from Sunday Herald, 19 September, 2010
“I’m extremely pessimistic about the future,” says Labo Bermo, a yellow scarf wrapped around his head. “There have been no rains. The animals are dying every day. Everyone is hungry.”
Bermo, a farmer from Niger, is a victim of the world’s latest food crisis, along with 10 million other west Africans. “At this rate, I don’t think even one of my cows will be able to survive,” he worries.
His story is not new, nor is it surprising. But this weekend, it has a special resonance, as world leaders prepare to meet and assess how they have responded to one of humanity’s greatest challenges: ending hunger, poverty disease and deprivation.
Not very well, is the answer. A decade after 189 countries agreed the historic “Millennium Development Goals” to bring comfort and justice to the world’s poor by 2015, most of them are on track to fail.
More than a billion people - a sixth of the world’s population and most of them in Africa - still go to sleep hungry every night. Every day 960 women die in pregnancy or childbirth because they lack basic health care.
At the same time, under pressure from the economic recession, rich countries are breaking the promises they made to help poor countries. Last year, half of the developed nations cut their foreign aid budgets.
“It is an outrage that in the 21st century men, women and children are still going to sleep with an empty stomach,” said Oxfam’s director of campaigns and policy, Phil Bloomer.
“Governments have failed to tackle the underlying causes of hunger, including food price volatility and decades of under-investment in agriculture and climate change.”
It was back in the heady days of 2000 that world leaders agreed to eight over-arching goals for the first 15 years of the new millennium. They were amongst the most ambitious aims ever agreed internationally, and promised nothing less than an end to global injustice.
But according to a new analysis by the charity, Christian Aid, governments are failing to meet nine of the 12 measurable targets central to achieving the broad-brush goals. Two thirds of the way to 2015, only three targets are on track to succeed (see table below).
The first millennium goal was to “eradicate extreme poverty and hunger”. One of its crucial targets was to halve the proportion of people who suffer from hunger between 1990 and 2015.
But that is only 40% achieved, and a billion are still starving, including one in every three people in sub-Saharan Africa. Even if the target were achieved, there would still be 600 million people undernourished.
Another target was to provide decent work for all, but progress on this has actually gone backwards since 2000, largely because of the recession. The third poverty target – to halve the proportion of people whose income is less than a dollar a day - is on track to succeed.
That would mean that by 2015, 920 million people will have been lifted out of extreme poverty. By the same token, of course, an equal number would still be very poor.
Progress has been worst on the millennium goal “to improve maternal health”. Its targets of cutting the number of mothers who die by three-quarters and achieving universal access to reproductive health, including contraception and ante-natal care, have fallen far behind.
As many as 350,000 women still die every year because of complications in pregnancy and childbirth. Experts says that up to 90% of the deaths are preventable, with good medical care.
Progress has also been poor on the target of halving the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation, part of the goal to “ensure environmental sustainability”. The world is doing much better, however, at halving the proportion without access to safe drinking water.
On education, there has been a big failure to live up to the goal of achieving “universal primary education”. Some 72 million children of primary school age do not go to school in developing countries – more than all the primary-age children in the developed world.
Approaching a billion people are thought to be unable to read a book, or sign their name. Progress on the goal of “promoting gender equality” in education, however, is good.
The millennium goal of combating HIV and AIDS, malaria and other diseases by giving universal access to treatment will not be met. Although the number of people living with HIV has decreased by 17% over the last eight years, there are still over 33 million, 70 per cent of them in Africa.
The target of reducing the mortality of children aged under-five by two thirds also looks like it will not be achieved. The mortality rate has dropped since 1990, but there are still ten million children dying every year, almost half of them from pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria and AIDS.
“Ten years on from signing up to the millennium development goals and we are still a long way off from ending extreme poverty across the world,” said Judith Robertson, the head of Oxfam Scotland.
“Meeting the goals is the first step to a life of dignity, free of poverty, for everyone. The world cannot afford a single broken promise. Failing one will fail all.”
To help meet the goals, developed countries promised to raise the proportion of their gross national income devoted to overseas aid to 0.7%. But so far only five countries have actually achieved this: the Netherlands, Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway and Sweden.
