Karamanou (PSE). – (EL) Mr President, it is a sad day when you
realise that, after fifty years of development aid, not one country has escaped
the underdevelopment and poverty trap. Many maintain that globalisation is the
root cause of the state of the economy in the poorest countries. The truth is
that the North’s protectionist policy has helped to strangle crucial sectors in
the South. The contention that poor countries can achieve the same levels of
income as rich countries without international trade, without incoming capital
and investment, is quite simply nonsense. If the poor countries make do with what
is in their coffers or wait to develop their own technological capabilities, it
will take them forever.
There is no such
thing as true progress in a society where few become richer and many become
poorer. Hunger and abject poverty mainly affect women, making sexual inequality
a huge barrier to development. Over the last decade, the number of women living
in absolute poverty has risen. This is linked to reproductive health problems,
because it is the poorest women that have the least access to health services
and the most unwanted babies. Nearly all of the half a million women who die
from maternity-related causes live in the underdeveloped world and they die,
not because they decided to become mothers, but because they are poor. The
probability of a woman dying in these circumstances is less than one in three
thousand in the developed world, compared to one in nineteen in Africa. These
figures prove that the benefits of globalisation have still not reached that
many people. Continuing poverty is holding back this process through open
trade.
The only solution
is to overcome our two main enemies: the resistance of numerous political
leaders in the North, who refuse to tear down barriers to the free movement of
goods and people, and the resistance of numerous political leaders in the
South, who refuse to give their people basic political, economic and human
rights, without which there can be no development.