MEDIA:
South-South Communications Lag Behind Trade Flows
Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO,  (IPS) - Vigorous expansion of trade between developing countries has created "a new geography of global trade," but communications have lagged behind this and other processes that have increased the gravitas of the South, participants agreed at a seminar in Brazil.

Never before has the relevance of South-South communication been as evident as it is today, said the under-secretary general of the United Nations and high representative for Least Developed Countries, Anwarul Chowdhury, at the meeting in Rio de Janeiro organised Tuesday by the international news agency Inter Press Service (IPS).

Many countries in the developing world have become centres of excellence in the fields of health, education, agriculture, the arts and modern technologies, but in spite of this, and the advances in communication infrastructure, it is still easier for them to communicate with the North than with other countries of the South, he added.

The world has changed, creating a new map of political and economic relations, but the flow of information has not developed along the same lines, said IPS director general Mario Lubetkin.

He called to mind the debate about the New International Information Order, 30 years ago, which must now be resumed with a "less ideological, more pragmatic" spirit, with the goal of reducing the imbalance between North and South.

The seminar on "The new dimension of South-South and South-North communications" drew about 80 participants, including high-level IPS representatives, journalists, and delegates of governments, international agencies and non-governmental organisations, and doubled as the IPS Annual Support Group Meeting.

The alliance being formed between India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) was discussed as a prime example of the global transformation process.

Several participants voiced complaints against the corporate press. People in government take decisions that affect other countries without knowing the real facts, based only on information that reaches them via media with a "Northern view," said Samuel Pinheiro Guimaraes, Brazil's deputy foreign minister.

In his view, there is a movement to "consolidate the concentration of power at the centre of the international political system," meaning the richest countries, who are seeking to "perpetuate their privileges" to the detriment of "the periphery."

Attempts at "decentralising" this power, such as IBSA and the foreign policy of the present Brazilian administration, face major obstacles, he said.

The South's energetic dynamism does not appear to be strong enough to reverse this trend, as the income gap as well as the technology gap between central and peripheral countries continue to grow, the Brazilian official pointed out.

The structural reasons which impelled Europe to colonise countries of the South still prevail, and that is reflected in the nature of the media, according to Thabo Masebe, head of South Africa's Government Communication and Information System.

To counter this state of affairs, Dumisani Kumalo, president of the Group of 77, the largest bloc in the United Nations with a membership of 132 developing countries plus China, stressed the need for more training and interaction to strengthen communication, and proposed that a newscasting network of the South be formed, coordinated by IPS.

The IPS news agency has supported a number of journalistic initiatives undertaken by national agencies and other media in the developing world.

But the concentration of the media in ever fewer hands continues apace worldwide, and consequently journalism is becoming increasingly homogeneous for economic reasons, to the detriment of human values, said Roberto Savio, IPS president emeritus and chair of its international board of trustees.

Newspapers are losing 4.5 percent of their readers every year at a time when world population is increasing at 1.8 percent a year, and readers are getting older, he added.

States are demonstrably "incapable of formulating information and communication policies," Savio said, stressing the importance of organising civil society in order to come up with solutions.

Indian Ambassador to Brazil Hardeep Puri expressed another point of view. In his opinion, the flow of information in the South is changing, imperceptibly as yet, in the direction of the changes in trade.

This is evident in the case of IBSA: along with the huge increase in trade between the three countries, especially between India and Brazil, there are now Brazilian correspondents in India, he noted.

With increased trade the exchange of visits by high-level government officials has intensified between the two countries, passenger airline flights are becoming more direct, and the dialogue between civil society organisations in India and Brazil is expanding, he said.

Francisco Whitaker, the Brazilian winner of this year's Right Livelihood Award, otherwise known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize", talked about the history and achievements of the World Social Forum, an annual meeting of civil society which promotes "horizontal networking" and action under the banner "Another World is Possible."

Brazilian journalist Arnaldo Cesar Ricci Jacob, a former IPS correspondent and currently head of journalism in Rio de Janeiro for the Bandeirantes television network, stressed the importance of television in Brazil, where it is the source of news for almost the entire population.

The seven television networks reach 99.6 percent of the Brazilian population of 187 million people. But this country is "introspective," so the media are not very interested in international relations, he said.

The meeting ended with a speech from Carlos Tiburcio, special adviser to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who indicated that at least three media watch organisations have been formed in Brazil, signs of a movement in favour of assessing responsibility and promoting accountability in journalism.

This movement has grown since the October elections, in which Lula was reelected. During the campaign, the press played a dominant role in "exaggerating" corruption scandals in his administration, attributing guilt to members of the executive branch and the governing Workers' Party when their cases were still under investigation by parliament and the courts, Tiburcio said.