morning, at the session on financing growth and development, the Minister for Cooperation and Development of the Netherlands, Eveline Herfkens, said that having been personally involved in the difficult discussions that had led to two major decisions – the “Everything but Arms” initiative of the EU, and the OECD’s decision to untie aid – she could assure all those present that neither of those decisions would have been taken were it not for the Conference, that it was pressure from the Conference which brought those decisions into being.  You yourself, Mr. President, said the same in your press conference, as did Mr. Nielson and Mr. Lamy in theirs. Thus, it is individuals who were involved in those decisions who are saying that this conference has already made possible some important progress in vital areas.

But could we say that in the light of those decisions, we should be satisfied with the results? I am afraid not. We know that unfortunately, many other decisions advocated, for example, by the NGOs have still not been taken. We knew, of course, before we came to Brussels that the current state of international cooperation on development would not allow for major breakthroughs in such areas as debt relief – not because there is no agreement on the principle, but because the current initiative is underfunded. The same could be said of trade, because the trade negotiations will have to continue, and the WTO members will have to deliver on the promises. And it could also be said of official development aid (ODA), where I am afraid the outlook is even less promising.

But in the face of this conclusion, what should we have done? I can see only three possible roads open to us: One would have been to go back to confrontation, as in the past, and we all know this would lead us nowhere. The second road would be resignation or passivity, which I am afraid is a very serious threat, particularly on ODA, where I have to say that even people who are really committed are showing a strange passivity in the face of prevailing trends. This sometimes reminds me of the famous verses by Yeats, in his poem “The Second Coming”, when he says: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”. This is an area where we should not give in to passivity. And I pledge to you that UNCTAD at least will continue to show rationally, rather than passionately, why it is necessary to reverse current trends if we want to break the dependence on aid. The third road would be to seek a new method of making progress. And this was what we tried to propose.

I know very well that this is only the beginning of a change in the way we do business when it comes to development issues. But we started from the assumption that if there is no consensus or political will at this point to move beyond what we were able to deliver, we should find ways of creating more consensus and more political will. And it was based on this realization that we proposed – and the Intergovernmental Preparatory Committee agreed to – a new approach, which would be to keep the intergovernmental process, to give it all the centrality it deserves, but to have another process working in parallel with this approach, one in which we would not be called on to approve agreed language in a formal negotiating process among States. Rather, we would identify concrete, tangible problems and organize a debate to reach some positive outcomes.

This approach was based on the idea of broadening participation as much as possible: first, by bringing in all the international organizations, not in a purely formalistic way, but by giving them full responsibility to organize the events in their area, without any interference from outside.  This was done with a large number of organizations. I personally visited 14 of them, speaking not only to the directors but also to the staff, in order to motivate them. They were asked to organize the debates and to deliver practical, tangible results. I must say that, as always in human matters, the outcome is of course mixed. Some organizations were better at the task than others, but I would like to stress that all of them were here and we had a very strong participation by the World Bank, for instance, lending considerable credibility to many of those discussions.

The other idea behind the new approach was to broaden participation by bringing in the new development actors, and this is the great difference between this conference and the previous ones, because here in Brussels non-State actors participated in an unprecedented manner. We had organized civil society, we had parliamentarians, we had mayors, we had the private sector. Ten or 20 years ago, it was not so clear that development was above all a responsibility of a dynamic private sector working in the framework of a market economy. Today we understand that, and as a result it would not have been possible to hold such a conference about development without bringing in the actors of development. We had chief executive officers from some of the biggest transnational corporations in the world, participating side by side with entrepreneurs from small and medium-sized enterprises, women entrepreneurs, young entrepreneurs, all of whom discussed not a diplomatic document but concrete problems with practical solutions.

I am only sorry that not all the participants in this Conference were able to experience the richness of those debates at firsthand. In my case, as I had the institutional duty to attend practically all of them, I can tell you that those who did not follow the debates missed something of great value.  To give you one example of a typical day – Wednesday – I started on health, moved on to migration, then to city-to-city cooperation among mayors, a technical meeting on export opportunities for small- and medium-sized enterprises, a fifth one on education, and then a sixth one on the environment. And in those debates there was much convergence, or consensus, and much political will. This was because they were discussing concrete projects – projects on railways in Africa, for instance.

So it is through this process that we can make progress. That means more than just discussing agreed language in documents; we have to move forward, even if it is by small steps. The deliverables, for instance, are of different orders of magnitude, but even if modest, they are all useful; their principal contribution is to create a momentum or a movement forward, on behalf of those who no longer have hope.

As I said, it is a pity that those who could not follow the debates also missed out on some real highlights.  For example, during the discussion on migration, a minister from Mali told his personal story, of having had an excellent job in Europe but suffering discrimination against immigrants and deciding to go back to his own country to start a new life, even without the promise of a decent job. Or again, the woman from Mauritania who wanted to export camel cheese to Germany, found an importer willing to buy her entire production, but can’t sell the cheese because the European Union has no regulations on camel cheese, which is a very concrete problem.

And finally, there was the amazing diversity of going from human rights to fighting AIDS, to discussing export opportunities and the music industry. Yesterday, after opening the music industry event, I was interviewed by the French Service of the BBC for French-speaking Africa, and they asked me, “don’t you think it odd or strange that in the same conference where you are fighting AIDS, which is a tragic problem, you have also hosted an event on participation in the music industry?”  I replied, “well, you have to understand that of course fighting AIDS is a much higher priority, because it has to do with survival and with the sacred value of human life, but life is variety; life is not only suffering, pain, disease. Life is also music, and music is also a factor of development”. The music industry now represents an annual market of $50 billion a year, while coffee, which used to be the first commodity after oil, now accounts for only $17 billion a year.  And the LDCs are present in this field, boasting many creators – Cesaria Evora from Cape Verde, and many others from Senegal, Mali and elsewhere – who are making their mark on the international market.

And this brings me to my conclusion, something we should never forget: the LDCs are not only recipients of aid.  We use the wrong nomenclature – donor countries and recipient countries. Of course the LDCs  need solidarity, they need help, but they also have a lot to give. They may have been behind in terms of Western technology, but they boast very ancient cultures. They have creativity, they have labour to offer, and the products of their imagination; they create music, but also colourful fabrics; they have the capacity to contribute to the emergence of a true globalization – not globalization confined to the concept of the unification of markets for trade, investment and finance, but globalization that can promote understanding, cross-fertilization of cultures, communication among human beings and a dialogue of civilizations. This is the real aim of this conference, and I am sure that the LDCs have much to contribute to it.

Thank you very much.