UNCTAD XI – The Spirit of Sao Paulo
We, the member States of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, gathered in Sao Paulo, Brazil, between 13 and 18 June 2004, for the eleventh session of the Conference, agree on the following Declaration:
1. UNCTAD was created in 1964 as an expression of the belief that a cooperative effort of the international community was required to integrate developing countries successfully into the world economy. Since then, UNCTAD has made a substantial contribution to the efforts of developing countries to participate more fully and to adapt to changes in the world economy. UNCTAD has also provided an invaluable forum for advancing the interrelationship between trade and development, from both a national and an international perspective, across the three pillars of its mandate.
2. The Millennium Declaration, the Monterrey Consensus, the Programme of Action for the LDCs, the Almaty Programme of Action, the Barbados Programme of Action, the Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development and the Plan of Implementation agreed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, and the Declaration of Principles and the Plan of Action of the World Summit on the Information Society, as well as initiatives for UN reform, strengthen multilateralism and establish a roadmap for actions at the national and international levels in the process of mobilizing resources for development and of providing an international environment supportive of development. We are committed to joining all our efforts in the achievement of the goals established in those texts in the agreed timeframes. The United Nation system should actively pursue agreed development goals between now and 2015, as identified in the Millennium Declaration, and UNCTAD has an important role to play in efforts towards the accomplishment of these common objectives.
3. In spite of all the efforts at the national and international level to promote growth, development remains the central issue in the global agenda. The contrasts between developed and developing countries that marked the world in the early 1960s are still present today. In fact, the gap between them has increased in many respects. While globalization has posed important challenges and opened up new opportunities for many countries, its consequences have been highly unequal between countries and within countries. Some have reaped the benefits from trade, investment and technology flows and seem to be winning the struggle for development and for poverty eradication.
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