Development & Aid, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Poverty & SDGs

DEVELOPMENT: More Promises Planned for Global Poverty

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 19 2004 (IPS) - The international community has served up a rash of new proposals to fund poverty alleviation, but at least two prior undertakings have failed to get off the ground, say diplomats, senior U.N. officials and representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

In recent months, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has proposed a global tax to combat poverty; French President Jacques Chirac has called for the creation of a special international fund to fight hunger and poverty, and Gordon Brown, the British chancellor of the exchequer, has suggested a global financing facility to double development aid.

Saradha Iyer of the Penang-based Third World Network is not holding out much hope that any of the proposals will bear fruit.

She said Brown’s plan for a financing facility – aimed at doubling global aid to 100 billion dollars by floating bonds on the international financial market- has already run into roadblocks.

”The United States, Germany and Japan are all opposed to it for various reasons,” Iyer told IPS.

”At this point in time, there is simply no enthusiasm for such moves and things will probably be just kept alive till 2005 – when Britain takes over chairmanship of the G-7 (group of industrial nations) and the European Union (EU), and until (U.N.) Secretary-General Kofi Annan presents his report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),” she added.

The goals include a 50 percent reduction in the number of people who suffer from hunger and in those who live on less than one dollar a day; universal primary education; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutting maternal mortality by three-quarters; promoting gender equality; and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS.

A summit meeting of 189 world leaders in September 2000 pledged to meet all of these goals by the year 2015. But implementation depends primarily on increased development aid by Western donors, which is slow in coming.

In another initiative, two years ago the U.N. General Assembly endorsed a Tunisian proposal to create a World Solidarity Fund. No money has been raised for the fund to date, while the project is to hold its first committee meeting in March, an official told IPS.

”The idea of finding a creative way of raising money for development – and to assist the poor to fight poverty, diseases and epidemics – is a real challenge,” Annan told reporters last week.

Asked for his reaction to the Brazilian proposal, Annan said it would be ”extremely helpful for the kind of work we do because it would help millions, if not billions (of people) around the world”.

The proposal was originally submitted to the summit of the Group of Eight (G-8) industrial countries in France last year. During a meeting with Chirac in January, Brazil and France agreed to set up a group of experts to study the proposal.

The group, which is expected to submit a report by September, will be mandated to find new sources of revenue to fund the fight against poverty and hunger.

But Annan warned, ”there are governments who see this as taxing their citizens, and they believe only they can tax their citizens”.

A similar proposal called the ‘Tobin tax’ has been discussed for several years now.

Named after James Tobin, a Nobel laureate economist from U.S.-based Yale University, the proposed tax on the 1.8-trillion-dollar global currency trade would generate an estimated 100-300 billion dollars annually, which could be diverted for development.

The Tobin tax has been strongly opposed by governments in the United States and United Kingdom.

On Tuesday a high-level meeting of U.N. officials, donors and heads of international institutions reviewed progress in mobilising resources for 50 of the world’s ‘least developed countries’ (LDCs), described as the poorest of the poor.

A U.N. conference on LDCs in Brussels three years ago adopted a plan of action to help these nations.

”But despite the best efforts made by the countries themselves and the international community, most of the least developed countries were in serious danger of falling short of the Millennium Development Goals and the Brussels Programme of Action,” Jose Antonio Ocampo, U.N. under-secretary-general for economic and social affairs, told the meeting.

He said many LDCs were labouring under ”staggering debt burdens”, market inconsistencies and commodity price fluctuations.

”While strenuous efforts were underway to augment external finances for LDCs, current conditions were such that many could not attract investors and had to depend almost entirely on waning Official Development Assistance (ODA),” he added.

After hitting a high of 59 billion dollars in 1995, ODA has continued to decline, reaching 52 billion dollars in 2001. In 2002, it rose slightly to 57 billion dollars. But the rise was insignificant because of the effects of inflation and exchange rate fluctuations.

In an article published in the London ‘Guardian’ Monday, Brown and World Bank President James Wolfensohn warned that, despite the endorsement of every world leader at the Millennium Summit, the MDGs are in danger of remaining unrealised because of the funding shortfall.

”Either resources are made available now to tackle poverty, or targets set in a fanfare of publicity will once again be missed, and the world’s poor left behind,” the co-authors said.

Brown and Wolfensohn also said that 70 countries will have failed to achieve universal primary education by the target date. ”Yet the promise we made on education for sub-Saharan Africa was to be met by 2015 – not, as now predicted, by 2165.”

”When we know the scale of the task, and the promises we made, we cannot wait for some other time and some other people. The world must act together now,” they wrote.