During the summer five distinguished figures gave public Caux lectures on such issues as the link between corruption and war, globalizatiom, and women's role in combating poverty.

Why not women?

Educating women is the key to eradicating poverty and hunger, said Catherine Bertini, Executive Director of the UN's World Food Programme and Under-Secretary General of the UN. It would break the vicious circle of malnourished and mal-educated women giving birth to malnourished children.

The first woman to head the World Food Programme, Bertini said that 830 million people went to bed hungry every night, and lived on less than a dollar a day. In sub-Saharan Africa, 80 per cent of farmers were women, though men owned 90 per cent of the farming land. Her agency was currently feeding 80 million. `In our communities throughout the world, not in poor communities alone, there are never enough people with energy, values and commitment who are willing to take leadership roles. Why not women?' she asked.

Corruption penalizes the poor

Corruption acts like an invisible tax that unfairly penalizes those least able to bear the burden, said Philippe Levy, the Chairman of Transparency International, Switzerland, and a former ambassador.

According to the IMF, crime and corruption cost $1,500 billion a year, he said. `We are all victims of unethical behaviour, as taxpayers, consumers, producers, shareholders, but also as citizens in undemocratic countries where human rights are violated and where democratic institutions do not work properly.' Till recently, governments had not taken the problem seriously and bribes paid to foreign officials had even been tax deductible.

Levy believed that without the efforts of Transparency International, conventions against corruption, such as those of the OECD and the Council of Europe, might never have seen the light of day. The challenge now was to put them into practice.

Early warning

`The liberal democracies of the industrialized countries cannot live in a fortress isolated from history,' said Ambassador Mohammed Sahnoun, Deputy Secretary General of the UN. Some spoke of the `end of history', following the victory of liberal capitalism over communism. But this offered `an apartheid vision', if it meant leaving Third World countries `as targets and battlefields for years to come', while the liberal democracies lived in safety.

Sahnoun, an Algerian who suffered torture and solitary confinement during his country's struggle for independence, said that, since the end of the Cold War, there had been few conflicts between states but over 40 internal conflicts, springing from ethnic, religious, tribal, language and political differences, and social injustice. Expatriates, living in the West, often provided finance, arms and propaganda support.

Sahnoun, who had been on UN peace missions in Africa, called for preventive diplomacy and an early warning system to defuse conflicts. `The enemy is nowhere and everywhere. It is as if we have to fight against forces both in ourselves and around us.'

Strange mathematics

Mgr Bernard Genoud, Catholic Bishop of Fribourg, Lausanne and Geneva, criticized `the illusion of knowledge' and teaching rooted in technique `without any reference to values'. He called for an education system where `masters' trained `disciples', based on relationships of friendship and aiming to transmit values.

Speaking on `the inalienable dignity of the human being', the former philosophy teacher said that he detected a return to a sense of individual responsibility. It was always easy to blame others. But this could lead to `a strange mathematics' where, individuals were decent but the sum of their activities resulted in the mess that all condemned.

He quoted Einstein--`we should not always do what it is possible to do'--to underline the importance of an ethic on which to ground all research and scientific progress.

Fighting poverty: `central priority'

Rubens Ricupero, the Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), called on governments to dialogue with anti-globalization demonstrators. `Otherwise we are heading for an increasingly violent confrontation. These movements express an understandable fear and anguish.' He discerned `a pervasive desire for something that goes beyond the economic'.

Ricupero, who comes from Brazil, insisted that globalization was bringing positive changes. But he ridiculed the claim by some governments that there were no limits to competition. No one today would justify slavery or child labour in the interests of greater competition, he said. `The economy is an instrument, not an end in itself. Human beings are the ultimate value.'

Fighting poverty, he said, should be `the central priority' within nations and in the international community.