UNDP launches trade and environment projects

A newly launched US $2 million trade project with Pakistan's ministry of commerce, funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), is intended to bring stakeholders together on a common platform from where future policy actions can be fed with their inputs, according to a UN official. The project, called "Trade Initiatives from Human Development Perspectives," was launched in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Wednesday. It intends "to assist the Ministry of Commerce in ensuring that the country can strategically seize the opportunities of global economic and trade integration for advancing national progress in human development and poverty eradication," an accompanying press statement said. "The commitment we have from the ministry is that they're willing to look and see what kind of recommendations are coming out of this process of consultation that we will have with the private sector, with academia, with research institutions, with the NGOs that are working in this area," Farhan Sabih, UNDP's chief of governance in Pakistan, told IRIN in Islamabad. "The idea is to bring them all together on a common platform where they can discuss these issues and provide their inputs which will then feed into the policy actions," he added. At the launch, Onder Yucer, the UN Resident Representative in Pakistan, and Dr. Waqar Masood Khan, the secretary of the government's Economic Affairs Division (EAD) signed the agreement for the project. One important element of this project is to allow this cooperation to enable the government to look at the trade initiatives from a human development aspect," Yucer told the assembled press corps after the signing ceremony. "That would mean a lot of research and analyses as well as discussions on the possible implementation of these trade initiatives, both at the global level and the regional level," he added. UN Assistant Secretary General, Dr Hafiz Pasha, who said he had flown in specially from UN headquarters in New York for the signing of the project, said he hoped the trade project would help the Pakistani government make the successful transition to open competition from a textile quota regime. "As we transit from the textile quota regime to a system of open-market competition in textiles from early 2005, it is extremely important that Pakistan is fully prepared to make a successful transition and we hope that our project will be of some assistance to the government of Pakistan in developing its plans for this transition," he said. Meanwhile, a US $1.2 million project, focusing on arid and semi-arid eco-systems in the south-west province of Baluchistan, was also launched by the UNDP in collaboration with the government on Wednesday. The five-year project, called “Conservation of Habitats and Species in Arid and Semi-Arid Ecosystems in Baluchistan,” will try and preserve degrading habitats in Pakistan’s largest but most underdeveloped province. “This project is very important because Baluchistan - because of its particular geography and temperature - has got very unique species in the world,” Aslam Rao, the Baluchistan head for International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) operations in Pakistan, told IRIN from the provincial capital, Quetta. The five-year project will be based in the Chagai desert and Toba Kakar Range in Baluchistan, an accompanying press statement said. “The province has an arid climate but contains many species and habitats of global biodiversity significance,” it said, adding that conservation efforts had been limited and not very effective leading, resultantly, to many habitats being degraded and species becoming extinct or critically endangered. “There’s a lot of pressure these days on natural habitats: lack of rains, a growing population, over-grazing, cutting of trees and even animal species such as the markhor and the Afghan Urial are endangered,” Iqbal told a press conference at the launch. However, Rao said he thought while five years was a reasonable period for the project to run its term, it seemed a bit “medium-term”. “I think five years is medium-term for a bio-diversity and conservation project,” he said. “In that time-frame, it would work well as a kind of example, or innovative scheme, but for sustainability reasons, it has to be, then, taken on by the community for the longer term,” he stressed.