THE JANUARY CONFERENCE
1. A short review of Lebanon’s economic policy (1943 to date). In this review we do not intend to judge the merits or the demerits of the economic policies that were followed by the 54 governments that succeeded themselves since Lebanon acquired its independence in 1943. We only wish to emphasize the fact that these policies generally lacked cohesion and consistency. Everyone will agree with me that few of these past governments attempted to present the citizens with a long term coordinated program and a plan of action with general goals and precise detailed targets to be achieved over a specific time period. In fact, quite the contrary occurred. Every new government that acceded to power rushed to scrap all the accomplishments, the studies and the projects of its predecessor in order to introduce new ones without taking into consideration the long term interest of the State. The result of these narrow and uncoordinated policies or lack of them shows up in the poor state of the country’s infrastructure, the neglect during sixty five years of its vital resources, the abandonment of its environment, and the absence of a harmonized growth strategy. Add to this the near total disregard of the individual and his needs and you have the perfect recipe for the explosive mixture that blew up during the civil war period and threaten to arise again at any time in the near future, unless some serious corrective actions are taken rapidly. These corrective measures should form part of a complete and coordinated strategy based on the right vision of the future, in short a National Plan that the entire nation should adopt and support if we do not want to drift soon into disorder or, worse yet, stagnate into mediocrity. 2. What is planning and why is national planning needed in Lebanon? “Take hold of the future or the future will take hold of you." Patrick Dixon, author of Futurewise What is planning? Planning in organizations and public policy is both the organizational process of creating and maintaining a plan; and the psychological process of thinking about the activities required to create a desired goal on some scale. A plan should be a realistic view of the expectations. A plan can play a vital role in helping to avoid mistakes or recognize hidden opportunities. Preparing a satisfactory plan is essential. The planning process enables management to understand more clearly what they want to achieve, and how and when they can do it. Planning helps in forecasting the future, makes the future visible to some extent. It bridges between where we are and where we want to go. Planning is looking ahead. Why do we need planning? It is high time that the actions of our government cease to be dictated by narrow short term political considerations. They should be the result of a concerted action based on a broad, long term view of the national interest. That view ought to be reflected in a well studied and popularly supported National Plan. All the countries around us have started adopting national plans. Cyprus, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, and Iran have seen their economy grow while ours is lagging behind and our youth is emigrating for lack of opportunities at home. In our opinion, most of the ills that have befallen the Lebanese economy during the past fifteen years: the horrendous escalation of our public debt, the low growth of our economy, the poor quality of our social services, and the degradation of our environment, are the direct result of an absence of vision and of a forward looking policy. 3. What are the advantages of the Lebanese National Plan? If the Nation unanimously adopts the concept of the National Plan and supports its implementation the following advantages will accrue: 1. To the individual citizens, a well applied National Plan will bring about a stronger sense of responsibility and commitment, a hope for a better future, and an increased sentiment of national pride. It will serve to create a more stable economy, better living conditions, and more employment opportunities to stem the flow of emigration of our youth. It will also reduce the internal frictions among the communities by focusing the thoughts and the concerns of everyone upon the implementation of the National Plan rather than the acquisition of narrow and selfish factional or communal advantages. 2. To the Authorities the Plan will provide a clearer vision of the tasks ahead and better relations with the citizens through increased transparency, understanding, and dialogue. The preparation of the Plan will reveal the need to correct some serious anomalies in the system in order to successfully implement the program. 3. To the Nation, the Plan will result in a more harmonious and fuller development of all its resources and the creation of a solid infrastructure 4. In the Region, the Plan will allow for a better integration of Lebanon’s economy in the area, better relations with its neighbors, better cooperation in regional projects such as gas and oil prospection, the protection of the environment, a regional common market and a regional transport system. 4. What are the main features and the components of the Lebanese National Plan? To be effective a National Plan should cover and encompass all the economic and the social activities of the Nation. In these difficult times we cannot and should not allow the politicians to decide alone our future for us. This is what we have done until now with nothing much to show for it. Civil Society, supported by some financial and economic experts, should have a say in essential matters such as the management of our public debt, the privatization process, the transparency of EDL records, and other important budget heads. The citizens are also entitled to know precisely how their government intends to deal with some vital sectors of the country’s economy, such as agriculture, industry, tourism etc. All these subjects should form part of a comprehensive study that Civil Society should undertake at the earliest possible opportunity. Furthermore the periodical post-control of the government’s performance in each sector, which is the true sign of good governance, will be greatly facilitated by the introduction of the benchmarks and the yardsticks that the Plan will provide. On the basis of all these considerations the proposed National Plan will address the following major issues: • The Fiscal Strategy • The Social Development Strategy • The Infrastructure Development Strategy • The Economic Growth Strategy • The Public Debt • The Privatizations • The Financial and the Monetary policies • The reforms that were pledged at the Paris III conference • The future prospects that are offered to Lebanon These main heads cover altogether twenty-seven separate topics called sub-projects. Each one of these topics will be the subject of a detailed analysis. All these studies will then be combined into an overall national action plan for the country. 