Transcript
ANNUAL MEETING CLOSING
The Inter-American Development Bank closed its 48th annual meeting in Guatemala City with an agenda full of urgent projects for the region.
During the event, some 45 hundred people participated in meetings, seminars and formal gatherings. Three subjects attracted special attention: the creation of opportunities for excluded majorities, new energy challenges and debt relief for the region’s least developed countries.
Last week, it was announced the cancellation of the debt the Bank held on Bolivia, Guyana, Honduras, Haiti and Nicaragua, for a total of 4.4 billion dollars.
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Moreno again
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“The historic achievement of debt-relief for the poorest and more indebted countries strengthened the bank’s commitment with the group of least developed countries. At the same time the bank recovered its capacity to seek a consensus.”
Rigoberta Menchú, winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace and a guest of honor of President Moreno, called for a multicultural state and a fiscal pact that helps to bring an end to inequity in her country, Guatemala.
The Bank, on the other hand, submitted several initiatives to first stop and then reduced this social gap.
Luis Alberto Moreno, President
“The region’s countries need to establish a different pattern of growth, a more inclusive one, and for this purpose it counts with the region’s consensus. We need a contract of equality of opportunities for all, and we must be the promoters of this contract and help implement it.”
The other issue the IADB’s meeting dealt with was what President Moreno called the greatest challenge of our era: climate change and the shift to new clean sources of energy.
Through its Sustainable Energy and Climate Change program, the Bank has already invested 550 million dollars in environmental initiatives and has committed itself to conduct all its activities under strict environmental standards.
Luis Alberto Moreno, President
“It was underlined the importance of the development of sources of sustainable energy, including biofuels, energy efficiency and climate change in the region’s countries. The most salient proposals included the necessity to take into consideration the energy balance, the environmental balance and the financial balance in the development of new sources of energy. And the need to coordinate the bank’s activities related to climate change with other entities as a global approach to this problem.”
The IADB has placed particular emphasis on this issue because Latin America is especially vulnerable to the catastrophic effects of global warming, both in the short and long runs.
Moreno finally celebrated the results of the meeting and thanked the attendees. The next meeting will take place in 2008 in a US city yet to be determined.
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About the Meeting
