MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS AND GLOBAL POVERTY

8 MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS AND GLOBAL POVERTY

10 One large scale example of this can be seen in the construction of

1 the development goals of the UN. The dawn of a new millennium

2 provided, in the words of the Secretary General Kofi Annan, the

3 opportunity for the peoples of the world under the auspices of

4 the UN ‘to reflect on their common destiny at a moment when

5 they find themselves interconnected as never before’ (A/54/200). At

6 the Millennium Summit held in New York in September 2000, 189

7 nations adopted the UN General Assembly resolution 55/2 the

‘Millennium Declaration’. This resolution provided the basis for

9 political cooperation towards eight millennium development goals

20 (MDGs). These are as follows: 1222

Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

2 Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education

3 Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women

4 Goal 4: Reduce child mortality

5 Goal 5: Improve maternal health

6 Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases

7 Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability

8 Goal 8: Develop a Global Partnership for Development

30 These goals were to be met by 2015. The millennium development

1 goals are far more than wordy declarations. They are time-specific,

2 measurable and enjoy immense political support. Yet the progress

3 towards these goals in the millennium development goals report 2005

4 did not make encouraging reading. All of these goals are immensely

5 important and represent vital challenges for the international com-

6 munity but to get a sense of the scale of the problem, the approach

7 to tackling the issues and the progress to date we shall focus solely

822 on poverty and child mortality.

172 F ROM STABILITY TO JUSTICE ? The headline target we are interested in is the eradication of

extreme poverty and hunger. The MDG is to halve, by 2015, the number of people living on less than $1 a day. While this goal includes all people and not just children, we can get some idea of the enormity of this problem from two pieces of data. The first is that more than

a quarter of children in the developing world are malnourished and that is around 146 million (see Figure 8.1). Second, every year around 11 million children under the age of

5 die. That is 30,000 children a day. Child mortality is closely linked to poverty and so it is not surprising that the peoples of the United Nations sought to act. However, one third of the time we set ourselves to halve poverty has passed but while progress is being made, the MDG’s report 2005 is clear that we are far from winning this vital battle (see www.childinfo.org).

In fact the problem is such that progress towards eradicating hunger is not keeping up with global population growth and it is likely that hitting the target will take more than 130 years rather

146 million children are underweight in the developing world and more than half of these children live in South Asia

East Asia/Pacific 22 million

Western/ Central Africa 17 million

Eastern/ Southern Africa 16 million

South Asia Middle East/

78 million North Africa

8 million Latin America/

CEE/CIS

Figure 8.1 Child malnutrition in the developing world Source: UNICEF analysis of the number of underweight children in the developing

world, 2006

F ROM STABILITY TO JUSTICE ? 173

1 than the 15 the UN envisaged (UNDP 2002). It is the case that while

2 progress is made in one area, ground is being lost in another. So

3 while it is true that the average income of the very poor in most of

4 the developing world has increased from $0.80 a day to $0.82 a day

5 the income of the very poorest in Sub-Saharan Africa has actually

6 decreased from $0.62 a day to $0.60. That leads to another 34 million

722 people having insufficient food.

8 The political language and effort of the UN and the global partner-

9 ship for develop should not be underestimated but what is it that is

10 preventing a reasonably united UN from hitting its targets? The

1 problem is often characterized in similar terms to those we explored

2 in relation to humanitarian intervention. A system of sovereign states

3 where the priority of the actors is self-help does not seem to be the

4 most fruitful ground for sowing the seed of global economic equity.

5 For some political commentators our moral obligations are very clear.

6 We are committed to human rights, to the eradication of poverty

7 and (under article 28 of the UDHR) to the establishment of social

institutions that are capable of delivering on these commitments. Yet

9 we persistently fail to live up to these standards.