12 June, 2008 - Published
07:56 GMT
IMF "not fit" for today's
purposes?
Last year, Commonwealth
Heads of Government focused on reform of international
institutions.
Their message: they don't
serve us well today and they need to change.
This week, a smaller group of
Commonwealth leaders met in London to start following up on this
idea.
The leaders of Guyana,
Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Tanzania, Mauritius, the Maldives,
Sri Lanka, Tonga, Ghana, and Malaysia met Britain's Prime
Minister, Gordon Brown, for what was called a mini summit on
reform of international institutions.
"Not fit for purpose"
British leader Gordon Brown
said that the leaders had agreed that "major reform of the major
institutions" was needed.
"The IMF, the World Bank, the
United Nations and other institutions that were built in the
1940's for the problems of the 1940s and beyond are not adequate
for purpose, not fit for purpose for the challenges we face in
2008 and beyond," Brown told journalists at Marlborough House.
The headquarters of the
Commonwealth Secretariat steers policy for the 53-member
organisation, made up mainly of Britain's former colonies.
So what has this reform to do
with the pressing needs facing nations today?
Prime Minister Brown outlined
"food, fuel and finance" as the major challenges in helping poor
countries.
He argued that better
institutions are needed to deal with these issues.
Oil interests
Prime Minister Patrick
Manning, from the Caribbean's oil-rich nation Trinidad and
Tobago, outlined how crucial international frameworks can be
when it comes to the ongoing fuel crisis.
"We find that there is no
structured dialogue taking place between consumers and producers
of energy," Manning told journalists.
"Opec is going in one
direction, the International energy agency is going in a next
(direction) and nobody's meeting around one table to see whether
we could come to some kind of consensus on global energy
governance," the Trinidad leader said.
Timeline?
It fell to Guyana's President
Bharrat Jagdeo to outline how long these reform plans could
take.
He told journalists that some
of today's problems could not be laid at the doorstep of
institutions alone.
"Some of the current problems
we face lie within the policies of member states," he said.
He mentioned the impact of
biofuel on food supplies: the point argument being that
re-assigning agricultural crops for fuel instead of food
production is self-defeating.
President Jagdeo also outlined
that these planned reforms could take some time.
Pointing out that the
Commonwealth could not force change, the Guyanese leader told
BBC Caribbean that "you will have to build a network and to do
lobbying."
He added the Commonwealth
plans have a chance of succeeding because "every country has
recognised that the world has outgrown these institutions."
Mr Jagdeo said that "the
global natures of many of these problems" means a need for a
global infrastructure to deal with them.
"(It) very well could be the
beginning of a long process but that doesn't mean that it's not
necessary," President Jagdeo told BBC Caribbean.
Next steps?
Britain's Gordon Brown called
for a "new Bretton Woods" similiar to the 1940s summit which
would reshape world relations.
The post second World War
Bretton Woods agreement was signed to establish the rules for
commercial and financial relations among the world's major
industrial states.
On the United Nations, Gordon
Brown told journalists that while some UN reform had been
impressive, more reform is needed.
For the global financial
crisis, he prescribed "better early warning systems" for the
world's banks and said this would fall under the aegis of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Prime Minister Brown also said
that a new climate change agreement to follow the Kyoto protocol
for the funding of alternative energy sources would work through
the World Bank.
Mr Brown's mission statement
was "to reshape the international institutions for a new era."
Commonwealth heads of
government will hold a meeting on reform in September 2008.
Their final statement argues
that the Commonwealth's own multi-lateral co-operation of
countries with diverse backgrounds offers some "guiding
principles".
"Global crises require truly
global and universal responses," stated the Commonwealth meeting
on reform of international institutions, issued this week.
"The inadequacy of the current
responses calls into question whether incremental and ad hoc
approaches to reform will create a new generation of
international institutions fit for today’s world," said the
Marlborough House statement.
