"Second Transatlantic Symposium: ""How can poverty and inequality be reduced in Latin America?"""

"On 2 October, a debate was held at CIDOB titled ""How can poverty and inequality be reduced in Latin America?"" The debate, held under the auspices of the Second Transatlantic Symposium 2008, represents a series of four sessions organised by the magazine Foreign Policy (Spanish edition) and the Safe Democracy Foundation, with the support of the CIDOB Foundation and the Ibero-American Secretary General’s Office (SEGIB), and features leading analysts and political personalities who offer answers to the main challenges in Latin America. 

On this occasion, the participants included Mr Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira, Vice-President of the Generalitat de Catalunya, and Mr Bernardo Kliksberg, Head Advisor to the UNDP for Latin America, while the event was chaired by Milagros Pérez Oliva, Editor-in-Chief of El País in Barcelona. Following the introduction by Mr Josep Ribera, Director of the CIDOB Foundation, Mr Rovira offered a Catalan view of the problems of inequality in Latin America, stressing the need to strengthen public institutions and the role of international organisations in order to tackle the current global financial crisis. Likewise, through his experience of Catalonia's development, he pointed out that crises can help to change ineffective models, and that social cohesion was indispensable for consolidating human development in Latin American societies. In his address, Mr Kiksberg declared that ""now is the time for the myths to fall"", in reference to the failure of the neoliberal approaches that were applied in Latin America in the 1980s and 90s. In agreement with the views of Mr Carod-Rovira, Mr Kiksberg highlighted the importance of greater State regulation compared to orthodox economic thinking, and suggested returning to the economic lessons of Adam Smith, who believed that ""without ethical values, markets are ineffective"". He went on to give a detailed description of today’s Latin America, and remarked that ""in this region there is no poverty and inequality, but rather poverty exists because there is inequality"". These inequalities generate Latin America's ""accident of birth"". Finally, the chairperson Milagros Pérez Oliva presented some questions for debate with relation to the opportunities for change that the current international financial crisis represents for Latin America. 

She also highlighted the burning issue of the problem of land in the region, stressing that parallel to the food crisis, at Latin America contains 70% of the world's uncultivated land. As a final result of the debate, the three speakers showed their optimism toward the consolidation of development in the region, by reassessing the role of public policy and the participation of civil society.