30/9/2005
Still No Breakthrough on Poverty

By Anthony Pouliquen

Last week the IMF and the World Bank ratified the decision taken by the G8 leaders in Gleneagles to cancel the debts of 18 of the world’s poorest countries. This may have seemed like a great step forward, but not everybody is convinced. For instance Christian Aid warns that five billion of the world’s poor are still being left behind.

In a new report called What About Us: Debt and the Countries the G8 Left Behind, Christian Aid claim that the debt deal leaves 19 out of every 20 people in the developing world mired in debt. "Despite the hype and the hope", it says, "the world’s richest nations again failed to deliver. Only 18 out of 153 developing countries will receive anything from the G8 deal on debt, with, at best, a further ten joining them by the end of 2007."

At the recent UN summit in New York world leaders came in for a lot of criticism from NGOs like Christian Aid for not having done more to alleviate world poverty. Indeed, although the final draft presses for poverty reduction and for the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals, the language and ambitions were too moderate for many campaigners. Many have criticised the US Ambassador, John Bolton, for tabling what they regarded as an excessive number of amendments weakening the Summit text. Others, like the EU's Development Commissioner, Louis Michel, were more positive: "A half-full bottle is definitely better than an empty one", was how he summed up Summit's achievements.

The UN devised the eight Millennium Development Goals for the new century five years ago in the context of the Millennium Summit of 2000. Through these goals the UN meant to oversee a substantial reduction in extreme poverty and hunger and the achievement of universal primary education, as well as promoting gender equality, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, fighting against pandemics and setting up a policy of environmental protection without preventing global development.

However as Jeffrey Sachs, a key UN adviser and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, pointed out in last week's Guardian, there is still much to do. "In the course of this year, the UN Millennium Project, the Blair Africa Commission, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the G8 summit, have all recognised that the world’s poorest countries are wildly off track to achieve the MDGs," he wrote. "Mid-course corrections are urgently needed", he added, "the world can still achieve the MDGs, but only if it makes the extra effort."

Indeed, no change has been recorded in the very high levels of poverty and hunger endured by the sub-Saharan regions of Africa. With over 1 billion people living with less than 1 dollar a day worldwide, the UN’s mission is rendered even more difficult by an increase of poverty in western Asia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a point recently made by the European Union itself. While most of the developing world is progressing, literacy in the CIS is declining.

Meanwhile, the Human Development Report 2005, published yearly by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), says that "there is a growing danger that the next 10 years—like the past 10—will go down in history not as a decade of accelerated human development, but as a decade of lost opportunity, half-hearted endeavour and failed international co-operation."

Sub-Saharan Africa is still one of the poorest regions of the globe. It is also one of the least advanced areas in terms of mother and child mortality as well for gender inequality. The countries of the region are plagued with endemic malaria, HIV/AIDS and increasing environmental problems such as deforestation. Nor has the population of these countries seen any improvement in the overall provision of drinking water or sanitation.

This contrasts with south-east Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean which are reported to enjoy much better standards of sanitation, gender equality and literacy than they did five years ago.