The news that the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) has chosen Cape Town in South Africa as the venue for its 2013 general assembly this November is a clear vote of confidence in Africa and the developing world. It will be the first time in the 118-year history of the ICA that its annual congress is held in Africa, and as many as 2,000 participants from 80 countries are expected to attend during the week from 1-15 November.
The news that the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) has chosen Cape Town in South Africa as the venue for its 2013 general assembly this November is a clear vote of confidence in Africa and the developing world. It will be the first time in the 118-year history of the ICA that its annual congress is held in Africa, and as many as 2,000 participants from 80 countries are expected to attend during the week from 1-15 November.
The Cape Town summit of the world co-operative movement is an important follow-up to the 2012 United Nations Year of Co-operatives, which was marked in Ireland when the three big Irish co-op groups joined together to celebrate and promote Ireland achievements in co-operative development.
It was at a keynote event held last May in Croke Park when the president of the ICA, Pauline Green, joined Irish President Michael D Higgins in declaring that the success of co-operative enterprise in Ireland should be shared and promoted internationally.
The strong links between the ICA an the European Union have become closer in recent years and especially since the appointment of Green, a former MEP and president of the Socialist Group of the European Parliament, not to mention the recent move of the ICA head office from Geneva to Brussels.
Ireland is where the great co-op pioneer Sir Horace Plunkett transformed the rural economy by helping communities to establish communal enterprises and credit facilities. The lessons of Ireland have long since influenced co-op development across the world.
The theme of the Cape Town meeting will be built around the ‘Blueprint for a Co-operate Decade’ with the launch of a worldwide campaign for the co-op form of business to become the acknowledged leader in economic, social, and environmental sustainability and the fastest growing form of enterprise by 2020.
This summit is also expected to provide an opportunity to discuss real alternatives to the present world economic set-up, which has led to extreme poverty, inequality, climate change, and a situation where international crime and terrorism prevail.
The choice of Cape Town – just across the water from where thousands of black opponents of apartheid were held on Robben Island, including Nelson Mandela – is a significant reminder that democracy, equality, and human rights are central to development.
When I was first elected president of the Development Committee of the European Parliament, infrastructures, roads, and dams tended to dominate much of the EU thinking on development. But today there is a greater awareness of the importance in development of the co-operative values of human rights, democracy, transparency, equality and the role of civil society.
Many years before I was elected a member of the European Parliament I became interested in the commitment by President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania to co-operative development, and this was further stimulated by my brief time in the early 1980s at the Co-operative College in Moshi, near Kilimanjaro, which today is the Moshi University College of Co-operative and Business Studies.
The world economic crisis brought about by the collapse of the banking and regulatory systems, and the bullying of developing countries by the World Bank and the IMF into cutting public services and promoting privatisation, raises issues as to whether a mutual and co-operative economic alternative is appropriate. I am convinced that a strong Irish presence in Cape Town would have so much to contribute to the debate on the relevance of self-help and mutual and co-operative enterprise as an alternative to the current world economic system, which has led to austerity and deprivation for so many of the citizens of the world.
Michael McGowan is a former MEP and president of the development committee of the European Parliament.
