LatAm closer to creating sustainable regional development: UN body

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) said on Friday it has moved closer to its goal of creating a Latin American forum to promote sustainable development and fight inequity.

An ECLAC committee "successfully completed" on Thursday in New York consultations "for the creation of the Forum of the Countries of Latin America and the Caribbean on Sustainable Development," the UN body said on its website.

The conclusions are to be presented to the ECLAC's 45 member states and 13 associated states at the upcoming biennial meeting to be held on May 23-27 in Mexico City.

The new inter-governmental forum essentially "seeks to establish the framework for regional and subregional monitoring of follow-up to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development," said the Santiago, Chile-based agency.

In New York, ECLAC Executive Secretary Alicia Barcena offered a preview of the main proposals in the document her agency will present in Mexico City.

Titled "Horizons 2030: Equality at the Center of Sustainable Development," the document "aims to orient the process of regional development in the coming years," with an eye to achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs) of the UN-backed agenda.

"The current development model is unsustainable, which means structural changes are needed to reverse growing inequality and environmental deterioration," the agency said.

Latin America is widely recognized to be the world's most unequal region.

"In 2014 the richest 10 percent of people in Latin America had amassed 71 percent of the region's wealth," Barcena wrote in an article published earlier this year.

"If this trend continues ... in just six years' time the richest 1 percent in the region will have accumulated more wealth than the remaining 99 percent," she warned. Endi