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DEVELOPMENT
U.N. Chief Looks Beyond 2015 Deadline
By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 20, 2010 (IPS) - As more than 140 world leaders began a three-day anti-poverty
summit meeting Monday, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon looked
far beyond the 2015 deadline for sustainable development the
world is desperately in need of.
By the year 2050, he told delegates, the world's population
will have grown by nearly 50 percent.
"We will have nine billion people by that time, and we will
need to cut global greenhouse emissions by 50 percent if we
are to keep climate change in check," he said.
"I call this the 50-50-50 challenge," Ban added, summarising
his fears of environmental degradation, in variations of
50s.
The challenges of the 21st century, he said, are far beyond
the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and require vision
and fresh thinking.
The three-day summit meeting began with a predictable gloom-
and-doom scenario for the U.N.'s development goals, which
are ambling towards a 2015 deadline. The political message
coming out of the opening day was a clear warning: if the
situation today is distressing, it could be infinitely worse
in five years time unless there is a new strategy.
By 2015, as World Bank President Robert Zoellick put it, 1.2
million more children under five may die, 350,000 more
students may not complete primary school, and about 100
million more people may remain without access to safe water.
"These are not just challenges for a summit week," he said.
"These are challenges every day" - when a mother goes
without food for the sake of her child; when a girl is
pulled out of school for the sake of her brother; and when a
grandmother takes in her grandchild with HIV/AIDs because
she is quite simply the only left alive in the family.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay
complained that MDGs often neglect large segments of the
world's population. Many commitments world leaders have made
in the past "regrettably remain only paper promises", she
added.
Although one of the development goals is to help reduce by
50 percent the number of people living in extreme hunger,
there will still be over 400 million people living in
hunger, she said.
And some groups of people, such as children, minorities and
others who suffer from racial or other forms of
discrimination, are increasingly being left behind, said
Pillay.
Agreeing with that scenario, the London-based Minority
Rights Group International (MRG) says the MDGs have
marginalised the world's minority groups and indigenous
peoples who are among the most in need.
Asked who should be blamed for the current state of affairs,
MRG's Carl Soderbergh told IPS that all actors, including
developing countries, international agencies and donor
governments, should take the blame.
"This will vary from country to country, but we have seen
widespread lack of consultation with minority and indigenous
communities," he said.
Moreover, there are programmes that do not reach the
marginalised areas that are often home to those communities,
and a lack of detailed follow-up, including sufficiently
disaggregated data collection.
Besides this, said Soderbergh, "Too little is generally
being done to combat discrimination and exclusion."
The gloomy scenario on poverty was also accentuated by
Meredith Alexander of ActionAid who pointed out that
"tomorrow almost a billion people won't have enough to eat".
Their chance of a better future rests on the U.N. summit,
she said. "If they can find the political will to act, they
could throw a life line to the world's hungry, who with the
right support can feed themselves."
As an example, she said that smallholder farmers in Malawi
were given help to buy seeds and tools.
As a result, the number of people reliant on food handouts
fell dramatically, from 4.5 million to just 150,000 in just
five years.
"Lack of food really is a matter of life and death. Hunger
will contribute to the deaths of 100,000 mothers this year
alone," she said.
The eyes of the world will be on New York to see if leaders
will rise to the challenge and offer solutions equal to the
size of this very real problem, Alexander said.
The MDGs are not without their success stories, mostly
coming out of countries such as Brazil, China, India and
South Africa. Still, the relatively limited successes of the
MDGs are being overshadowed by the inherent failures, says a
coalition of non-governmental organisations (NGOs),
including Water Aid, Action for Global Health, Action Contre
La Faim International, and End Water Poverty.
"A decade of global efforts to meet the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) has shown us the best and worst of
the international community - and their commitments to
support developing countries to eradicate poverty, hunger
and disease," the groups said in a statement.
On the one hand, the MDGs have helped galvanise a decade of
activism in which extreme poverty has been reduced, levels
of child deaths have steadily declined, and enrolment in
primary education has steadily risen.
On the other hand, says the coalition, there has been a
"collective failure to keep in full our promises to the
world's poor, exacerbated by recent global crises."
(END)
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