UN plans for poorer countries ‘inadequate’

Plans by the United Nations to set up a mechanism to facilitate access to new technology for poorer countries are "inadequate", President Michael D Higgins has said. The President was commenting at the University of Washington in Seattle yesterday on the UN agreement to establish the Technology Facilitation Mechanism, launched at the end of September.

“At first reading, these steps strike me as inadequate and they are seen by most as modest at best,” he said. “It remains to be seen how they will interact with agreements in other spheres and emerging from other processes.” He did say, however, that the new structures would provide a framework for expression of “a new ethic of science”.

Delivering a keynote address on redefining development and taking responsibility for climate change, Mr Higgins said empowerment was the key to sustainable and just development. A model of sustainable development that “creates employment, develops indigenous industry, builds infrastructure, and addresses the acute needs of the people” was needed.

“We have a choice, to make available the benefits of science in a spirit of solidarity . . . or to reduce knowledge to a tradable commodity, which becomes another dimension to the imbalance and inequalities we inherit from history.”

The President said that in the developing world, the best results were produced where the benefits of science and technology were delivered within a citizenship rather than a consumer model.

Access to technology and scientific knowledge was central. He highlighted programmes in which access to necessary scientific knowledge was delivered through state agencies and universities, and combined with local expertise. This differed from “unaccountable strategies that can create a new dependence, or indeed even a new form of colonialism”.

He asked if it was acceptable to ask Ebola-stricken countries like Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone to give interest payments on debt priority over basic health infrastructure, emergency food systems or education.

Access to essential medication raised the wider question of the conflict between technology as commodity and technology as public good, the President said. The context of rights in that context was “contentious” and in conflict with the interests of industries and governments in the South seeking to utilise or build on the relevant technology.