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	Aid critical to ensuring benefits from Trade by Pascal Lamy and Donald Kaberuka allAfrica.com   September 2007   While developing and industrialized countries continue to wrestle in the Doha Round of negotiations to reach a new international trade agreement, there is increasing recognition that even if there was free trade between nations, many countries simply do not have the basic infrastructure needed to take advantage of it.   Hence the organization in Dar es Salaam next week of a high-level meeting to promote “Aid for Trade” – assistance aimed improving the capacity of countries to join fully in the international trade system. Pascal Lamy, Director-General of the World Trade Organization, and Donald Kaberuka, President of the African Development Bank, explain. For many developing countries, trade has been a vital instrument for reducing poverty and raising levels of development. One need only look at Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and China to see how trade can help raise living standards. But many other developing countries have yet to derive the same benefits from a global trading system which could provide them with an important route to economic growth.   One important reason for this is that many developing countries, not least in Africa, lack the technical and institutional capacity to integrate successfully into the system. To address this problem, governments around the world are establishing a financial assistance partnership dedicated to building trade capacity in the developing world.   From October 1 to 3, the African Development Bank will host trade, finance and development ministers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to build support for the global “Aid for Trade” initiative in which the World Trade Organization plays a central role. The meeting – one of three regional Aid for Trade meetings to be held in the northern autumn – is designed to encourage beneficiary countries to make trade a greater development priority and to encourage aid donors to scale up trade-related development assistance.   Aid for Trade is needed to train developing country trade officials so that they can more effectively participate in WTO activities. But it is also needed to improve trade-related infrastructure in Africa, to help African countries implement commitments they will take in the Doha Round while providing adjustment assistance necessary to reform trade regimes.   All governments agree that an “Aid for Trade” package is no substitute for an ambitious and development-oriented Doha agreement. By reducing trade barriers and paring back distorting subsidies, an agreement would create real opportunities for African businesses in the world marketplace.   But if entrepreneurs are to take advantage of these opportunities, they will need help. African trade is growing – trade has risen nearly five times in 20 years and exports have risen an average of 15 percent annually since 2000 – but the continent"s share of world trade still lags behind. In 1950, Africa"s share was 10 percent, but today her share hovers at less than three percent. With exports of goods and services having grown 20-fold to more than U.S. $14 trillion since 1950, a return to market share of 10 percent would mean a vast expansion of resources. But this will not come without effort and money.   Infrastructure and enhanced customs procedures are two solutions to improving African trade performance.   Africa suffers from underdeveloped roads, ports, rail and telecommunications systems. The cost of telephone connectivity in Africa is higher than anywhere else. African freight costs as a percentage of total import value are 13 percent compared to 8.8 percent for developing countries elsewhere and 5.2 percent for industrial countries. In Kenya, the average cost to import one container is nearly $2,500, or five times more than the cost in Singapore. The operating costs per kilometre of using two-axle trucks in Tanzania is two and half times the costs in Indonesia or Pakistan.   Fixing these infrastructure deficiencies will not be cheap, but the potential benefits are immense. The World Bank estimates that to build roads linking Africa"s capitals and major cities would cost $20 billion and another $1 billion a year in maintenance. But the bank also estimates that such infrastructure improvements could boost trade by $250 billion within 15 years with the rural poor being major beneficiaries.   Other capacity-building programmes require fewer funds but offer equally important gains. An average customs transaction in Africa requires the involvement of 20-30 different parties, 40 documents and 200 data elements. The result is that customs delays in Africa average 11.3 days, compared with 7.2 days in Latin America and 5.5 days in Asia. This is significant because there is a direct correlation between such delays and a country"s volume of trade. The OECD estimates that reducing such delays to six days could result in a 10 percent rise in African exports.   An agreement on trade facilitation arising from the Doha round would help by streamlining global customs procedures but African governments will need money to train customs officers and to computerise operations. Aid for Trade can also assist African exporters in meeting the quality and safety standards mandated by industrial country governments and consumers. Relatively modest investments in helping governments meet sanitary and phyto-sanitary requirements for fish or horticulture products or in finding overseas partners for local entrepreneurs can deliver significant economic results too.   Financial support to make all this come true is needed from international organizations and from bilateral donors. The good news is that these donors have stepped forward and shown real commitment to this process. Development banks, like the African Development Bank, and the World Bank have integrated trade in into their poverty reduction strategies.   The economic problems facing Africa are diverse and complex. Addressing these problems will require a great deal of determination and commitment from all sides. But such efforts are essential if we are to bring Africa in from the sidelines of the global economy.
