By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 5 2005 (IPS)

The tsunami disaster that claimed the lives of over 150,000 people in south and southeast Asia is also threatening to derail the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – including a lofty plan to reduce by half the number of people living in poverty worldwide.

“There is a big risk that there will be no additional aid (for MDGs),” Eveline Herfkens, the U.N.’s executive coordinator for MDGs Campaign, told IPS.

A former Dutch minister for development cooperation, Herfkens said that most European countries have a fixed development budget. “So there will be a very big risk of diversion (of aid) from long-term investment in poor people” to the tsunami emergency, she added.

Emergency aid, Herfkens pointed out, counts as part of official development assistance (ODA), particularly in relation to developing nations.

Jan Egeland, the U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, last week accused rich nations of being “stingy” because most of them have failed to meet the U.N. target of 0.7 percent of gross national product (GNP) as ODA to the world’s poorer nations.

Only five countries have consistently met – and gone beyond – the 0.7 target which was set by the U.N. General Assembly in 1970. The five countries are: Denmark (1.06 percent), the Netherlands (0.82 percent), Sweden (0.81 percent), Norway (0.80 percent) and Luxembourg (0.7 percent).

“I think I would want to see (donor) governments respond to this crisis without depleting resources from the development account, because we are already behind in many countries in our efforts to meet the MDGs,” Annan told reporters last week.

“I hope we will not be robbing Peter to pay Paul,” he added, warning that any “diversion” of aid would derail MDGs.

The MDGs include a 50 percent reduction in poverty; universal primary education; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; the promotion of gender equality; and the reversal of 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 their implementation has depended primarily on increased development aid by Western donors. A second summit meeting is scheduled to take place in New York in September this year to review progress.

Annan says that developing nations need an additional 50 billion dollars annually in ODA – over and above an average of about 55 billion to 60 billion dollars currently doled out by Western donors every year.

But this may not be forthcoming, says Herfkens, because most of the European countries have a fixed “floor and ceiling” on their development budgets. As a result, “there is clearly a risk” resulting from the tsunami tragedy.

The only two exceptions, she said, were the United States and Japan, which have more leeway with their development budgets.

Asked if developing nations would have received increased aid in the absence of a tsunami crisis, Herfkens said: “We saw an increasing number of European countries committing themselves to an increase in ODA and an increase in their percentage of GNP to ODA.”

She said that a majority of European nations – about 15 – had committed to meet self-imposed deadlines with annual increases to meet their targets. These include Ireland (by 2007), Belgium (2010), France and Spain (2012) and Britain (2013).

Herfkens said “there were increases in ODA coming and everybody hoped that the focus of that would be in achieving MDGs,” particularly in countries that needed external support, mostly least developed countries (LDCs), described as the poorest of the poor.. These projected increases, she said, were expected to go the poorest nations in sub-Saharan Africa.

“There is a need to continue the war on poverty which is one of the main contributing factors in the social upheaval in the developing countries,” Rev. Gabriel Odima, president of the Africa Center for Peace and Democracy, told IPS.

He said that the tsunami crisis is a wake up call to the international community. “The crisis should not undermine the millennium development goals. Instead, the international community should focus on providing the needed aid in the region and developing a long-term strategy of promoting development.”

This, he said, should include debt cancellation, good governance and fair trade, to name a few.

In an editorial Tuesday, the New York Times said that the aid to tsunami victims “must not come out of the same pot used for development aid.”

“It’s clear that in the yearly lottery of disaster aid, the tsunami survivors will get the most. But that doesn’t mean that the eight million people who die every year from preventable diseases like malaria should end up losers – again,” the Times said.

Ironically, Herfkens said that the region struck by the tsunamis – south and southeast Asia – was the region that was most likely to achieve some of the MDGs. She singled out Thailand, which was hit very hard, as one of the countries in Asia making considerable progress in MDGs.

As of Wednesday, U.N. member states, along with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, had pledged over 3.5 billion dollars for the tsunami disaster, in less than 10 days. The monies were pledged both as emergency assistance and reconstruction aid..

“It is the biggest outpouring of relief aid over such a short period,” Egeland told reporters.

He also said that the second phase of the emergency would be the reconstruction of the battered regions. Asked how much this would cost, he said: “This could be in the tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars.”

Egeland said he would be able to give a better estimate at a U.N. pledging conference scheduled to take place in Geneva on Jan. 11.

“When a disaster is on Cable News Network (CNN),” Herfkens said, “the monies keep pouring in. But the big problem will be a year from now, because that’s when big monies are needed for reconstruction in these countries.”

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