Your excellences,
honorable delegates, UN agencies, civil society colleagues and friends;
We bring a message
from the Asia Pacific Civil Society Forum on Sustainable Development 2016 on
behalf of 135 Civil Society Organisations. We request you to annex our full written
statement and more detailed recommendations to the Outcome document.
The Asia Pacific
region faces uniform as well as diverse set of challenges spanning all three
pillars of sustainable development. We as civil society want to highlight some
overarching trends that will make the SDGs impossible to realize and advance
our recommendations on the same.
The
dominant macroeconomic policy regime
in the Asia Pacific region has resulted in increasing privatization,
liberalization and deregulation across sectors. Anti-poor and inequitable macro policies have led to increasing suppression of interests of the people
at large, especially of those who are economically
and socially weaker and unable to participate in the process of
policy-making. This inequity
is reflected in how the poor, small farmers, workers, women, migrants, indigenous peoples, dalits, the
disabled, the elderly and other marginalized communities face a denial of social protection and human
rights. Moreover food security and
sovereignty is challenged by the expansion of corporate led agriculture
that has not only made food costly but also unhealthy, destroyed natural
ecosystems and bio-diversity, thus triggering widespread hunger and
malnutrition in the region.
Moreover,
trade and investment agreements
including the WTO and FTAs, have created major challenges for the developing
and least developed countries in the region and challenged access to food, land,
livelihoods, critical services and resources, and challenged development policy
space in general.
Governments
have increasingly withdrawn from public
provision of essential and quality social services such as health care and
education, as well as access to clean and safe water, housing, energy and
land. Access to progressive sexual health and education services, in particular
SRHR has seen severe opposition in several countries. Limited access has again
been skewed against socially weaker groups including children and in particular
girls. Universal access to health care and education has been far from realized
in the region and specific needs of specific groups such as the disabled, the
girl child etc.
Displacements and evictions due to land grab, climate disasters, loss of livelihood, and debt
are common phenomenon across economically and socially weaker communities
including among farming and indigenous communities. Asia Pacific has been particularly plagued by environmental degradation and climate change. This tendency is heightened
by current production
practices, both in agriculture and industry, which become environmentally
unsustainable with adverse impacts on the ecosystem, and the health and lives
of the people. The operation of the extractive industries have destroyed natural ecosystems, displaced
communities, undermined human rights, and contributed to health hazards.
We
reiterate that discrimination and
marginalisation must be eliminated if the SDGs are to be realized. Underlying structures of inequality and marginalization (i.e.
caste, patriarchy, sexual orientation, ageism, racism, sexism, among others)
remain deeply embedded in historical
processes of discrimination and inequitable development in the region.
Indeed, many groups, women, persons with
disabilities, older people, indigenous peoples, dalits, LGBTIQ, single and
widow, ethnic minorities, migrants, PLHIV, young people, people in the remote
area, sex workers, informal workers and others, today still find themselves
socially, politically and economically excluded and marginalized from national
development and governance processes, with few opportunities for redress.
Furthermore, the crosscutting issues of marginalized populations have not yet
been fully explored, understood and incorporated in the sustainable development
framework.
In
spite of its limitations, the comprehensive nature of the 2030 Agenda for
Sustainable Development offers us the opportunity to retrospect and reorient
ourselves. Civil society in the
Asia-Pacific advocates for a complete
reorientation of economic, social and environmental policies (including
those for climate change adaptation and mitigation) and a bottom-up approach with participation of grass-root communities and
civil society, with shared ownership by the people. Pro-poor and equitable economic and social policies must; provide
jobs, incomes and social provisioning, not based on exploitation but rather
protection of all; especially women, children, elderly and the youth; workers
and migrants; indigenous peoples, the disabled, and those with different sexual
orientation. At the same time, trade and
investments agreement negotiations must be transparent, participatory and
necessarily subjected to independent human rights impact assessments before
they are signed. The traditional or significant
roles of communities and regions (such as the Pacific) in conservation,
nurturing, management of natural resources, climate change mitigation and
adaptation, and in preventing
and reducing disaster risk must
be recognized and harnessed, while their special needs are also addressed.
However
none of the above will be possible without accountable,
transparent, participatory and just institutions, especially in the state
domain. Private sector as development
partners and economic players must also be subject to stringent norms of
scrutiny, as we would ourselves be. Stakeholder
participation must be underpinned by human rights principles including universality, non-discrimination, social and gender equality,
participation, empowerment and accountability. Finally civil society
participation in sustainable development processes and mechanisms must be
institutionalized based on principles of
non-regression, democracy and equality, as guided by the HLPF and the
Agenda itself.
Bangkok, April 2, 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment