The 29th World Congress of Public Services International (PSI),meeting in Durban, South Africa, on 27-30 November 2012NOTINGwith concern that the Central American sub-region is going through one of the most complex periods of the last two decades, with worrying economic, environmental, social, labour and political problems;AWARE that these countries face a series of challenges, most of them documented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the ILO and the World Bank, whose main reports highlight social exclusion, poor health and education services, low incomes and a deterioration in the environment;CONSIDERING the long history of human and trade union rights violations denounced internationally by the ITUC and the GUFs, as well as the increase in the number of killings of trade union leaders and the increase in public insecurity caused by the scourge of drug trafficking, which swells by thousands the number of killings throughout the sub-region;IN THE KNOWLEDGE that 35% of children under the age of five in Central America suffer from chronic malnutrition and that this figure reaches 50% in some countries. More than 20% of young people between the ages of 12 and 24 or in either education or employment and there is a high rate of emigration of skilled labour, 40% of households (18 million people) are abandoned by the free market system and the state and no Central American country has more than 55% of the population in the formal economy, most people have precarious jobs, social security coverage is on average only 24% and investment in education and health is on average only $19 per capita and none of these countries has an efficient, fair, equitable and progressive tax system, and does not guarantee quality public services;COMBINED with the fact that there are major floods in the sub-region, which is also vulnerable to climate change, which is aggravated by the lack of appropriate land management, which makes human development increasingly unsustainable;ALARMED at the high consumption of resources, which is greater than the sub-region’s biocapacity to produce them and the increasingly frequent climate events that threaten the sub-region, the temperature of which is estimated to rise by between 2.5 and 4 degrees centigrade in the next 40 to 50 years;GIVEN THAT Central America produces less than 0.5% of the emissions responsible for climate change but is the most affected by this phenomenon;THEREFORE this 29th World Congress RESOLVES that the PSI secretariat should take the relevant measures necessary to prioritise use of the financial resources provided by international solidarity to give continuity to trade union development in this sub-region in response to these major challenges. See all Congress resolutions including the Program of Action and the Constitution.