We live in a world crisscrossed by borders, drawn and redrawn throughout history, chosen by fancy or caprice and all too often defended by bloodshed. They have always been imperfect and today their flaws are visible in new ways.
Waves of immigrants, driven from their homes by poverty and desperation, blend one nation's struggles into another's. Climate change caused by environmental destruction in one place can cause floods, storms, drought and famine in other countries and easy global travel means that diseases travel more quickly. Increasingly, we must recognize that our borders are not fortress walls. They are simply lines that we have sketched in the air.
UNVEVEN BLOWS
In short, no nation on this changing, shrinking planet can truly address its own problems in isolation. Nowhere is this more true than in Latin America and the Caribbean, where the uneven blows of history and varied national policies have resulted in a patchwork of fates for our many peoples.
Today -- sometimes across borders, sometimes within them -- once unthinkable wealth exists alongside extreme poverty and all its social ills. Ours is a region of cruel contrasts.
Fortunately, many countries in this part of the world have recognized that regional welfare must be addressed as a regional challenge. I am proud to list Costa Rica among them. Our nation may be small, but our commitment to improving the well-being of this region is anything but.
We have an important role to play in advancing the principles of sound knowledge, quality decision-making and transparency. Costa Rica is the region's most stable democracy, a place where peace, nature, and education are valued above all. While we rejoice in our successes, however, we have long recognized that our future is tied to our neighbors' challenges, whether they include military conflicts -- as was true 20 years ago -- or hunger and disease, as is the case today.
CONFERENCE
That's why I am pleased that this month, the Inter-American Development Bank and the Copenhagen Consensus Center will host a conference in our capital, San Jose. The conference was inspired by the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus summit, where a panel of the world's leading economic thinkers was challenged to answer this question: if an extra US$50 billion were spent improving the state of the world, how could the money be allocated to achieve the most good?
Those analysts realized that most, if not all, of the solutions to the world's biggest challenges depend on local or regional contexts. Therefore, this month's San Jose conference will replace a global outlook with a regional one, with a new panel of experts focusing on the biggest challenges facing Latin America and the Caribbean.
The challenges fall into 10 categories -- a familiar list of key issues in this part of the world: democracy, education, employment, the environment, fiscal problems, health, infrastructure, poverty and inequality, public administration and crime.
The experts will face obvious restrictions. Our resources are scarce. We cannot meet everyone's demands, or solve all our problems at once. We must choose between various good ideas, however difficult this may be. The panel will produce a prioritized list of solutions that can serve as a set of guidelines for regional policymakers, helping us to be both ambitious and realistic.
The "Consulta de San Jose," as the event has been dubbed, will produce practical ideas that leaders can implement and help us to identify and promote cost-efficient initiatives. Most importantly, however, it will serve to emphasize the importance of collective action. Working together with a genuine sense of regional community is a challenge in itself, but one well worth addressing.
`GOOD FENCES'
It has been said that "good fences make good neighbors." There is undeniable wisdom in those words, but it is time to reevaluate what "good fences" really are. In today's world, they must be low enough for us to shake our neighbor's hand, understand his problems as we do our own and enable us to find feasible solutions. They must be built with the knowledge that no fence, wall, ocean or a continent can truly divide us from the problems of others.
This is the spirit of the upcoming conference. I hope that spirit will spread far beyond San Jose and that other regions will join us in recognizing that while our borders may define our territories, having the courage to reach across them defines our character and, ultimately, our future success or failure.
Costa Rican President Oscar Arias is the winner of the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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