For Peru, Sir, your election as President of the General
Assembly at its sixty-second session is a guarantee of
experience and exceptional work. I am convinced that
your performance will strengthen the principles of
dialogue and coordination that guide the efforts of the
United Nations to attain realistic commitments that
contribute to well-being in the daily life of humankind.
On 15 August, an earthquake occurred in the city
of Pisco, seriously impacting the southern populations
of Peru, claiming priceless human lives and causing
great material damage. The Peruvian people deeply
appreciates the immediate and generous response of
the international community, as well as the speedy
action of the United Nations Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The Office’s
support showed that united action can make a
difference in a crisis situation and contributed to the
Government’s activities in attending to the urgent
needs of the victims. Our sincere recognition goes to
the cooperation received, which is now being
channelled by my country’s Fund for Southern
Reconstruction.
The stabilization and growth of the Peruvian
economy over the past 76 months have generated
national and international confidence and expectation.
We are convinced that the investment and participation
of our productive forces will allow us to maintain
continuous growth and to exploit the opportunity to
enhance a model and national project of social
tranquillity and development.
In the first year of his Government, President of
the Republic Alan García has laid the foundations for
greater dynamic growth in the country. We must now
consolidate and give practical and positive content to
the democracy, governance and economic stabilization
of the country in order to allow the growth indices to
generate national confidence and participation that can
be converted into transparency, equity, justice and
social peace.
The struggle against poverty and inequity is the
most formidable current challenge to the national and
foreign policies of Peru. In the conviction that the
dignity of human beings and their welfare are at the
core of governmental management, and that economic
indicators should be based on the well-being of our
population without distinction, the Government of Peru
has redefined its social policy through a concept of
productive inclusion, access to education and
technological innovations, territorial institutional
development and support for the population. To that
end, we have begun implementing a national strategy
of rural development and a national strategy of food
security to address chronic child malnutrition.
Important road infrastructure works will complement
the incorporation of the Peruvian Andes and Amazonia
into the development of the country.
Towards the fulfilment of the Millennium
Development Goals, Peru has set itself the concrete
goal of reducing the current level of poverty from 50
per cent to 30 per cent by 2011. Chronic malnutrition
will be reduced from 25 per cent to 16 per cent, and the
provision of potable water and electricity will be
extended to 90 per cent of citizens. Likewise, we plan
to eradicate illiteracy, reduce employment in the
informal sector from 53 per cent to 35 per cent, create
1.5 million jobs, and reduce the external debt from 24
per cent to 13 per cent of the gross domestic product.
The Government’s new direction in State action
is focused on decentralization. The strategic
decentralization plan goes beyond the mere transfer of
resources or the execution of public works in the
interior of the country. The regions can now coordinate
their own development plan, efficiently distribute more
than 80 per cent of the national budget, interlink and
gradually integrate Peru as a whole, and promote the
better distribution of the population and income
through a process of national institutionalization that
supports optimal care of the environment.
Peru has become one of the emerging countries of
the region thanks to the continuous growth of its
economy over the past eight years. Its strategic
location in the South American Pacific, the full force of
a modern legal framework that encourages investment
and exports, the diversity of its natural resources, its
growing diversification in the global markets, and its
political and macroeconomic stability are factors that
ensure a development process of genuine social
inclusion.
Much remains to do. In the face of the
uncertainty of the Doha Round negotiations and a
cautious evaluation of the effective possibilities of
integration in the Andean subregion and Latin America,
Peru is striving to conclude free trade treaties with its
major commercial partners that will complement
regional and subregional integration schemes and
multilateral trade negotiations. In the Andean
Community comprised of Peru, Colombia, Ecuador
and Bolivia Peru has an up-to-date free-trade zone.
Likewise, Peru has entered into free-trade treaties with
Chile and the United States, and is negotiating similar
instruments with Canada and Mexico. Negotiations
with the Central American countries are scheduled to
begin shortly. We have finished negotiating a free-trade
agreement with Singapore, negotiations with Thailand
have reached an “early harvest” agreement, and we
have begun to negotiate a free-trade agreement with the
People’s Republic of China. Likewise, the negotiation
of an agreement of association between the Andean
Community and the European Union has begun. Our
priorities are now to pursue negotiations with Korea,
Japan, India, Russia, Australia and New Zealand.
Our objectives are clear: to ensure access to the
markets of our main commercial partners; to establish
fair and predictable commercial rules and regulations
that complement the standards of the World Trade
Organization; to diversify the markets for our exports
of goods and services; and to attract investment and
technologies to modernize our productive structure,
reduce the technology gap, and modernize Peru’s
physical infrastructure in order to increase its
competitiveness.
Following on the results of a regressive utopian
experiment in Latin America, we are convinced that
Peru’s model of integration into the global economy,
while consolidating regional economic expansion, will
allow us to ensure the participation of the large
majority of our people in the system’s benefits, with
concrete improvements in their daily lives. It will
thereby contribute to the people’s sense of belonging to
their social institutions and of full citizenship, as well
as to their perception of themselves as agents of social-
economic change and to the consolidation of the
democratic system.
In the framework of such integration, my country
is also assuming growing international responsibilities.
In our efforts to foment dialogue, we are deeply
honoured to be able to organize a summit of heads of
State and Government of Latin America and the
Caribbean and the European Union, as well as the
summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
Forum, both of which will take place in Peru in 2008.
