'People must prevail over capital'

Geneva: Ecuador President Rafael Correa Delgado told an audience of hundreds that "subjugation of living, breathing human beings to the needs of capital" is not acceptable, in a damning critique of "an immoral and unjust world order" during a lecture organised by UNCTAD in Geneva recently to mark its fiftieth anniversary.

President Correa's lecture - 'Ecuador: Development as a Political Process' - covered efforts by his country to build a model of equitable and sustainable development and the lessons learned from implemented policies.

Ecuador is one of the few countries where inequality is being reduced, President Correa said.

In the past seven years it had continued to grow compared to its neighbours and this was despite the 2008 financial crisis and dollarisation in 1999.

Extreme poverty has been reduced to single percentage points but, President Correa said, "one poor person is too many and an insult to humanity".

"An economist at the time of Columbus would have predicted a brighter future for Latin America than North America. But why didn't this happen? It is one of the enigmas of development," President Correa said.

"The answer is that development is a political issue: who is in charge? Elites or the majority? Capital or humankind? The market or society? The greatest harm done to societies is to separate politics from economics and we have been led to believe that economics is a 'technical' issue. Many academics are now discovering that development is a political issue. Institutions, policies and programs depend on who holds the balance of power."

President Correa said Ecuador had emerged from what he called "the long dark night of neoliberalism" to apply "new socialist" methods of redistribution, social spending and novel mechanisms such as mandating a "dignified wage" for households.

As a former academic, Correa also said that he placed a premium on investing in education. "Education is the cornerstone of democracy," he said, "To improve our skills base we are investing more than the OECD average in higher education at almost 2 percent of GDP."

President Correa said that regional integration would be key to safeguard against volatility caused by the globalisation of financial capital, which he said was a threat to the sovereignty of developing nations.

"If I have learned anything during my time as president it is that the world is dominated by transnational capital and the interests of the hegemonic countries. Regional integration can guard against neo-colonialism: the world of the future is a world of blocs," President Correa said.

"I personally restate what I said in 2009 - Europeans will have to explain to their grandchildren why they united; and we in Latin America will have to explain to our grandchildren why it took us so long," he said.

President Correa concluded by saying that if inclusive and sustainable development is to succeed "people must prevail over capital and society must prevail over the market".

UNCTAD Secretary-General Mukhisa Kituyi said, "At UNCTAD we know that how a country deals with its own challenges is more important than any outside advice.

Therefore, I am keen to hear what President Correa has to say about Ecuador's experience and how we might learn from it."

President Correa's lecture, delivered in Room XX of the Palais des Nations (the 'Human Rights Room'), was the fifteenth of UNCTAD's Raúl Prebisch Lectures, and the first to be given by a sitting Head of State.

The Raúl Prebisch Lecture Series was set up in 1982 by then-UNCTAD Secretary-General Gamani Corea, to honour Argentinian economist Raúl Prebisch, UNCTAD's founding Secretary-General.

Dr. Kituyi said that it was fitting for a Latin American leader to speak during UNCTAD's fiftieth anniversary year because it was development thinking that had originated in Latin America which led to the setting up of UNCTAD.

The first Raúl Prebisch Lecture was given by Dr. Prebisch himself, followed by a number of eminent thinkers in the field of trade and development, including: Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi (1983), senior vice-president and chief economist of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz (1998) and director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University and an advisor to United Nations Secretaries-General Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon (2009), Jeffrey Sachs.

President Correa, who took office as president of the Republic of Ecuador in January 2007, has a background as an academic, government minister and consultant for international organisations.

Successfully re-elected twice, his present term ends in 2017.Raúl Prebisch (1901-1986) was UNCTAD Secretary-General from 1964 to 1969. He was executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC) from 1948 to 1963, following a distinguished career in the civil service of Argentina.

Dr. Prebisch was known primarily for his work as a scholar specialising in international and development economics and his greatest contribution is known as the Prebisch-Singer thesis, which found that the terms of trade for primary commodity exporters tended to deteriorate over time with respect to manufactured exporters.