DEVELOPMENT: Political Obstacles Slow Path to Goals

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Feb 17 2004 (IPS) - Lack of political will at the power centres is emerging as the major obstacle to the millennium development goals, leading experts say.

“Every year the most powerful nations of the world spend over 1,000 billion dollars in weapons, 350 billion dollars in subsidies for agriculture, but only 57 billion dollars in development aid,” World Bank president James Wolfensohn told the fifth annual conference of the Parliamentary Network of the World Bank (PNoWB).

If a Martian would come to earth he would see its inhabitants destroying themselves, Wolfensohn said at the conference held Feb. 15-16. The meeting attended by representatives from 80 countries explored the role of parliaments in pushing initiatives to meet the millennium goals.

“At this pace we are not going to meet the millennium goals by the year 2015,” Wolfensohn said.

The eight goals were established at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2000. With 2015 as target date, the goals aim to halve the proportion of people living on less than one dollar a day, and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.

Universal primary education, promotion of gender equality, reducing child mortality, combating HIV/AIDS and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability, and developing a global partnership for development are other goals.

The goals will not be met given current levels of aid, experts say. “If present trends continue, there will be 10 million child deaths in 2015, compared to half that if the target is met,” the British non-governmental organisation Oxfam said in a report late last year. “Countries have massive financial gaps standing between them and achieving the millennium goals.”

The gaps have arisen when the world has never had as many resources as now to meet such goals, the report says.

The solutions are known, United Nations Development Programme director Mark Malloch Brown told the conference. What is lacking is “the political will to implement them.”

Market-led globalisation deprives the poorest people of resources in order to increase the living standards of the rich, Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva told the closing session over a satellite link. “This is unacceptable,” Lula said. “The world has enough resources to satisfy the needs of a population twice as big as the present one. But it lacks the political will to overcome this inequality.”

Lula called for the creation of an international fund to pay for implementation of development policies to meet the goals. “A small tax on all dealings with weapons could produce enough resources to launch a consistent global development policy,” he said.

Malloch Brown warned of a growing gap between emerging countries and the less developed countries. “The emerging countries are improving their living standards,” he said. “But the poorest countries have seen their human development indexes shrink as never before. At this pace, in sub-Saharan Africa the UN development goals will be achieved only in 2147.”

But despite the failures in implementation, the millennium declaration has helped create “a global awareness of the development problems we have to confront, and the emergence of a civil society demanding solutions,” Malloch Brown said.

The elite have understood that it is not enough to call for good governance. “What counts now is to have real results in health, in education, in access to clean running water,” he said. “The manifesto for the 21st century is to set social and environmental priorities, and to fulfil the moral obligations of the Northern hemisphere towards the South.”

Removal of subsidies is central to that, said Dutch parliamentarian and forum chairman Bert Koenders. “Donors cannot provide aid to create development opportunities with one hand, and then use trade restrictions to take these opportunities away with the other hand.”