Statement by
H.E. Dr. Surakiart Sathirathai
Deputy Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Thailand
at the 29th Annual Meeting
of Ministers for Foreign Affairs of the Group of 77
22 September 2005, New York
Mr.
Chairman,
I would like to express my delegation's appreciation
for Jamaica's chairmanship of the Group of 77 and for convening
this Annual Meeting of Ministers for Foreign Affairs. I
would also like to congratulate the Chairman-elect of the
Group of 77 for the year 2006. I am privileged to be a part
of this important gathering once again after attending our
Second Summit in Doha last June.
Mr. Chairman, the tasks, the missions and the responsibilities
of our Group will require continued reinforcing and further
strengthening of our joint efforts so long as poverty is
not yet history.
With the Doha Declaration, the Doha Plan of action, the MDGs and the
Outcome Document, our Group of 77 is filled with a wide
range of hundreds and thousands of words well-intended to
achieve poverty alleviation. But our peoples in Asia, in
Africa and in Latin America are not waiting for all those
words. They are waiting for the actions and implementation.
They
are waiting for the day they live their life with human
dignity without hunger, without starvation and without malnutrition.
They are waiting for the day they live their life with basic
human necessities that bring them dignity. They are waiting
for the day they have clean water and enough food, adequate
medical care, reasonable roof over their head and decent
clothes over their body for themselves and for their children.
They are waiting for the day they can earn income sufficient
to provide themselves with these fundamental human needs.
Efforts to make poverty history and development sustainable
must involve global partnership at all levels to bring about
these necessities required for human dignity. Allow me to
go through some of them very briefly.
First at the level of the United Nations. The UN
must be truly a world citizen-centred on development issues.
All UN agencies must weave together the strength of their
network for all citizens of the world and respond to their
diverse requirements. Coordination between agencies themselves
and between agencies and the people on the ground must be
the rule, not the exception. We must bring about real partnership
for development with the UN system.
Secondly, the North-South and South-South partnership.
Poverty alleviation and sustainable development require
the North-South as much as the South-South cooperation.
Developing countries require external assistance as much
as self-help. The countries in the South can leapfrog by
learning and sharing experiences with each other in order
to follow the path of success and not to be trapped in the
path of failure. A free and fair trade system under WTO
will enable the countries in the South to help themselves
and stand on their own feet. This is something the North
can do as much as pledging aids, ODA and debt relief.
Thirdly, a domestic tripartite partnership. A true
partnership between the government, the people and the business/private
sector can be an important contributory factor to sustainable
development. The people can provide workforce, the government
brings access to capital and the private sector offers ideas
and market initiatives. This is a formula for success of
a self-sufficient income-generating projects.
Fourth,
reinforced regional and multilateral partnership. Partnership
between neighbours, partnership within and between subregions,
partnership within and between regions, and regional partnership
with the UN system bring trust, confidence, shared aspiration
and real action to the development process.
Thailand is not the only country that believes in
creating these levels of partnership for poverty alleviation
and sustainable development. But we have had the experiences
of putting them into practice with people-centred approach.
Therefore, we will do our utmost to share our experiences
and work with all our friends to bring about the world-citizen
centred sustainable development. We will do our utmost to
work with the United Nations to put the world-citizen centred
development and its implementation an important agenda of
the UN reform.
With the process of the reform starting, we
must do our utmost so that the reform will ensure that all
our development agenda shall become something done and not
something pledged. The MDGs must leave mass hunger, starvation,
and poverty to be found only in the history book of mankind.
Thank you.
