1 “Beyond Pragmatic Neoliberalism: From Social Inclusion and Poverty Reduction to Equality and Social Change” Henry Veltmeyer James Petras UNESCO “Rethinking Development: Ethics and Social Inclusion” 17-18 August 2011 Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs Mexico City Despite the laudable concern with, and current focus, on inclusive development ‘exclusion’ is not the problem that development practitioners should be concerned with. It is not the problem. Nor is inclusion the solution. The problem rather is a system which is designed to benefit the few who have the power to advance their own interests at the expense of the many, who have suffered and continue to suffer precisely from their inclusion and participation in this system, under conditions of what CEPAL, in a very timely and important report on the social dynamics of the system in Latin America, terms ‘the structure of inequality’ (ECLAC, 2010). The report, which parallels reports published recently by UNRISD and the UNDP, essentially views this structure, and the policies of neoliberal globalization that reproduce it, policies that come under the rubric of the so-called Washington Consensus—now the Davos consensus--as responsible for the devastating poverty that still affects a third of the region’s population 1 even with a 30-year plus war waged by the World Bank on poverty and a decade 1 After a decade lost to development, during which the rate of poverty in the region climbed from 40% of the population to 48%, and then ‘the difficult 1990s’ characterised by slow to negligible economic growth and a marginal decrease in poverty (down to 43% in 2000 and 44% in 2002), the new millennium opened with a commodities-export led boom and an appreciable reduction in the rate of poverty (down to 33%) and the