5. Who will be responsible for the preparation of the Lebanese National Plan? To create a successful National Economic Plan one must ensure that it is truly national in its composition and in its intent. In other words the entire Nation should participate in its creation. We suggest adopting the following procedure: a. The initial build-up of the Plan 1. Select carefully the persons, or rather the group of persons (preferably an NGO, or a group of undergraduate students) who will coordinate the study of each section of the Plan. We have purposefully used the word “coordinate” because the study per se will be the result of several individual researches by experts and specialists, as well as the appointed representatives of the Ministry or Public Institution concerned. We have also in our mind the Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR) that has undertaken similar studies in the past and can provide some valuable guidance and advice to the researchers. We shall call that body of experts the research team. 1. The role of the coordinating NGO or the student group will consist in combining all the initiatives into a final summarizing document. That will entail recruiting 27 NGOs or student groups for the entire project, one for each sub-project. It should not be too difficult considering that there are six thousand NGOs operating in the country at the present time. 2. The research team will collect and analyze the numerous local and foreign documents, proposals, studies and researches on each of the 27 topics that the National Plan intends to cover. 3. The research team will scrutinize attentively the national plans that were previously formulated in Lebanon and discuss the matter at length with the experts at the Council of Development and Reconstruction, CDR. 4. The research team will also examine the plans that were created and administered by the governments of other countries, namely Ireland, Brazil, Cyprus, Syria and Jordan. They will trace and identify the reason for the success of these plans. b. The enhancement of the Plan 1. At the end of the above preliminary study its findings should be widely published and the public should be called upon to provide their feedback and their comments upon them. 2. A special attention and care should be brought to obtain the opinion of the different experts in their respective fields of knowledge, to name but a few: • the faculty teachers and graduates • The experts and the consultants • The economists • The members of the professional associations • The public servants • The syndicates • The government ministers • The deputies • The directors of the ministries • The NGOs • The international organizations 3. The remarks and the suggestions presented by the different experts will serve to amend and enhance the original Plan. 4. The National Plan should be the end result of a true democratic process in which all the citizens are invited to participate, each according to his/her capacity and competence. Thus the Plan will turn out to be the concrete embodiment of the wishes and the aspirations of the entire population. 6. Who will be responsible for implementing the Lebanese National Plan? The Plan will be submitted in the first place to the Government for adoption. If it is approved, the Plan will then go to the different parliamentary committees concerned for discussion, and will be subsequently presented to the Parliament for a vote. The President of the Republic, who represents the highest instance in the Land, should provide his seal of approval and his wholehearted support to the Plan after it has been approved by the government and voted by Parliament, The Plan that is in essence a national work program for the next five years should generally inspire and guide the actions of all the governments that will be in charge during that period. The performance of these governments will be evaluated according to how well they are able to implement the Plan and execute it on schedule. 7. Who will be responsible for monitoring the execution of the Lebanese National Plan? This is a crucial step in the process to ensure the success of the Plan. In fact the lack of implementation and the absence of a rigorous follow-up have always been the Achille’s heels of all the past Lebanese Administrations. To avoid falling into the same trap we recommend adopting the following measures: I. Determine the institutions and the individuals who will be ultimately responsible for following up on the implementation of the Plan and coordinate among the different departments of the Administration who are responsible for its execution. II. Assign to the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) some equal responsibility in the monitoring process to ensure that the Plan is regularly and effectively undertaken and does not fall into disuse through neglect or ill will. These NGOs will also be called upon to submit and publish periodical reports on their monitoring achievements. This is called “external governance”; as opposed to the “internal governance” that is the responsibility of a governmental body or institution. III. Any member of the general public, who wishes to make any comments or remarks on the entire planning process, during all its phases, should be actively encouraged to do so and his suggestions and proposals should be carefully considered and implemented once they are accepted. That last initiative will ensure that the Plan will not only see the light of day but that it will be supported by the majority of the population throughout all the changes of regimes and governments, and implemented with a relatively good margin of success. 