Rokeya Kabir, the Executive Director of BNPS, is delivering her speech in the Ninth Asia Europe Peoples Forum (AEPF9)

The Ninth Asia Europe Peoples Forum (AEPF9) entitled ‘People’s Solidarity Against Poverty and for Sustainable Development: Challenging Unjust and Unequal Development, Building States of Citizens of Citizens’ held at Vientiane, Laos on 16 to 19 October.

Ms Rokeya Kabir was keynote speaker at the opening plenary on the main theme of AEPF9. At the beginning of her speech, she mentioned about Malala Yousafzai’s struggle which indicate what a society and world we are living in, the dynamics of ‘Arab Spring’, and the paradoxical economic growth in South Asia and around the world, such as India being a home of highest numbers of rich and highest numbers of poor as well. She referred persistent of very high numbers of maternal and child mortality, unacceptable level of child marriage, shameful level of illiteracy around the world and enslaved situation of women where they still bear the major burden of reproductive and productive work while suffering from malnutrition and all sort of discrimination.    

She said, poverty is not a sheer issue of looking into people’s income, calorie intake, and growth of economy. Any system which does not include people’s access to basic needs, citizenship and equal rights, protection from not being discriminated, guarantee life with dignity and so forth fails to respond to poverty effectively and cannot ensure any sustainable and just social system.

According to her, the deprivation of a huge number of poor and marginalized people of their citizen rights and entitlement to basic services, the reduction of democracy to a mere electoral game, the crisis of the state manifested in governance failures and a propensity for bureaucratic centralization in the developing countries have entailed a need to constantly re-evaluate the concept of citizenship, democracy and governance. It is now urgent to find ways to restore the whole range of rights and entitlements associated with citizenship reinvigorate democracy and restructure governance in the light of felt needs and experience, she added. 

Indicating poverty as root cause of unrest and terrorism, her speech also emphasized on embargo on arms production. She said, if arms produced whether large or small in huge quantity, they surely would like to find market, legal or illegal.

Criticizing neo-liberalism that stressed on policy option for “having the pie bigger first and then distribute it to larger people”, she mentioned, when pie get bigger the size of freeze to store the pie also get bigger and pie never been distributed to needy.  

On MDG framework, she questioned fixing the income ceiling of one dollar a day per person as line of poverty then how one can meet the basic needs by this income. She also questioned how global leadership in a mode of top down approach fixed its goal to give education to all children by targeting enrollment only, skipping quality of learning which is the main object of education.  

She called upon to look beyond the boundary of Asia region as we in Asia, cannot thrive for a better future without linking our struggle with others people in Europe, North and South America. Their voices, experience, learning and alternatives they practice are very much relevant to our struggle. She said, the solidarity economy movement crystallizing in various countries of Latin America and Canada can be a viable alternative to existing political and economic structure.  

The AEPF9 tackled four major themes, or People’s Visions, which represent AEPF’s hopes for citizens of the Asia–Europe Meeting (ASEM) member countries and the communities they live in. These are:

- Universal Social Protection and Access to Essential Services

- Food Sovereignty and Sustainable Land and Natural Resource Management

- Sustainable Energy Production and Use; and

- Just Work and Sustainable Livelihoods.

For the final declaration of the forum that calls the Asia–Europe Meeting (ASEM) governments to build a nuclear free world, please visit http://www.aepf.info/aepf9/94-final-declaration-9th-asia-europe-people-s-forum-vientiane-laos