Formidable technological advances, especially in
the information field; the emergence of new powers;
energy insecurity; climate change; growing inequity
and poverty; and new challenges to international
security characterize a changing and ever-more
complex international scene to which States and
international institutions must adapt. Global society is
interlinked through productive processes, trade,
financial flows, the digital telecommunications
revolution, and so on.
In this complicated scenario, Peru is participating
in the Security Council and in peacekeeping
operations. The Peruvian armed forces are present in
the Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
Ethiopia and Eritrea, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire and Haiti.
Peru attaches special importance to cooperation
with Haiti, having assumed in January the coordination
of the Group of Friends of Haiti in the Security
Council. In that regard, we support the renewal of the
mandate of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in
Haiti (MINUSTAH) for a year, as well as the gradual
reorientation of its work to promote development, in
support of its multidisciplinary and multidimensional
work. At present, we are contributing a contingent of
Peruvian military officers, which we expect to be able
to complement shortly with an engineering corps.
Our permanent representation in New York has
presented a draft resolution that, inter alia, reaffirms
the urgent call to fulfil the contribution pledges,
pursuant to the priorities presented by the Haitian
Government, especially for cooperation projects to
eradicate poverty, improve basic health services and
strengthen national institutions. We expect the draft
resolution to enjoy consensus in the Security Council
so that the international contribution to Haiti can
continue.
Last May, Peru, with the cooperation of Norway
and the United Nations Development Programme,
organized the Lima Conference on Cluster Munitions,
assuming a lead regional role in the endorsement of the
Oslo Process. At the Conference, Peru presented to the
69 delegations of the participating countries a proposal
to secure a declaration of the Latin-American region as
a zone free of cluster munitions, which have
indiscriminate effects on civilians. Our initiative
already enjoys the support of many countries of our
region.
Peru is also committed to effectively
implementing the Convention on the Prohibition of the
Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-
personnel Mines and on Their Destruction. Peru is in
the final stages of preparing a national plan of action
against anti-personnel mines with a view to completing
the demining process along our northern frontier, in
cooperation with the brotherly country of Ecuador.
Moreover, Peru is firmly committed to efforts to
attain complete disarmament and the non-proliferation
of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, as well as
their delivery systems, which constitute a threat to
international peace and security. In that respect, we
support the strengthening and universalization of the
relevant binding multilateral agreements. In that
context, Peru organized a regional seminar on the
implementation of Security Council resolution 1540
(2004) in November 2006, in which most countries of
the region participated.
The General Assembly is the forum in which the
middle-income countries can efficiently contribute to
identifying imaginative responses to conflicts and new
threats. That is why we resolutely support reform that
will strengthen the Assembly and ensure its ability to
adapt to change and to the most urgent needs on the
international agenda. In order to reinforce the
Assembly’s legitimacy, we need to sharpen procedures
and reduce its agenda. An equal priority is to carry out
more effective action against violations of human
rights. Security Council reform is needed urgently to
make the Council a more efficient, transparent,
legitimate and representative body with better working
methods. On the Other hand, we also want to highlight
the validity of the Economic and Social Council, an
essential instrument for promoting greater
effectiveness in the coordination of development
strategies, as well as assistance in emergencies.
International reality presents many challenges to
the universal system for promoting and protecting
human rights. There is still a dichotomy between
security and individual rights, with a backdrop marked
by the poverty and the inequality in which the great
majority around the world live and which affect human
dignity. The new Human Rights Council and the
system integrated into it ought to help in the response
to these challenges.
Discussion over the last few days in this
Organization shows that climate change is a world
problem that requires a collective response from the
international community in a framework of a
multilateral and worldwide commitment. Through
sustainable forest management, Peru has contributed to
the global commitment by reducing emissions caused
by deforestation. We have also made headway in
implementing our National Strategy on Climate
Change by strengthening national capacities to
maximize human and financial resources. The size of
the problem requires an agreement with goals for the
emission of greenhouse gases more ambitious than
those agreed in the first stage. Peru has great
expectations for the next meeting in Bali, and we will
work to ensure a common platform that will allow us to
very soon begin negotiations to define the new
international regime that we hope will be concluded in
2009.
The official launching of the International Year of
the Potato will take place at Headquarters on 19
October. This celebration is especially important for
my country because the potato has its origin in Peru,
and it is the country with the greatest genetic diversity
of this product. The cultivation of the potato was
developed in ancient times by civilizations that gave
rise to the Peru of today and is one of the great
contributions to the world’s diet. Peru has proclaimed
2008 as the National Year of the Potato and has
developed a calendar of multisectoral activities for
outreach and research that will be a positive
contribution to the work programme of the Food and
Agriculture Organization.
I shall conclude by noting that Peru participates
actively to ensure and strengthen the United Nations
Charter principles and objectives of peace, peaceful
coexistence and development, especially in the
Security Council and the Human Rights Council. In
accordance with this commitment, Peru will continue
to promote dialogue and coordination among peoples
of the world. It has put forward its candidature for the
Economic and Social Council and the Peacebuilding
Commission, bodies within the United Nations system
where we hope to achieve the support of all members
of the Assembly in order to contribute to working
towards a safer, more equitable world where
development can reach the large majority of
populations.