Summit Yields No Anti-Poverty Consensus : Diplomacy: Resolution crafted at U.N. gathering is non-binding, long on compromise and short on specifics.

COPENHAGEN —  When she was growing up in Suriname, Thaninga Fulani remembers, there were whole days when she did nothing but walk around with her mother, gathering “food, clothes, pots and pans--anything that we could get,” to try to resell to feed the family.

Fulani says she didn’t know at the time that she was poor because everyone around her was doing more or less the same thing. The realization came later, and with it came anger, which she expressed by going on a hunger strike in the main hall of the U.N. World Summit for Social Development, the weeklong anti-poverty meeting nearing its close here.

“I feel as if the summit was like drinking tea with the queen,” complained Fulani, who now works for a Dutch group that helps black immigrant women. “The participants here do not know what poverty is really like, because they have not experienced it.”

The presence of a hunger strike amid the bustle and rhetoric of a major U.N. gathering reflects the wide range of views among participants about what needs to be done to fight world poverty--and how much progress the delegates have actually made in that fight.

Fulani and the other women fasters said they had been hoping for quick, decisive action: the imposition of binding limits on how much governments can spend on their militaries, perhaps, or debt relief, or legal requirements that a fixed share of national resources be redirected to the poor.

Instead, they got an anti-poverty resolution that is non-binding and, not surprisingly, shot through with compromises and code language that can be interpreted in many different ways.

The summit is “not a total disaster, of course, but certainly not a visionary charter for a new social order in the 21st Century,” Mahbub ul-Haq, a former Pakistani finance minister and special adviser to the U.N. Development Program, said Saturday.

But official delegates responded that even the non-binding resolution constitutes something of a breakthrough, marking the first U.N. summit-level agreements on such controversial topics as debt relief.

The thousands of delegates have spent the past week drafting the lengthy anti-poverty resolution--an extremely difficult task, because it meant finding common ground between rich nations and poor nations, and everything in between, on the touchy subjects of resource distribution, debt relief and national sovereignty.

The last topic of debate--a sensitive passage setting a context for economic growth--was settled Friday evening, and the first of an expected 122 national leaders began arriving in Copenhagen on Saturday to give formal speeches on the document.

President Clinton is not attending today’s event, but First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared last week to unveil a new initiative to reduce female illiteracy, and Vice President Al Gore is scheduled to speak this morning.

“You’re not going to get rid of poverty” with the new resolution, said John Sewell, president of the Overseas Development Council and a special adviser to U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali for the summit. “But by the time you get through with (the upcoming U.N. conference on the status of women in) Beijing, you will have established a set of norms that is very, very important.”

Sewell was referring to major U.N. gatherings that have brought world leaders to Rio de Janeiro, Vienna and Cairo, as well as Copenhagen, over the past several years and have created new international agreements on environmental protection, human rights, population control and now poverty.

One of the key norms the newest resolution sets is a level of “absolute” poverty--which essentially means no access to any of such basic human needs as elementary education, clean drinking water and prenatal health care.

The participating nations have agreed that pockets of such destitution are unacceptable, and each nation is now supposed to design its own strategies for wiping them out, on its own timetable.

The resolution also urges that the resources of both rich and poor nations be redirected toward meeting the needs of those deemed to be living in absolute poverty.

Thus, rich nations are ideally supposed to dedicate 20% of their foreign-aid spending to fundamentals such as primary education and basic health care in the poorest countries, rather than spending it on trade promotion, the training and equipping of foreign militaries, the construction of roads, ports and other infrastructure, and other classic foreign-aid projects that do not directly help the poor.

Poor nations are called upon, meanwhile, to earmark 20% of their total government budgets for basic help for the poor.

This so-called 20-20 proposal was a centerpiece of the talks, and one of the less radical and more promising ideas raised in discussions that also touched on such nerve-jangling ideas as debt cancellation and the taxation of foreign-currency speculation, with the proceeds to go to the poor.

Many observers and participants had high hopes for the 20-20 proposal, but it bogged down over the week because a number of countries that receive foreign aid felt it was an unwanted incursion on their national sovereignty. In the end, the only way to get all national delegations to agree to the 20-20 proposal was to make it non-binding.

As the resolution is now written, the 20-20 proposal thus applies only to “interested” nations.

“A 20-20 compact has been endorsed, but this is more to avoid public embarrassment than to initiate real action,” said Mahbub, who came to the summit stumping for the concept. “There is no binding international commitment. There is no rigorous definition of basic social services. There is no global monitoring mechanism.”

U.S. officials at the summit said the United States hadn’t fought the 20-20 proposal but that it wasn’t relevant to American aid-giving because the nation already dedicates 20% of its foreign aid to meeting the basic needs of the world’s poorest.

This assertion was met with incredulity, however, by various non-governmental analysts present in Copenhagen who said that by their calculations, the U.S. percentage is much lower.