The UN's millennium development goals will never be reached as the economic order imposed by rich consumer societies continues to squash developing countries, Cuban President Fidel Castro said here yesterday.
In a strong rebuke to the rich world and the US in particular, the Cuban President said today's economic order excludes South countries from development plans while perpetrating a neocolonial exploitation of their natural resources.
"The world's poorest nations pay with tens of millions of lives for the economic order imposed upon the world by the neo-liberal globalisation process … Never before there has been so much inequality," Castro said in a speech delivered on his behalf by Carlos Lage, Vice President of the Cuban Council of State, at the Second South Summit of the G77 and China.
"This order blocks the development of South countries to sustain the wasteful consumerism of the North, environmental degradation and the accelerated squandering of the world's natural resources.
"The overflowing wealth of the North is the result of the savage colonial and neocolonial exploitation of the South … The modest millennium goals will never be reached."
Foreign debt of the Third World continues to grow, promised development aid is still awaited and free trade of South products is hampered by protective measures in the rich countries, Castro said.
The Cuban president said that although the United Nations set a 0.7 per cent of the countries' gross national income should be allocated as official development aid (ODA), aid does not exceed 0.2 per cent and that offered by the United States is of 0.1 per cent.
Debt service paid in 2004 was 5 times what the South received as official aid, he added.
Castro also accused the US Government of granting protection to a confessed terrorist.
"We are facing up to the US government efforts to grant safe haven to a notorious and confessed terrorist, a fugitive from Venezuelan justice who is responsible among many atrocious acts of terror, for the midair bombing of a Cuban commercial aircraft and the resulting death of the 73 innocent people," Castro said referring to Luis Posada Carriles.
The US Embassy here declined to comment on the issue.
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