DEVELOPMENT: New Partnership Needed to Achieve MDGs

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

David Cronin

THE HAGUE, Jul 5 2007 (IPS) - A “new partnership” between rich and poor countries is required if the United Nations goals of reducing extreme poverty by 2015 are to be realised, according to an official who helped devise those objectives.

Jan Vandemoortele, now head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Pakistan, describes himself as one of the “midwives” of the eight goals agreed at a summit of world leaders in 2000. These Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) commit signatories to reduce the rate of childhood mortality by two-thirds and the proportion of women who die during children by three-quarters.

They also contain a pledge that the international trading system will be reformed so that it contributes to poverty alleviation.

Vandermoortele argued that some of the world’s most powerful countries are “not ready to abandon preconceived notions” in order to make the goals a reality by the 2015 target.

This is particularly evident, he said, in the case of the Doha round of world trade talks. During these negotiations, the EU and the United States have been demanding that many developing countries reduce considerably the tariffs they levy on imports, even though such taxes can be key sources of revenue and can help shield nascent domestic industries from foreign competition.

“The West is not ready to change the perception that first developing countries have to open up their markets to industrial products from the West, then later, the West will open its own markets to agricultural imports from developing countries,” he told IPS.

Similarly, he urged that the World Trade Organisation should no longer have a mandate over intellectual property. Major pharmaceutical companies have invoked the WTO’s trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS) agreement to prevent poor countries from overriding patents on essential medicines. This has led to allegations that the firms are trying to hinder poor people’s access to affordable generic versions of drugs deemed vital in treating AIDS and other deadly diseases.

“The whole TRIPS agreement should be taken out of the WTO system,” Vandermoortele said. “We all know who put it there in the first place, and it was not the poor countries.”

Vandermoortele was a participant in this week’s 50th anniversary congress of the Society for International Development (SID) at The Hague (Jul. 4-7).

He said that the current relationship between rich and poor countries is based on the premise that “one side has money, one side receives money.”

“This is an inherently unstable relationship. We have to shift from money changing hands to ideas changing minds.”

One of the major failings of activities ostensibly aimed at reducing poverty is that they are not providing sufficient benefits to the poorest of the poor, he suggested. In the case of under-five mortality, children in such countries as Zimbabwe, Indonesia, the Philippines and Ghana are several times more likely to die if they are born into a poor family, than into a well-off one.

“The progress we have received has gone disproportionately to the better off, not to the people most in need,” he said. “We are missing out on the bottom 30 to 40 percent of populations. We are not going to reach the MDGs if we do not do something about that.”

Ana Agostino from the International Council for Adult Education in Uruguay called for a reappraisal of the MDGs so that ecological issues are taken into account.

Recent scientific reports have found that the poorest are most vulnerable to climate change, even though those living in rich countries have consumed a far higher proportion of the earth’s resources and caused considerably more pollution to the atmosphere. Agostino said that the rich should set objectives for themselves, instead of merely focusing on those for the poor.

“Shouldn’t we have goals on consumption?” she asked. “Shouldn’t we limit consumption?”

Jacqueline Ogega, who represents the World Conference of Religions for Peace, stressed the importance of the MDG on universal access to basic education for all boys and girls. When growing up in Kenya, her parents suffered “a lot of social stigma because they bore girls,” she explained. While the resulting pressure may have contributed to her father’s alcoholism, her mother insisted that Ogega and her two sisters go to school. “Girls must be educated,” she argued. “These are goals my mother put in place long before the millennium declaration.”

Michel Camdessus, governor of the Banque de France and a former managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said that he regularly hears calls for powerful global bodies like the IMF and World Bank to be abolished. “These suggestions are pathetically naive or tainted by populism and irresponsibility,” he said.

He described the World Bank as “indispensable” for financing the fight against poverty but admitted that it should be reformed. The Bank could “shift more attention” from its “traditional clients” like national governments, he said, to regional authorities, such as those running huge cities with “critical unfinanced needs”.

Jewish Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp told the congress how he was born in Amsterdam in 1943, a year before the end of the Second World War. When he was three months old, he was brought by a “resistance man” opposed to the Nazis to the house of a German-born woman living in The Netherlands. The woman agreed to look after him, even though she risked death for doing so.

“It is because she opened that door, that I’m here today,” he said, arguing that the Millennium Development Goals are akin to a ‘knock on the door’ of the world’s conscience. “We have seven precious years. Will we open the door for our fellow human beings? Or will we fail?”