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Latest NewsThird UN Conference on Landlocked Developing Countries taking place in Botswana

Third UN Conference on Landlocked Developing Countries taking place in Botswana

Botswana – The third UN Conference on  Landlocked Developing Countries (LLDCs) will highlight the challenges being faced by landlocked countries and will also open an opportunity to explore meaningful partnerships to unlock the potential of landlocked developing countries, officials say.

The four-day conference (December 10-13, 2024) , being convened at Gaborone in Botswana, will bring together officials, civil society and business leaders from landlocked countries around the world.

“ LLDCs pay a higher premium to access global markets because of the lack of direct territorial access to the sea. This limited transport connectivity causes lower levels of trade compared to the rest of the world. Access to electricity is below the world average and the costs of ICT services remain high,” said UN Assistant Secretary General Marcos Neto. “LLDCs also face rising risk of debt distress, elevated trade costs, rising inflation, energy and food prices as well as effects of climate change.”

The last five years of the Vienna Plan of Action, in fact, saw a reversal in development gains, following COVID-19 pandemic, disruption of global supply chains and international trade, according to the UN.

 Total FDI inflows to LLDCs decreased by an average 2 per cent annually since 2014, heavily impacted by the overall decline in global Foreign Direct Invesetment (FDI) flows over the past decade and by the COVID-19 pandemic.  LLDC’s share of FDI inflows to developing countries shrunk from 4.3 per cent in 2014 to 2.8 per cent in 2023,  said a report published by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)

In this context LLDCs continue to perform poorly in cross-country rankings or benchmarks of productive capacities. This reflects the group’s socioeconomic and geographic challenges, as well as insufficient economy-wide improvements in terms of productivity, value-added by domestic producers, and long-term structural transformation, the INCTAD report said.

 Critical opportunity

The upcoming Third United Nations Conference on LLDCs presents a critical opportunity to reassess and reinforce the strategies laid out in the Vienna Programme of Action. This will require exploring new avenues to address the decline in FDI, by continuing to enhance the investment climate and facilitating investment in key sectors. It will also necessitate additional support from the international community, including through the promotion of innovative financing mechanisms and capacity- building for large-scale infrastructure projects, according to the UNCTAD.

The first UN Conference on Landlocked Developing Countries was convened in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on 28-29 August 2003.

This conference focused on “Addressing the Special Needs of Landlocked Developing Countries within a New Global Framework for Transit Transport Cooperation for Landlocked and Transit Developing Countries.”

The second UN Conference on Landlocked Developing Countries was convened in Vienna, Austria, on 3-5 November, 2014 and undertook  a comprehensive appraisal of the implementation of the Almaty Programme of Action.

Over 450 million people live in  32 LLDCs.

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