General Assembly hears call for greater efforts to close gap between rich and poor

More must be done to shrink the gap between developed and developing nations, countries of Latin America and the Caribbean told the General Assembly’s annual high-level debate.

Haitian President René Préval called for a new paradigm in international cooperation to replace the exploitation of poorer countries by the powerful.

“The time has come to confront the globalization that seeks profit at any price, elevated to a new credo, with a globalization of solidarity that alone can guarantee the eradication of misery,” he told the Assembly. “The only vehicle for peace, stability and security is development.”

He said the food, energy and financial crises that impose such a heavy burden on the developing countries are not the result of chance. “They are the direct consequence of the model of development and governance imposed on the rest of the world for several centuries by those nations that are recognized as powerful,” he added.

A restructured world economic order is needed to strengthen the small economies on the basis of a just and equitable distribution of the benefits stemming from the production of wealth, Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo Méndez said today.

He told heads of State and government assembled at UN Headquarters in New York that “the unequal trade relations must end and effective policies of solidarity must be developed for the countries that suffer geographic and climatic adversity.”

At the same time, the healthy political development of different countries must be promoted to guarantee that the more powerful nations do not interfere in local processes, especially when such intervention seeks to violate genuine democratic processes, Mr. Lugo said.

He called for an end to the “criminal aggression against the environmental,” noting that states who are most responsible for global warming “are not assuming their obligations in face of the growing socio-environmental debt that they are causing, maintaining and increasing a clearly unjust situation that must be reversed.”

Only multilateralism can solve current challenges, President Bharrat Jagdeo of Guyana pointed out.

“This is the most important lesson to be learned from the era of globalization and independence,” he said at the debate.

Mr. Jagdeo noted that small vulnerable economies have had to bear the brunt of the global recession. “Even as we seek long-term solutions to bolster the resilience of our economic, the need for relief and support is immediate,” he added, calling for the global community to restructure the debt of vulnerable small countries.

“The case is equally compelling for new additional flows of developing assistance to be delivered to these countries by both multilateral and bilateral development partners.”

For his part, Óscar Arias Sánchez, President of Costa Rica, said that developing nations will bear the brunt of global warming and population growth, as well as being “responsible for accelerating the growth of a global economy in which the rich cannot offer much more than what they already generate.”

Improving the situation of poorer nations, he said, will hinge on success on three fronts: strengthening democracies, curbing arms trafficking and military spending, and combating climate change.