8. How can we adapt the Lebanese National Plan to the country’s regional and global environment? We have seen during our present review how the National Plan can be a valuable guide and a superb management tool that can serve the government to plan ahead, harmonize the development of the country’s resources, and avoid costly mistakes. We have also appreciated the fact that, in Lebanon, the Plan will aid to cement the relationship between the eighteen communities by focusing everybody’s attention upon national growth and progress, away from the constant petty squabbling over the division of the resources. There is yet another major aspect of the National Planning process that is often overlooked. The relationship and the interdependence between the different regional economies in the Middle East become all the more apparent when the authorities are engaged in building up a national development program. Agriculture, industry, tourism, trade and transport are sectors that need to be considered in their regional and global context. The protection of the environment and the sharing of the water and the energy resources are also policies that cannot be built and developed independently of Lebanon’s Middle Eastern and Mediterranean neighbors. For all these reasons and others that I may have omitted to mention, let us keep in mind how important it is for Lebanon to have a National Plan, if we want to heed Patrick Dixon’s warning: “Take hold of the future or the future will take hold of you”. In the morning we have theorized upon the concept of the National Plan and the need for Lebanon to build, adopt and implement such a program. This afternoon we intend to move away from generalities into specifics and consider how the principles that were enunciated earlier on can be applied in practice. We are pleased to announce that since the first of December 2008, a group of students at Notre Dame University of Louayze have formed a research team to undertake all the necessary studies leading to the build up of an Agricultural Plan for Lebanon. The team selected Agriculture among the twenty seven topics that form the National Plan because the Ministry concerned had already undertaken a similar initiative in 2006. Their Agricultural Plan covered 425 individual proposals and was presented in March of that year to the Council of Ministers by Agriculture Minister Aly El Khalil. Unfortunately, the Council refused to consider it for reasons that are yet to be disclosed. The student research team has set up a detailed action program for the next six months that should culminate in the drafting of a new and updated Agricultural Plan. Hopefully that Plan will be ready on time for submission to the new Parliament that will meet after the 2009 national elections. Needless to say the student research team will not work alone on that project but will seek and hopefully obtain assistance and cooperation from all who will be able and willing to provide it. We have suggested some possible avenues of support earlier on when we mentioned the various experts who will be called upon to participate in the project. We expose below the broad lines of that action program: • January 2009: the research team will undertake the detailed study of the 425 projects that form part of the Agricultural Plan originally prepared in 2006 by the Ministry of Agriculture. • February 2009: the research team will interview some officials at the Ministry of Agriculture to discuss the update of the above Plan with them. Later the students will request a meeting with the Director of the Council for development and reconstruction (CDR) and seek the Council’s guidance and advice in the matter of the plan preparation. • March 2009: The research team will interview a number of prominent stake holders and NGOs in the sector of Agriculture and ask for their feedback and their comments over the Plan. • April 2009: The research team will meet with the representatives of the International Organizations currently involved in several agricultural initiatives in Lebanon for the same purpose. • May 2009: The research team will convene once more with the officials of the Ministry of Agriculture to agree upon the final details of the new Agricultural National Plan. • June 2009: The planning committee will draft the text of the New Agricultural Plan and will present it to the Ministry of Agriculture. While conducting their research and their enquiries the research teams will seek, for each individual project, the answers to the following basic questions: Question one: What does each project consist of and seek to achieve? Question two: When is each project planned for execution? Question three: Who will be responsible for the implementation of each individual project and what are the respective roles therein of the public and the private sector? Should it be undertaken solely by the government? Should it be outsourced or should it be left entirely to private initiative (individual companies, associations, NGOs)? Question four: How much will each project cost to be executed and how will it be funded? Question five: How can the international community assist the Lebanese government in implementing some of the projects covered by the Plan? Should not this assistance be provided within the general framework of the Plan? Question six: In what respects the project influences or is influenced by the other sectors of the National Plan? For instance what is the interrelation between agriculture and other areas like industry, tourism, the environment, energy, roads and transport, trade, the banking, the insurance and IT services, education, health, the policies of fiscal revenue and expenditure? Question seven: What are the yardsticks that will be used to evaluate, and monitor the progress achieved in the implementation of the project? Before we conclude we wish to point out that the members of the research team have already been informed of the large obstacles that will come up their way from the start. They will discover that their task is far from being an easy one and that they will have many hindrances to overcome. It was necessary to point a finger at some of these barriers to enable our budding researchers to enter into the fray with their eyes open. They will soon enough discover the public administration’s reluctance to change its old ways and adopt new techniques, the shortage of qualified staff within the Civil Service and the low salary scales that do not adequately reward merit and specialization, the incoherence of the administration often resulting in duplication and waste of manpower and resources, the lack of interest of our politicians in anything that does not profit them directly, the vested interests and the monopolies that may feel threatened by positive reforms, the rampant corruption tacitly admitted and accepted at all the levels of the civil service. We could go on and on in our listing before we cover all the impediments that our research teams will meet. Nonetheless they are also well aware of the importance of their mission. The greater the challenges, the harder they will strive to achieve their goals. We should not only wish them success in their endeavor but we should all of us try to help them in any way we can. |
| Afternoon Session The Agricultural Plan
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National Planning and Democracy (The proposed text of a future conference to be held in January 2009) |
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