DEVELOPMENT: Poverty Eradication Goal Ambitious But Not Utopian

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 20 2000 (IPS) - The global campaign to eradicate poverty is being derailed by rising debt burdens, declining development aid, volatile commodity markets and proliferation of military conflicts.

“The world does not lack good intentions to eradicate poverty,” says Harri Holkeri of Finland, president of the 189-member UN General Assembly. But the good intentions are not being matched by deeds as the number of poor people keeps increasing, not decreasing, he adds.

At the 1995 Social Summit in Copenhagen, a firm commitment was made to halve the proportion of people living in poverty by the year 2015.

This commitment was reiterated by the world’s major industrial powers at the Group of Seven summit in Japan last July, and also by more than 180 world leaders attending the Millennium Summit in New York last month.

“I note the many efforts and programmes carried out by the United Nations, its specialised agencies, governments and civil society actors,” Holkeri admits. “But as yet, we have not done enough.”

As the UN commemorates International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on Oct. 23, Secretary-General Kofi Annan points out that although the international target is an ambitious goal, “it is neither utopian nor impossible”.

“We have the knowledge and the means with which to achieve it. What is missing is the will,” he adds.

In the developed world, he says, that means the will to provide meaningful debt relief, to remove protectionist barriers against exports from the poorest countries, and to spend more than just a negligible fraction of income on development assistance.

In many developing nations, it means the will to fight corruption, to put an end to persistent conflicts, and to build a platform of good governance, he notes.

Currently, there are about 1.2 billion people living below the poverty line of less than one dollar per day, and almost 3 billion on less than two dollars per day compared with a global population of over 6 billion people, according to World Bank figures.

“Even this statistic fails to capture the humiliation, powerlessness and brutal hardship that is the daily lot of the world’s poor,” Annan points out.

The international target is to decrease the proportion of people living in poverty by the year 2015.

Globally, the proportion of people living in poverty declined from 29 percent in 1987 to 26 percent in 1998, although the total number of poor remained almost unchanged at around 1.2 billion.

The reduction in the incidence of global poverty is attributed primarily to progress made in East Asia, most notably in China, although progress was somewhat reversed during the Asian economic crisis in 1997-1998, and seems to have stalled in China.

The performance in three other regions – namely Africa, Latin America and South Asia – shows only moderate or no declines in the incidence of poverty, while the number of people living in poverty in these regions has increased.

Asked why China had succeeded where others had failed, Stephen Browne, Senior Adviser on Poverty at UN Development Programme (UNDP), said this was mainly because China is a relatively egalitarian society where rapid growth has translated into rapid poverty reduction. In highly inequitable countries, he said, the effects are less, even negligible.

According to the ‘Global Poverty Report’ released by the World Bank last July, an additional 74 million people joined the ranks of the poor in sub-Saharan Africa in 1998, reaching a total of some 291 million.

In Latin America, the figure increased from 64 to 78 million. And in South Asia, a total of 522 million people live in poverty. The fastest rise was in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics where it increased from about seven million to 24 million in 1998.

Browne, who also heads UNDP’s Social Development and Poverty Elimination Division, told IPS that meeting the international target depends on many factors.

“My main contention is that poverty reduction begins at home. Considerable progress could be made on the basis of existing resources, if there were more stability, less conflict, and a better use of those resources, as well as the will to encourage people to participate more actively in economic life,” he said.

Browne described it as enfranchisement in the broadest sense of the term – “not just voting, but true enabling participation, especially of women”.

On the domestic front, he said, a reduction of military expenditures would free resources for education, health, water and other social services.

Easing the debt burden and providing more market access to exports from poorer countries would also help, he said, if the resources are put to productive use.

At the same time, he said, “more aid should be used for the kinds of enablement which I have described, not necessarily just for lots more small-scale anti-poverty projects which are often not fully absorbed nor sustainable”.

Meanwhile, the United Nations has identified both HIV/AIDS and unrestricted globalisation as two other factors for the rise in poverty.

UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown says that AIDS is not only a devastating disease but also a major impediment for economic development. Globalisation, on the other hand, has been heralded as a major force that could be harnessed to push the poverty eradication agenda.

“But globalisation must mean more than creating bigger markets, and experience confirms that growth alone cannot reduce poverty and income inequality,” argues Annan.

“Economic policy must be combined with effective social policies aimed at education for all, health for all, and gender equality. This is essential if globalisation is to work for all the world’s peoples, and if we are to meet the goal of halving, by the year 2015, the proportion of people living in poverty,” he notes.