Rich countries urged to meet commitments to ending poverty

Thursday 25 September 2008

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is hosting a summit on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly to galvanize world support for achieving eight key poverty-reduction objectives, dubbed the Millennium Development Goals, by 2015.

Some 90 world leaders, along with major philanthropists and a few activist celebrities, are holding a meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly intended to revive dormant development commitments embodied by the Millennium Development Goals of 2000.

Today, soaring energy and food prices, compounded by the recent financial crisis, have made these goals seem harder to reach than ever.

Halfway through to the first Millennium objectives deadline of 2015, the meeting is meant to “note what progress has been made, identify failures and decide on concrete steps to correct them”, explains UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Keynote speakers will include British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, as well as U2 singer and aid activist Bono, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

The meeting follows the Secretary General’s call for rich countries to honour a pledge to double annual aid to Africa, in keeping with their pledges made in the 2005 G8 summit of Gleneagles, Scotland.

“We now have a pretty good idea of what is needed,” Ban told representatives of more than 160 countries on Monday. “It will cost about 72 billion dollars per year in external financing to achieve MDGs by the 2015 deadline,” he said, adding that although the “price tag may look daunting, it is affordable and falls within existing aid commitments”. The OECD estimates that rich countries need to increase the level of aid donations by 12% by 2010.


“It is always the poorest who pay for the cupidity of the most powerful”

Sustainable development and poverty reduction, once supposed to be the main themes of this year’s UN General Assembly, have been overshadowed by the looming threat of a worldwide recession caused by the recent meltdown of the global finance industry. Leaders from developing countries, worried that aid goals will never be attained, are expressing growing concern and bitterness at the situation.

“I hope [the financial crisis] does not lead to a reduced effort for the developing countries. That would be quite a big disappointment,” said Donald Kaberuka, chief of the African Development Bank, on Monday. “We are a global village and the demands are, quite frankly, modest,” he stressed, in comparison with the 700-billion-dollar bailout package the US government concocted for failing financial institutions.

“This year, emerging countries used to being lectured by US-led financial institutions were able to lecture back,” says FRANCE 24’s Philippe Bolopion, reporting from the UN in New York.

Nicaraguan President Miguel Nescoto, speaking at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, summed up the general sentiment of many leaders: “It is always the poorest people who pay for the cupidity of the speculators and the most powerful.”


Falling behind the Millennium Development Goals

In 2000, the UN voted to endorse a series of ambitious commitments known as the Millennium Development Goals to reduce poverty in Africa. These include halving the number of people who live in extreme poverty by 2015; combating child mortality, HIV/Aids, malaria and other pandemic diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; as well as promoting gender equality and achieving universal primary education.

But donors have already fallen behind in meeting their commitments, sowing resentment among African leaders, Bolopion explains.

“They feel that the developed countries are not really serious about fighting poverty,” says Bolopion, given their slowness in delivering promised development aid and their speediness in bailing out financial institutions.

The wide-ranging prescriptions of the 2000 Millennium Development Goals are criticized by some, who call the plan utopian. “It will not work any better than central planning by bureaucrats has worked anywhere else, which is to say not at all,” New York University economics professor William Easterly told the New York Times.

The outcome of today’s meeting will be a good indication of whether global leaders are ready to stick to their previous development commitments or whether their fear of a global economic recession will lead them to back out of them even more.