Other rich countries like France, Spain, Switzerland and the UK only manage around 0.5%, while Canada, Australia, the US, Japan and Italy spend 0.3% or less (see second table below). And cutbacks are being threatened by some because of the recession.
At the G8 summit at Gleneagles in Scotland in 2005, leaders promised to increase aid by $50 billion by 2010, half of which was meant to go to Africa. But according to Oxfam, about 40% has not been delivered.
The missing $20 billion would be enough to put every child in school, or prevent millions of children from dying of malaria. Only $11 billion of the $25 billion promised for Africa has reached the continent.
“Now more than ever is a time for action, not just words,” said Oxfam’s spokeswoman Emma Seery. “If we are to prevent the very real danger that progress on the millennium development goals will be wiped out, we must see leaders standing firm on their commitments so that they can be proud of their progress.”
A United Nations summit on the millennium goals has been convened by the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, in New York on Monday and Tuesday. “It is clear that improvements in the lives of the poor have been unacceptably slow, and some hard-won gains are being eroded by the climate, food and economic crises,” he warned.
The UK will be represented by the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, and the International Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell. Clegg has made clear that the UK’s priority will be to tackle the problems faced by women in poor countries.
Clegg will promise to double the number of lives of women and babies saved by UK aid by 2015. This could lead to 50,000 more women and 250,000 more babies surviving, he believes.
The coalition government in Westminster has promised to protect the overseas aid budget from the 25% or more cutbacks being faced by other departments. It has also said that it will meet the UN target of giving 0.7% of national income in aid by 2013.
Clegg has described the millennium goals as “one of the great causes of our age". He told the Sunday Herald that the UK can be proud of the leadership it is showing on international development.
“But with the 2015 deadline looming we need to make sure the next five years are marked not by warm words and platitudes but firm, concrete action,” he said.
“At next week’s summit in New York I will be fighting hard to secure commitments from other nations and the private sector that will deliver real progress towards meeting these vital goals.”
What we are doing wrong
The images of painfully thin, fly-ridden children clinging to their mothers’ bony breasts are familiar. They recur with distressing frequency on our televisions and in our newspapers.
Sometimes it seems that they will never go away, and that there is some truth in the old aphorism that the poor are always with us. Not so, say the campaigners who are fighting for the world’s leaders to step up their action to meet the UN millennium goals at the New York summit this week.
Rather, the problem is lack of ambition, they say. “Countries such as Vietnam and Brazil have proved that with the right policies this situation can be transformed,” said Phil Bloomer, Oxfam’s director of campaigns and policy.
“When global leaders get together in New York, they must put their weight behind a global action plan that will bring all countries together to tackle hunger.”
Oxfam is calling for properly funded national plans to reduce hunger by increasing international aid. They want the financial sector to be heavily taxed so that $400 billion can be raised annually, half of which should go towards improving development and combating climate change.
“It is shameful that ten years since world leaders vowed to halve global hunger by 2015, we are no closer towards achieving this goal,” said Bloomer. “We know it is possible, we know how it can be done, but what is missing is the political will.”
The approach being adopted by world leaders is also flawed, argues a new report from Christian Aid. The radical ambitions embodied in the UN’s original millennium declaration in 2000 have been “lost in translation”, claims the charity.
“The declaration’s emphasis on empowering people living in poverty was somehow translated into telling poor counties what their priorities should be,” said Alex Cobham, Christian Aid’s chief policy adviser.
“Its emphasis on powerful countries and companies meeting their responsibilities to others was somehow translated into a system which fails to hold them accountable for their part in fuelling global poverty.”
According to his report, the fundamental reason for the failure to meet the millennium goals is the failure to understand the root causes of poverty. “They fail to address the causes of poverty and they are blind to inequality, unsustainability and the importance of ordinary people having a say in decisions which affect them,” argued Cobham.
“Inequalities between groups – for instance based on gender, ethnicity and caste – can be especially pernicious in undermining human development. Why should membership of a particular group prejudice anyone’s chances of a good life?”
But despite its flaws, Christian Aid recognises that the international effort to meet the millennium goals remains the best hope of ending poverty in the world. It is calling for rich countries to be made more accountable for their part in achieving the goals.
