Organisation of Islamic Cooperation
The Collective Voice of The Muslim World
Date: 18/08/2008
Istanbul – Republic of Turkey - 18 august 2008 It gives me great happiness to be a part of this event today. For me it has special significance and the reason will be clear in the course of my statement. Before proceeding further, I would like to congratulate and extend my deep appreciation to our host for organizing this business forum in a way to complement and support the Turkey-Africa Cooperation Summit in a very meaningful and effective manner. Following the OIC Summit Meeting held in Dakar in March this year, for the first time in the OIC history, we organized our Ministerial Council Meeting in Kampala, beautiful capital of Uganda where, again, as an innovation, an OIC Ministerial Council Meeting was accompanied by a sideline business forum for the fist time. I remember very well that the two days OIC Kampala Business Forum, which was organized under the kind patronage of His Excellency Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, President of the Republic of Uganda had as its motto the phrase of “Discover the Resources and High Potential of the African Market”. The OIC Kampala Business Forum focused on the role of the private sector in enhancing trade and investment in joint venture projects between and among the OIC Member States. I had also emphasized the utility of such Business Forums to provide a platform for businessmen and political decision-makers in the OIC Member States to exchange their experiences and explore the resources and the potential that the private sector could tap, in a bid to generate wealth, create jobs and fight poverty. In the same line, I believe that particularly at this phase, this type of gatherings are very necessary and they serve a very critical purpose that is, identifying potentials and partners, in other words, discovering each other. After the Kampala Ministerial Conference and Business Forum, many officials and businessmen from various OIC countries privately shared with me that the Kampala gatherings gave them the chance to discover not only a country but a continent about whose potentials, resources and beauties they had no idea before. I certainly believe that at a time of increased commodity and energy prices and scarcity of resources in the face of the new realities and configuration of the global economic order, everybody should look at Africa with more attention and creativity and from a long term perspective. The critical resources that the African continent possesses, notably its natural resources, fertile land, abundance of water in many parts and mineral resources, young population and the strategic location make it potentially the one of the most pertinent places for development projects in agriculture and food security, as well as industrial production. As a matter of fact, in the recent years, the OIC institutions through special programs have been giving emphasis to encouraging the private sector in our member states to deploy efforts to pump more investment in a number of OIC Member States, especially in the African countries. Ladies and Gentlemen, The Ten Year Program of Action adopted by the leaders of the OIC member states at the Extraordinary Makkah Summit in December 2005 and the new Charter of our Organization adopted at the last OIC Summit in Dakar in March 2008 provide the main guidelines for the transformation and new direction of the OIC. These two documents clearly define socio-economic development as the main remedy in facing the challenges of the 21st Century. As a token of my personal and institutional commitment to Africa, I realized my first official tour to Africa in my first months in the office. When the Ten Year Program of Action was first conceived, then prepared and adopted in 2005 during my first year as the Secretary General, at multiple stages, there was absolute consensus and common understanding on the necessity of paying special attention to the issues of Africa. If I may elaborate a little further on the economic aspects of our Ten Year Program of Action, I might say that this blueprint document provides the basis and enshrines the joint will of the leaders for increased economic partnership among the member states. The economic partnership that our Ten Year Program envisages is articulated in clusters such as increasing intra-OIC trade, eradicating poverty, eliminating pandemic disease and increasing economic assistance to the Least Developed Countries, particularly to African member states and naturally requires collaborative efforts of the OIC institutions, governments, international and regional organizations, private sector and civil society. Overall, the creation of a 10 billions US dollars poverty alleviation fund under the title of Islamic Solidarity Fund for Development (ISFD) and a separate Special Program for the Development of Africa (SPDA) should be considered to be the most prominent steps towards achieving the lofty goals of the Ten Year Program of Action. ISFD and SPDA are also concrete examples of the new visionary and strategic direction of the OIC. In the sphere of trade exchanges among the OIC Member States, the Ten-Year Programme of Action envisaged to move the volume of intra-OIC trade upwards from around 14 to 20 percent by the year 2015. In this particular aspect, we have already achieved significant success thanks to the efforts of the OIC Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation (COMCEC) which is chaired by His Excellency Abdullah Gul, President of the Republic of Turkey. COMCEC has established very important instruments to carry out coordination and planning tasks, particularly through the Trade Preferential System (TPS) and the Protocol on Preferential Tariff Schemes. Once the OIC Trade Preferential System enters into force, the OIC member states would cross the threshold of a new economic and trade age conducive to the creation of a free trade zone and a new Preferential Tariff Scheme. Of course in devising and implementing various programs and projects the OIC system pulls immense strength from the existence of one of the most successful regional banks in its family, Islamic Development Bank (IDB). In addition to COMCEC and IDB, I should also refer to the important roles played by other OIC institutions, namely, the Islamic Centre for Development of Trade (ICDT) based in Casablanca, the Statistical, Economic and Social Research and Training Centre for Islamic Countries, SESRIC based in Ankara and the Islamic Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ICCI) based in Karachi. Ladies and Gentlemen, The OIC has identified food and agriculture sector as one of its top priority areas for collective action and has set a number of objectives and established programmes of action with a view to ensuring food security for the populations of our countries. Food security will not be attained without developing the agricultural sector. As we, and the countries of the world, are actively seeking adequate solutions to the food security crisis, we know that the solutions are not easy to find. Nevertheless, we know that this goal is unquestionably attainable, and the one to which the OIC is deeply committed. We would like to engage in coordinating with the initiatives announced by international institutions, as is the case with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Bank, to tackle the food crisis. I would like to take this opportunity to announce that based on the COMCEC and OIC Ministerial Council Resolutions and upon the generous invitation by Mali, an OIC Forum on ways and means of energizing trade and investment in food industry in Africa will be held in Mali in November 2008. We have also identified the food crisis as the interactive discussion theme of this year’s OIC Foreign Ministers Coordination Meeting to be held in New York on 26 September. I believe that following the efforts which lead to the adoption of the OIC Five Year Cotton Action Plan, the food sector will be another area of successful cooperation within the OIC where OIC institutions, governments, research centers and private sector come together to increase efficiency in production and achieve competitiveness. In the process of preparation of the OIC Cotton Action Plan, besides COMCEC and IDB, Turkey played a leading role and supported the process in every possible way. It is my expectation that in the joint action in food industry, we will be able to attract the attention and interest of the Turkish private sector companies in an extensive manner. I should also share with you another existing project as an example to our commitment to the socio-economic development of Africa. Following the resolutions of the Dakar Summit in March and Kampala Ministerial Council Conference in June, we immediately started coordination activities for the Dakar-Port Sudan Railways Line and First Meeting of the Committee for Implementing the Project met at our headquarters in Jeddah exactly a month ago. Certainly such a project would benefit all the countries involved and generate employment and income opportunities for many people. Last but not the least, I would like to touch upon an important subject which I believe offers considerable potentials. It is the development of tourism directed to Africa and promotion of investments in this sector. In my view, private sector in OIC countries and particularly Turkish private sector should give a special attention to explore the opportunities of investment in Africa in this field and African governments should prepare and provide special incentives to attract and secure investment. In this regard, I would like to inform you that within the framework of the implementation of the OIC Plan of Action to strengthen economic and commercial cooperation, nine Member States of the OIC, namely BENIN, THE GAMBIA, GUINEA, GUINEA BISSAU, MALI, MAURITANIA, NIGER, SENEGAL and SIERRA LEONE, and the World Tourism Organization have initiated a project titled “Sustainable Tourism Development in a network of Cross-border Parks and Protected Areas in West Africa”. I could have elaborated on all the issues I touched upon above and there are also many issues I would have loved to share with you yet I don’t want to take your precious time any further here. However, I should inform you that after I took office I appointed one of my senior adviser Ambassador Nabika Diallo to assist the OIC members states and private sector on issues related to the projects and about Africa and he will be at your disposal at the OIC General Secretariat for further discussions. The OIC General Secretariat stands ready in an open-minded and flexible manner to consider any concrete project proposal which will contribute to the goals of the Ten Year Program of Action and the UN Millennium Development Goals. We are also convinced that during the Chairmanship of the visionary African leader His Excellency President Aldoulaye Wade of Senegal, the OIC will be continuously paying special focus to the challenges faced by Africa with creative and pragmatic approaches. Expressing my appreciation to the Turkish Government, the Turkish Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges and Foreign Economic Relations Board, once more, for their special attention to the issues of Africa, I certainly hope that this type of gatherings will be repeated in the future. I thank you all for your attention and patience.
