ASIA: Expert Urges Social Contract to Fight Poverty

• by IPS Correspondents (dresden, germany)
• Sunday, November 20, 1994
• Inter Press Service

DRESDEN, Germany, Nov 20 (IPS) - A new "social contract" between the state and the poor to alleviate poverty is being pushed by eminent South Asian expert Punna Wignaraja.

"If the poor participate as subjects and not as objects of the development process, it is possible to generate growth, human development and equity, not as mutually exclusive trade-offs but as complementary elements in the same process," Wignaraja told IPS.

Vice Chairman of the Independent South Asian Commission on Poverty Alleviation, Wignaraja participated in a weekend international symposium which took place in this German city 160 kms south of Berlin, and which was organised by the Development and Peace Foundation (SEF).

The Bonn-based Foundation was set up in 1986 by late Willy Brandt, a former west German Chancellor and Chairman of the 'Brandt Commission' which published two reports in the early 1980s examining manifold aspects of North-South relations.

Wignaraja said neither the conventional neo-classical nor Marxist concepts of development were sustainable either in the North or in the South. Structural adjustments -- in different forms -- are required in both the North and the South for a "sustainable world economy", he said.

"The North has yet to understand fully the predicament into which it has got itself, and the need to bring about changes in its approach to its own development, patterns of excessive consumerism and wasteful use of global resources, and in the management of the global system," Wignaraja explained.

On the other hand, he said the South could no longer embrace "fragmented concepts of economic and social development, the dichotomised sequence in redistribution with growth...and structural adjustment in the ideologically oriented financial sense with or without human face, and provide vast natural, financial and human resources to sustain an...inequitable global order".

The South Asian Commission, set up in December 1991, submitted its report to the heads of state of seven South Asian nations -- Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maledives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka -- in April last year.

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