By Dot Keet

The Millennium Development Goals are doomed because they rest on faulty assumptions, writes Dot Keet, a fellow of the Transnational Institute and research associate of the Alternative Information and Development Centre based in South Africa

Evaluations of the United Nations’ much vaunted Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have to look beyond the goals and numerical targets to expose the theoretical and economic policy assumptions that the MDG project reflects and endorses.

The most fundamental flaw of the entire MDG project is that it takes the current global system as a given. It ignores the international institutional and governmental sources that are creating and recreating poverty.

In fact, the current global economic system is explicitly endorsed in the MDGs as the essential means through which to tackle poverty. The MDG project declares that it is necessary to ‘‘[d]evelop further an open, rules-based, predictable, non-discriminatory trading and financial system’’ (target 12).

However, these rules have to be unpacked to expose the negative implications and adverse effects of the liberalised trade and financial rules that have been imposed on weaker economies and vulnerable social sectors throughout the world.

This is a fundamental source of the deepening poverty, marginalisation and disempowerment of vast swathes of humanity and of the growing polarisation within and between countries in today's ‘‘global economy’’.

Since the early 1980s, for more than two decades, externally indebted countries have been forced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to radically reduce the economic and social responsibilities and public resources of their governments. This had to be done to enable ‘‘market forces’’ to take over many of these functions and to operate more freely.

The radical reduction of governmental resources, combined with a private sector that is not oriented to the provision of essential social services to the poor, has caused the virtual collapse of public services, particularly in health and education.

This has resulted in dramatically declining human and social indicators in the very spheres which the MDGs now aim to correct--yet, without any reference to the fundamental causes of the social crisis.

The imposed privatisation of social services, major national infrastructures and natural resources has also encouraged corrupt practices in the ranks of public policymakers. Many of them take advantage of such appropriation programmes by themselves or in collusion with foreign companies.

Thus, privatisation programmes and practices have also been a major source of the poor ‘‘governance’’ that the designers of the MDGs seek to correct. Once again, no acknowledgment is made of the responsibility of the IMF, the World Bank and transnational corporations in encouraging such self-serving and corrupt practices.

The World Bank’s ‘‘structural adjustment programmes’’ have also imposed extensive deregulation of the financial and labour markets in their ‘‘client’’ countries. This has facilitated the exploitative and destabilising operations of international investors, as they move around the world levering optimal investment terms and maximising their business advantage.

The extensively unregulated operations of both local and international corporations allow highly exploitative employment practices. The lack of regulation also depresses wages, denies workers health and safety rights and produces environmental damages which affect both employees and entire communities.

Such rampant abuses and causes of poverty and disease are not registered at all in the MDGs programme, which speaks uncritically about ‘‘cooperation with the private sector’’.

The liberalisation of trade facilitates competitive manufactured imports to the liberalising countries. This has caused the collapse of ‘‘uncompetitive’’ local companies and extensive de-industrialisation and labour retrenchments in weaker economies, aggravating the catastrophic rates of urban unemployment and poverty.

Simultaneously, the increased inflows of extensively subsidised agricultural exports from the richest economies have placed insupportable competitive pressures on small farmers.

This has undermined their livelihoods and added to rural impoverishment--happening at the very same time as the withdrawal of government support services for agricultural production, as dictated by World Bank ‘‘market’’ programmes.

Yet again, the MDG on poverty and hunger makes no reference to how the North’s governmental policies, whether via the IMF and the World Bank or directly, contribute to such rural and urban poverty.

The emergence of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has given the creation of an ‘‘integrated’’ open global economy a further generalised boost since the mid-1990s.

A range of developing country governments are engaged in the multilateral negotiations in the WTO. Many of them know, from hard experience, the damaging effects of trade liberalisation and transnational corporate entry into their economies.

Thus, they have united to block attempts by the major powers in the WTO to impose even more extensive liberalisation of trade, investment, services and ‘‘government procurement’’ in their countries.

Such continuing struggles by developing countries against the offensive demands of the governments of developed countries receive no acknowledgment, let alone support, in the MDG programme. Instead, it merely refers to the highly developed countries as crucial members of the ‘‘global partnership’’ to achieve the goals of ‘‘reducing’’ (as opposed to eliminating) poverty.

In recent times, the multilateral resistance of developing countries has caused a virtual stalemate in the WTO. In response, the major powers have mounted an even more aggressive strategy to evade opposition from the developing world.

The US and the EU are now seeking to outflank that joint resistance by confronting individual countries with demands for extensive bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs).

Or, as in the case of the EU's so-called economic partnership agreements (EPAs), groups of African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries are coerced into accepting region-to-region ‘‘reciprocal’’ trade liberalisation undertakings with the EU.

What all these proposed ‘‘trade’’ agreements have in common, is that they include the investment, services, government procurement and other such liberalisation demands which the developing countries have blocked in the WTO.

These agreements go even further to demand what can be called ‘‘WTO Plus’’ terms. One example is the enhanced protection of the ‘‘intellectual property rights’’ of their transnational corporations, especially their pharmaceutical companies. But the MDG plan regards these companies as ‘‘partners’’ (target 17) in the fight against poverty and disease.

The MDGs are not only lagging behind their own target dates. This entire project is lagging behind the realities of the struggles underway for development and against the sources of poverty in the world today. In fact, in ignoring these, the MDG project is undermining the creation of real alternatives towards effectively tackling poverty.