• Analysis by Julio Godoy (paris)
• Saturday, September 18, 2010
• Inter Press Service

When world leaders meet at the United Nations in New York to review progress to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), they will face the difficult picture that with just five years left, almost everything is still left to accomplish.

The MDGs 'have an essential merit,' Nathalie Péré-Manzano, director of the Paris-based French Research and Information Centre for Development, and spokesperson for the Global Call for Action against Poverty, told IPS. 'They promoted the mobilisation of world leaders around a consensual reference on development.'

Besides, the eight MDGs restored 'the social dimension of development, and helped to rebuild the social services devastated by the programmes of structural adjustment' imposed by international financial organisations upon developing countries throughout the 1980s and 1990s, says Serge Michailof, professor of social sciences at the Paris-based Institute for Political Studies.

But the global mobilisation to achieve the MDGs by 2015 has still failed to improve substantially the lives of the world's poorest.

There is some consensus among experts and international organisations that big advances have been made in eradicating poverty. But as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) says, 'this achievement will be due largely to extraordinary economic success in...Asia,' especially in the strong emerging economies China and India.

New research suggests also that sub-Saharan Africa has made advances over the past decade. Xavier Sala-i-Martin, professor of economics at Columbia University, said in a recent research paper for the U.S. National Bureau on Economic Research, that 'African poverty is falling...rapidly. If present trends continue, the goal of halving the proportion of people with incomes less than one dollar a day will be achieved (by 2015).'

'The first MDG, of halving the number of people living in extreme poverty, from 42 percent of the world population in 1990 to 21 percent in 2015, could be achieved, but the global economic crisis that hit the world in 2008 has stopped the trend,' Fabrice Ferrier, France coordinator for the Campaign for the Millennium told IPS.

The first goal is essential to achieving the others, Ferrier said. 'When you say extreme poverty, you say hunger, malnutrition, disease, and children and maternal mortality.'

In those areas, advances are at best marginal. According to the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), in 2009 more than one billion people suffered of malnutrition -- that means one hungry person in seven. This is the highest proportion of the world's population ever.

Experts warn that the chances of yet another food crisis such as the one the world suffered in 2008 are high. In a study released last May, the World Bank's Food Price Watch warned that 'recent volatility of domestic staple prices appears higher than that prevailing before the 2008 global food price crisis.' The study pointed out that average food price volatility for a sample of 26 low income countries had been 'higher over the past year than it was in 2006- 07.'

'The main problem of the campaign towards the MDGs is that it focuses on international aid on health and education, and has ignored promoting economic growth,' says Michailof.

'The campaign has put in place mechanisms of aid which tend to increase the developing countries' dependency on international cooperation. But the campaign does not encourage these countries' efforts to create wealth, which would allow them to secure the steadiness of the social policies.'

Experts say also that fictitious aid hides behind so called international development cooperation. 'It is not just a question of the quantity of aid, it is also a question of its quality,' Péré-Manzano told IPS.

Official development assistance (ODA) from industrialised nations increased by 34 percent between 2004 and 2010, but it still represents less than 0.33 percent of their gross national product (GNP), far behind the promise made in 1970 of allocating 0.7 percent of GNP for development.

ODA amounts to 27 billion dollars this year, just above half of the 48 billion promised by the G8 meeting at Gleneagles in 2005, and less than 15 percent of the estimated 185 billion considered necessary to finance the MDGs campaign.

This ODA includes financial artifices, such as the annulment of debt, and expenses that do not go directly into development policy, such as salaries and technical assistance for development officials from donor countries.

Most experts seem to agree that ODA should give priority to supporting agriculture. 'The major key problem of poverty can best solved by supporting farmers and agriculture in developing countries,' Michailof said. The share of ODA aimed at supporting agriculture shrank from 17 percent in 1980 to 3.8 percent in 2005.

'Investing in agriculture means giving small farmers access to professional education and training, to credit and infrastructure, and to good inputs adapted to local conditions,' says Benédicte Hermelin, researcher at the Paris-based Professional Solidarity and International Cooperation Association.

'But supporting agriculture in developing countries leads nowhere if industrialised countries continue to subsidise their own farmers, and impose upon the countries of the South the opening of their local markets through so-called free trade agreements,' Hermelin said.

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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