	Accountability of Transnational Corporations (TNCs) by International Federation for Human Rights   October 2007   Open Letter to John Ruggie endorsed by more than 150 NGOs.   Professor John Ruggie Special Representative on Human Rights and Transnational Corporations and other Business Enterprises Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.   Dear Professor Ruggie,   We are writing to share our views on how you might most effectively advance the protection of human rights in the context of business activities during the remainder of your mandate as United Nations (UN) Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Human Rights and Transnational Corporations and other Business Enterprises.   We work to prevent the occurrence of human rights abuses involving business and to promote justice for the victims of such abuses when they occur. Our organisations and groups share your desire to see an end to human rights abuses involving business. It is in this spirit that we offer our common perspective on several issues. We point in particular to four issues that we believe deserve priority in your work, in accordance with your post as an independent expert for an international body with a global remit and an explicit and overarching human rights mandate. Namely, we hope that, in your capacity as Special Representative serving the UN Human Rights Council, you will:   help to deepen the focus by the UN on actual situations relating to human rights and business, especially with regard to the perspective of victims so as to illustrate the scope and nature of abuses;   analyze the factors driving the failure of states to adequately discharge their duty to protect the human rights of individuals, communities and indigenous peoples;   assess the inherent limitation of voluntary initiatives, in order to avoid an over-reliance on such initiatives; and help to spread awareness of the compelling need for global standards on business and human rights to be outlined in a UN declaration or similar instrument adopted by member states.   We elaborate our views on each of these topics below and also include proposals for recommendations that might be included in your final report to the Human Rights Council. In our globalized world business is a very powerful actor that can have both negative and positive impacts on the enjoyment by individuals, communities and indigenous peoples of their human rights. The negative impacts that businesses may have are widespread, affecting the full range of human rights, and are not limited to specific countries, industries or contexts. As you have rightly recognized, the expansion of global markets has not been matched with sufficient protection for the people and communities that are the victims of such human rights abuses. In many cases, abuses involving businesses arise in a vacuum of effective human rights protection, in which governments fail to take appropriate steps to prevent abuses and perpetrators are not held to account, and in which obstacles to justice compound the original abuses by depriving victims of their right to an effective remedy and reparation. In our view, a number of factors contribute to this state of affairs and must be addressed.   First, victims of human rights abuses by or involving companies are often voiceless in the context of debates on business and human rights. Discussions on these issues have tended to focus on abstract concepts rather than the actual impact that corporate conduct has on the human rights of individuals, communities and indigenous peoples. We believe that the perspective of the victims requires greater emphasis and elaboration in the final stage of your mandate and in your final report to the Council in 2008. It is essential that the Council’s discussions on business and human rights be grounded in the experiences of those affected by corporate human rights abuses and informed by an understanding of the nature, scale and patterns of such abuses, in order to ensure a thorough analysis of the problem and the identification of meaningful solutions.   We believe that the UN Human Rights Council should adopt a new or revised mandate for a UN special procedure (e.g., independent expert or group of experts) on business and human rights. This procedure should have a remit to research and analyze patterns of corporate human rights abuses with reference to real situations, to conduct field visits, to receive individual communications from victims of human rights abuses and human rights defenders working on their behalf, to issue recommendations to states and companies and to contribute to conceptual development within this field. Such functions constitute the core work in respect of most other thematic mandates established within the UN human rights system. We would welcome your public support for the creation of such a mandate and are hopeful that you will include this option among your recommendations to the Council. In doing so, we encourage you to make clear the pressing need for this type of mandate and to recommend that the Council act in a timely fashion to establish it.   In the interim, we believe that in the final stage of your mandate you can do much to ensure that the victims of human rights abuses involving companies have a voice at the Human Rights Council. We encourage you in particular to increase your efforts to consult with affected communities, including through visits to these communities and regional meetings. We hope that you will appropriately reflect the results of these visits and consultations in your final report, both to ensure that your own analysis of the outcome of these consultations is evident in the report and, where possible, to append relevant documents from these consultations to your final report. Our groups and organizations, which include grassroots human rights groups and indigenous peoples’ organizations, would be more than willing to meet with you and to submit further documentation about corporate abuses. We also recommend that you solicit comments and input on your draft recommendations from individuals, communities and indigenous peoples directly affected by corporate human rights abuses and from human rights organizations which have conducted primary research into such abuses. Such dialogue will serve to test whether and how these draft recommendations would positively address the situation of victims of such abuses.   Additionally, we believe it would be worthwhile to continue and deepen your analysis and reflection on the nature and scope of the human rights abuses occurring worldwide with the involvement of business, and to reflect this analysis in your final report.   * Visit the link below for more details. Visit the related web page
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