Date:14/09/2005 URL: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2005/09/14/stories/2005091400351000.htm
Back UN Summit in New York
Millennium Goals: The story so far

G. Srinivasan

The UNDP's Human Development Report contends that the UN meeting beginning in New York on Wednesday provides a crucial opportunity for governments that signed the Millennium Declaration to show that they mean business. The summit presents them the moment to mobilise investments and develop plans to build defences that can stop the tsunami of world poverty. Needed is political will to act on the vision set out five years ago, says G. Srinivasan.

AS THE Heads of state and government gather together in New York for a crucial United Nations summit to review progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), crafted five years ago and to be achieved in a decade from now, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) presented its 2005 Human Development Report (HDR) last week as a reference point for the world leaders.

The MDGs include halving extreme poverty, cutting child deaths, providing all of the world's children with an education, eradicating infectious diseases and forging a new global partnership to deliver results. The Report draws the analogy of the recent tsunami to slam the point that "every hour more than 1,200 children die away from the glare of media.

This is equivalent to three tsunamis a month, every month, hitting the world's most vulnerable citizens — its children. Maybe the causes of death vary, but the overwhelming factor could be traced to single pathology: poverty."

The Report contends that the New York meeting provides a crucial opportunity for governments that signed the Millennium Declaration to show that they mean business with the summit presenting "the moment to mobilise the investment resources and develop the plans needed to build the defences that can stop the tsunami of world poverty. What is needed is the political will to act on the vision that governments set out five years ago".

Scale of the challenge

Against this backdrop, the 2005 HDR deals with the scale of the challenge facing the world at the start of the 10-year countdown to 2015. Recalling that the first HDR, in 1990, had looked forward to a decade of rapid progress, it says that "there is a real danger that the next 10 years, like the last 15, will deliver far less for human development than the new consensus" reflected in the recent reports of the UN Millennium Project and the UK-sponsored Commission for Africa. No doubt much has been achieved since the first HDR, but these gains should not be exaggerated, the Report says, listing out a litany of woes afflicting the hapless people in the developing and least-developed countries. Some of the ironies of the development saga of the last 15 years were well imprinted in the minds of dispassionate observers. Thus, in 2003, 18 countries with a combined population of 460 million people registered lower scores on the Human Development Index (HDI) than in 1990 — an unprecedented reversal.

Side by side with an increasingly prosperous global economy, 10.7 million children die every year without seeing their fifth birthday. More than one billion people live in abject poverty, on less than $1 a day. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has dealt a body-blow to human development, claiming three million lives and leaving another five million people infected in 2003.

Skewed development

The other vignettes of skewed development documented by HDR 2005 include:

  • One-fifth of the humanity lives in countries where many people think nothing of spending $2 a day on a cappuccino. But another fifth survives on less than $1 a day in countries where children die for want of a simple mosquito net.

  • Death rates among the world's children are falling, but the trend is slowing — and the gap between rich and poor countries is widening. This is an area in which slowing trends cost lives. Had the progress of the 1980s been sustained since 1990, there would be 1.2 million fewer child deaths this year. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for a rising share of child deaths as it accounts for 20 per cent of births worldwide and 44 per cent of child deaths.

  • The slowdown in progress extends beyond Sub-Saharan Africa. Some of the most highly visible globalisation "success stories" — including China and India — are failing to convert wealth creation and rising incomes into more rapid decline in child mortality.

  • Even as debates about trends in global income distribution rage, the sheer scale of inequality is not open to doubt.

    The world's richest 500 individuals have a combined income greater than that of the poorest 416 million.

    Beyond these extremes, the 2.5 billion people living on less than $2 a day — 40 per cent of the world's population — account for 5 per cent of global income. The richest 10 per cent, almost all of whom reside in high-income countries, account for 54 per cent of global income.

  • Using a global income distribution database, the UN estimates that it would cost $300 billion to lift the one billion people living on less than $1 day above the extreme poverty line threshold. That amount represents 1.6 per cent of the income of the richest 10 per cent of the world's population.

  • Since 1990, increased prosperity in rich countries has done little to enhance generosity: While the per capita income has increased by $6070, the per capita aid has fallen by $1. Such figures suggest that the winners from globalisation have not prioritised help for the losers, though they would gain from doing so.

  • For every $1 that rich countries spend on aid they allocate another $10 to military budgets. Just the increase in military spending since 2000, if devoted to aid, would be sufficient to reach the long-standing UN target of spending 0.7 per cent of gross national income on aid.

  • Failure to look beyond military security to human security is reflected in under-investments in addressing one of the greatest threats to human life: HIV/AIDS. Currently the spending on this disease that claims 3 million lives a year represents three day's worth of military spending.

  • The $7 billion needed annually over the next decade to provide 2.6 billion people access to clean water is less than what Europeans spend on perfume and less than what Americans spend on elective corrective surgery. This is for an investment that would save an estimated 4000 lives each day.

    These gloomy statistics capturing the lopsided development of the world economy with rich continuing to grow richer and the poor sinking further into poverty, must be an eye-opener for the world leaders gathering in New York. They can use the summit to send out a clear message that the Millennium Declaration signed five years ago is not just "a paper promise" but also a commitment to change.

    The way forward

    Hence, the HDR 2005's focus on three pillars of cooperation — development assistance, international trade and security. Thus, on aid, the Report prescribes setting a schedule for achieving an aid-to-GNI ratio of 0.7 per cent by 2015, tackling unsustainable debt, ending tied aid, streamlining conditionalities and providing predictable, multi-year financing through government programmes.

    On international aid, the Report favours deep cuts in rich country government support for agriculture and an end to export subsidies, removing barriers to developing country exports, compensation for countries losing preferences and protection for policy space for human development, besides refocusing services negotiations on temporary movements of labour from the developing to developed world. On security, it suggests a new deal of aid, as starving conflict-prone or post-conflict states of aid is unjustified and calls for greater transparency in resource management.

    In sum, as the Report pertinently remarks that in New York, the world leaders have a chance to set a course that will "reshape globalisation, give renewed hope to millions of the world's poorest and most vulnerable people and create the conditions for shared prosperity and security".

    But a business-as-usual approach would lead towards "a world tarnished by mass poverty, divided by deep inequalities and threatened by shared insecurities," the Report cautions adding that "in our interconnected world a future built on the foundations of mass poverty in the mist of plenty is economically inefficient, politically unsustainable and morally indefensible".

    Hence, the HDR 2005 convincingly makes the point that "if ever there was a moment for decisive political leadership to advance the shared interests of humanity, that moment is now".

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