Cochabamba, November 24, 2005

On behalf of the Secretary General of the Andean Community, who because of urgent last minute Community commitments is unable to be with us today as he would have wished, I would like to cordially welcome you and to congratulate you on the materialization of this Second Andean Regional Conference on Employment.

Endorsing what the Minister of Labor of Bolivia has stated and in an effort to contribute some complementary ideas that will allow us to delve more deeply into the significance of the efforts being made by the Andean Community to build a social agenda that will support valuable national efforts to bridge the social gap and to define strategies for social cohesion -- in which employment plays a key role--, allow me to take a few minutes to give you a brief account of some of the actions being taken today that are directly associated with this subject.

One of the most important challenges of the New Strategic Design for Andean integration is to ensure that integration contributes effectively to overcoming our countries’ serious social crisis, a crisis marked by high poverty rates, one of the world’s highest rates of concentration of income and productive assets, still precarious levels of integration of the various ethnic and cultural currents into a cohesive social body, and the continued existence of huge disparities in levels of development among regions and countries in the Andean Community.

To help meet this challenge, the Andean Community is developing its Social Agenda, consisting of a series of programs, projects and activities defined by the Member Country Community authorities to boost the development of the social dimension of the integration process. Its purpose is to contribute to the consolidation of the integration process, ensure its democratic and participatory nature, increase its social benefits for the entire population and help build a socially cohesive subregional space.

Among the Andean Community’s most important social advances are the formulation and adoption of the Integral Plan for Social Development (IPSD), approved through Decision 601 in September 2004 as a Community strategy to support the Member Countries’ efforts to overcome poverty, exclusion and social inequality.

The IPSD objectives and proposals hark back to United Nations Millennium Summit (2000) Development Objectives (MDOs), as well as to the objectives laid out at the Copenhagen Social Summit of 1995. As the IPSD states, the MDOs were the starting point for the definition of common social objectives for the five Andean countries.

It is vitally important here to underscore the fact that it is not the IPSD’s intention to replace national antipoverty and social inequity strategies and policies, but to enhance them through the contribution or value added of a regional perspective and the cooperation among the Member Countries of this integration process.

It is evident that the Integral Plan for Social Development (IPSD) constitutes the Community’s first great effort to lay the groundwork for building a socially cohesive subregional space in which effective dialogue and concerted efforts among all of our countries’ social and productive bodies are essential.

The IPSD’s most ambitious strategic line of work is, without a doubt, the series of programs and projects that are proposed in the areas of socio-labor, education and culture, health and food security, social development in rural areas, sustainable biodiversity use and management of water resources and social development in border areas. These IPSD Project profiles are proposals for Andean Community efforts --in other words, projects in which at least three Member Countries should participate and which should be subregional in approach and scope.

Among the most important IPSD socio-labor projects are precisely those having to do with Employment Promotion and Labor Education and Training.

The IPSD Project “Subregional Harmonization of Labor Education and Training Methodologies, Criteria and Priorities Program” seeks to generate an exchange, dialogue and debate on labor education and training among the Andean countries, in order to define Community criteria for improving the employability of the subregion’s workers. That Project is currently being coordinated by the Bolivian IPSD National Follow-up Committee.

The IPSD “Andean Subregional Employment Promotion Program” Project, for its part, seeks to compile, evaluate and systematically organize the Member Countries’ experiences in this area and to establish a Community framework to promote the formulation of employment policies, with special emphasis on the urban informal sector and the promotion of micro, small and medium-size enterprises. The Venezuelan IPSD National Follow-up Committee coordinates that Project today.

In response to this vision of the Andean Community social agenda and to support the projects designed by the Integral Plan for Social Development, the First Andean Regional Conference on Employment was convened during the Seventh Meeting of the Advisory Council of Andean Community Labor Ministers (Geneva, June 2004) for the purpose of encouraging discussions about employment at the highest political level, working on the outline of a strategy to effectively link up and dovetail economic and social policies as an essential means for bridging the social gap, and reinforcing worthy and decent work in the subregion.

For that reason, it was decided to actively interlink the Andean Business and Labor Advisory Councils with this initiative and a special invitation was extended to the Andean Community Advisory Council of Treasury or Finance Ministers, Central Bank Presidents, and Economic Planning Officers to participate in these efforts.

Given the results of the First Andean Regional Conference on Employment held in Lima in November of last year and the convening, in Bolivia, of this Second Conference for the second straight year, as well as the commitment to hold a Third Conference next year in Venezuela (all of this duly approved and backed by the Ninth Meeting of the Advisory Council of Andean Community Labor Ministers, held in Geneva in June of this year), it is obvious that this forum aspires to become, thanks to the valuable initiative of the Advisory Council of Labor Ministers, the privileged seed for periodic meetings of the ministries responsible for social matters and for economic matters in our countries that foster the efforts of the IPSD to define a subsequent Community strategy on social cohesion.

In this connection, these Conferences have shown signs of shortly becoming a key element in the construction of the Andean Community social agenda by contributing to the essential coordination of national and Community institutions on matters of employment, which is in greatest demand by the various sectors of the Andean population.

For all of these reasons, it is worth drawing attention to the significant efforts made by the various Bolivian Government bodies represented basically by the Ministries of Labor and of Economic Development to comply with the mandate to hold this Second Andean Regional Conference on Employment, particularly considering that the country is preparing for its forthcoming general election.

I would like to wish this important Conference the greatest success in its deliberations and to express the Andean Community General Secretariat’s wholehearted commitment to unceasingly support the effective materialization and deepening of its results.

Thank-you.