LATIN AMERICA: Inequality Undermines Development Goals

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo González

ROME, Jun 21 2007 (IPS) - The main reason that Latin America is not making faster progress towards the Millennium Development Goals adopted by the international community in 2000 lies in the various forms of inequality that prevail in the region, former Dutch minister of development cooperation Eveline Herfkens told IPS Thursday.

Latin America is the region with the widest gap between rich and poor.

Herfkens, the executive coordinator of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Campaign since October 2002, is in Rome to participate in the Local Governments’ International Mid Term Evaluation Conference on the MDGs.

The conference hosted by the Italian capital Friday and Saturday is bringing together mayors and other municipal representatives from some 80 cities, who will assess the contribution of local governments to meeting the MDGs by the 2015 deadline.

Under the theme “Running Out of Time”, the meeting will identify ways and actions through which cities and local government, individually and through their associations, and in partnership with civil society, central governments, the international community and the media, can provide a decisive contribution to achieving the MDGs.

The MDGs, adopted by U.N. member countries in 2000, are halving extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women, reducing maternal mortality by three-quarters and infant mortality by two-thirds, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, adopting an environmentally sustainable development model, and building a global partnership for development.

The evaluations carried out so far by the U.N. Millennium Development Goals Campaign and regional U.N. agencies have found that a majority of the targets will not be met, which means grave social, economic and humanitarian problems will persist, especially in the poorest parts of the world, like sub-Saharan Africa.

“The perception of local authorities is that the MDGs are a long way off,” Franco Latorre, who is coordinating the conference in representation of the Rome city government, said in a meeting with journalists.

The international news agency IPS (Inter Press Service) and the Italian Coordination of Local Governments for Peace and Human Rights are taking part in the conference, which is jointly organised by the Rome city government, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) – the voice of local government before the United Nations and the international community – the Millennium Campaign Voices Against Poverty and the European Commission, the European Union executive arm.

Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni, former U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan, prominent U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs and Herfkens will be among the key-note speakers, along with one of the three presidents of the UCLG, South African priest Smangaliso Mkhatshwa.

Latorre said the last summit of the Group of Eight (G8) most powerful countries, held early this month in Germany, issued a rhetorical statement with respect to promoting progress towards the MDGs when in reality they remain reluctant to commit themselves to the goal of earmarking 0.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to development aid.

The G8 is made up of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States.

Italian Deputy Minister of Foreign Relations Patrizia Sentinelli said Italy’s aim is to dedicate 0.33 percent of GDP to official development aid next year, below the proportion earmarked by the Scandinavian countries, whose share is around one percent, but higher than the G8 average of 0.22 percent.

Sentinelli told IPS that it makes sense to study new ways of providing development aid in order to make it more effective, through direct relations, for example, between donor governments and non-governmental organisations or civil society in recipient countries, in order to reduce corruption.

Deputy mayor of Montevideo, Hyara Rodríguez, stressed the efforts carried out by the government of the Uruguayan capital over the past 17 years to strengthen health and education services through partnerships with social organisations.

The work carried out under this kind of partnership is in line today with the progress needed to achieve the MDGs, said the city official. She underlined, however, that there is still much to be done to overcome serious social problems, like the fact that 53 percent of children born in Montevideo today are born into poverty.

With respect to such challenges, Rodríguez emphasised that if cities work together, their joint efforts are a powerful tool for coming up with solutions, in terms of taking the fullest advantage of available resources and bolstering the capacity of local communities themselves.

This integration between cities, she added, can give rise to cooperation at the regional level, as occurs for instance in the organisation Cities of Mercosur (Mercociudades), which currently links 180 local governments from the full and associate members of South America’s Mercosur trade bloc: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Rodríguez also said the presence of journalists in the process is essential. “If we don’t provide coverage of and communicate about our problems, we will be that much farther away from solving them with the joint efforts of everyone,” she said.

Maria Pia Garavaglia, deputy mayor of Rome, said local governments have a key role to play in promoting the MDGs, as an expression of democracy that is close to the grassroots and often more credible than national governments.

IPS Director General Mario Lubetkin said that a priority strategy of his agency is to get the media to increase coverage of the MDGs.

Towards that end, IPS invited to the Rome conference journalists from Asia, Africa and Latin America in order for them to hear first-hand the points of view of key actors in the processes of international development and cooperation, said Lubetkin.