One person’s struggle to survive
Golah Nurzei is in her mid-40s, and married with six daughters and two sons aged between six and 21. She lives in Baz Girha village in the Herat province of Afghanistan, right on the country’s western border with Iran.
To reach the village, visitors have to drive for about an hour from the nearest road and cross the desert in a four-wheel drive. Golah’s family has six goats for milk and wool, which they were given by RAADA, a local organisation which works with the charity, Christian Aid.
Her life is hard, especially if any of her children get sick. “There’s a clinic in the town of Zinda Jan, but it’s a couple of hours’ journey away, and the service is very bad,” says Golah.
“I went there once when one of my children was sick, and I had to wait two or three hours, but no doctor ever came and we were given no medicine. In the end, we just came home again.
“When a woman goes into labour with a child, we can do nothing but call on God to help us. If there is a difficulty, we send someone on the motorbike, to call a car to come and take her to medical help, but we pray to God this doesn’t happen as it takes too long to get her there.”
Golah and her family used to sleep in one room with all her animals. “But RAADA told us not to do this because the dirt from the goats and their droppings will make us sick,” she says.
“And they told us to wash our hands before we eat, and things like that. The children always used to have diarrhoea all the time, but it’s less since we stopped sleeping with the animals.
The family lives on naan, milk, yoghurt, cheese, tea, and rice. “Sometimes we kill a goat and then we eat meat too – but not too often,” says Golah.
“During the Taliban time, they used to abuse us; they hit our children, sometimes forcibly they took our men to fight with them. Thank God, there is some more security now,” she adds.
“I pray for peace, security and health. I pray for a better life in future. Things are getting better, but life is hard. We don’t have a school or healthcare here, but we hope that gradually we will see a change in our lives.”
Failing to meet the millennium targets
millennium target / percentage progress so far / on track to fail or succeed
Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people / minus 14.3% / fail
Achieve, by 2015, universal access to reproductive health (contraception) / 20.8% / fail
Reduce by three-quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio / 28.8% / fail
Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to basic sanitation / 37.3% / fail
Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling / 38.9% / fail
Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger / 40% / fail
Achieve, by 2010, universal access to treatment for HIV/AIDS for all those who need it / 42% / fail
Reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate / 42.4% / fail
Achieve, by 2015, universal access to reproductive health (antenatal care) / 44.4% / fail
Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than one dollar a day / 79.2% / succeed
Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015 / 57-83% / succeed
Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water / 89.7% / succeed
Source: Christian Aid
How mean are the rich countries?
country / billion dollars given in 2009 / % of gross national income
Korea / $0.8 / 0.1%
Italy / $3.3 / 0.16%
Japan / $9.5 / 0.18%
Greece / $0.6 / 0.19%
United States / $28.7 / 0.2%
Portugal / $0.5 / 0.23%
Australia / $2.8 / 0.29%
New Zealand / $0.3 / 0.29%
Austria / $1.1 / 0.3%
Canada / $4 / 0.3%
Germany / $12 / 0.35%
France / $12.4 / 0.46%
Spain / $6.6 / 0.46%
Switzerland / $2.3 / 0.47%
United Kingdom / $11.5 / 0.52%
Finland / $1.3 / 0.54%
Ireland / $1 / 0.54%
Belgium / $2.6 / 0.55%
Netherlands / $6.4 / 0.82%
Denmark / $2.8 / 0.88%
Luxembourg / $0.4 / 1.01%
Norway / $4.1 / 1.06%
Sweden / $4.5 / 1.12%
Source: OECD
Ten big numbers
$151 billion: what Oxfam says it would have cost in 2005 to end extreme poverty
$93 billion: what the world has spend on slimming products since 2000
$131 billion: what the world spent on sweets in 2005
$147 billion: the cost of treating obesity-related diseases in the US in 2008
$198 billion: what the world spent on shoes in 2005
$346 billion: the revenue amassed by Wall Street in 2006
$395 billion: what the world has spent on video games since 2000
$543 billion: what the world has spent on pet food since 2000
$664 billion: what the world has spent on ice cream since 2000
$5,210 billion: what the world has spent on cigarettes since 2000
source: Oxfam
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