The Sector Vice-president for Planning, Ricardo Menéndez, participated last Thursday morning in the Executive Meeting of the Board of Directors of the Regional Conference on Population and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in which the sociodemographic scenario of the countries of the region in the framework of the COVID-19 pandemic was analyzed.
At the meeting, held through a videoconference, Menéndez stressed that the pandemic has exposed the deep inequalities and has demonstrated the structural problems that exist in the region and worldwide. Additionally, he argued that this eventuality has allowed to see the strategic importance of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
“We cannot pretend that from the pandemic we will delay in time the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, it is the opposite, the pandemic what shows us is the urgency, the peremptory nature of accelerating the achievement of these objectives”.
He, also Minister of Planning, indicated that in the midst of the pandemic, several countries have suffered attacks on their economies through sanctions, unilateral and coercive measures, which in the case of Venezuela, has led to the need to reinforce direct transfers to the population in order to alleviate and confront, from the economic point of view, the coercive measures against the country.
“In recent years, just to confront the coercive measures, we have had to withdraw more than 25 billion dollars of resources that were destined for the Development Agenda, to carry out direct transfers to the population”.
Likewise, Menéndez proposed to reinforce three themes for the future of this type of meeting: the supporting role of the United Nations and ECLAC in the countries’ public purchases; spatial strategies and productive subregions within the countries of the region; the strengthening, from the United Nations System, of sovereignty and national statistical and geographic systems.
Finally, the Vice-president assured that Venezuela has not abandoned its census round, which is why it is currently carrying out a high-impact self-registration mechanism throughout the nation.