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

POLITICS: Will Development Aid Follow in Dinosaurs’ Footprints?

Thalif Deen

SAO PAULO, Jun 14 2004 (IPS) - When United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan addressed a press conference here Monday, he was asked why no speaker on the opening day of a major U.N. meeting had thought fit to address the problem of declining official development assistance (ODA).

Will the long-promised ODA, which industrial nations first pledged to the world’s poorer countries back in the 1970s, go the way of the dinosaur?

ODA is still alive, responded Annan, hours after the opening of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD XI), which is trying to figure out how the world’s 132 developing nations will survive the battle against poverty, disease, debt and the inequities of the international trading system. The five-day meeting is scheduled to conclude Friday.

“The fact that we did not mention ODA this morning does not mean we have given up on it,” Annan told reporters.

But the secretary-general admitted that only four of 22 industrial nations – Norway, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands – have consistently met the target of spending 0.7 percent of their gross national product (GNP) on aid.

The rest have continued to renege on their promises and pledges, according to the latest figures released by the United Nations.

Total ODA – which has declined over the last 20 years, averaging about 55 billion U.S. dollars annually – registered a surprise increase last year to 68.3 billion dollars.

Theoretically, ODA has been climbing since the U.N. International Conference on Financing for Development, held in Mexico in March 2002, says Jose Antonio Ocampo, U.N. under-secretary-general for economic and social affairs.

But a large part of the increase was made up of additional aid to Iraq, and also money to fund the debt-relief programme of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC).

“The increase does not provide fresh funding to low-income countries,” Ocampo said in an interview Friday.

Despite this aberration, Annan says 2003’s 68.3 billion dollars is still below the target of 100 billion dollars annually, which will be required to meet the U.N.’ s much-trumpeted Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The MDGs, approved by the U.N. General Assembly in September 2000, seek to reduce by almost 50 percent the number of people living in abject poverty and also those suffering from hunger and disease. The deadline to reach its targets is 2015.

“We have made some progress in our MDGs,” Annan told reporters Monday. “But a lot more needs to be done.”

It will be accomplished, he added, only with the infusion of new and additional resources to the world’s poorer nations.

In contrast, the United States has earmarked a staggering 119 billion dollars for the first two years of a military conflict against a single country: Iraq. The proposed spending includes 97.2 billion dollars for military operations, 21.2 billion dollars for reconstruction and a billion dollars for administrative expenses.

In an appeal to the Group of Eight (G8) nations – the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan and Russia – Annan said last week: “you in the G8 have a clear responsibility to place yourselves in the vanguard of that increase, and I hope you can do so by committing yourselves to specific timetables for achieving the ODA target of 0.7 percent of GNP.”

Such commitments, he said, will have a powerful impact and reinforce the confidence of developing nations. Annan also said an increase in ODA is essential for sub-Saharan Africa, which is being devastated by the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other tropical diseases.

But the G8 summit, by and large, ignored Annan’s appeal.

The worst hit by the decline in ODA are the 50 least developed countries (LDCs), described as the poorest of the poor.

They range from Bhutan and Bangladesh to Uganda and Zambia.

U.N. Under-Secretary-General for LDCs Anwarul Karim Chowdhury told IPS Monday that if ODA is not doubled between now and 2010 – and if there is no outright cancellation of debt and no diversification of economies – “there is really no way the LDCs can achieve the MDGs by 2015.”

“Of course, some LDCs have done well in respect of human development goals, but overall prospects are not encouraging,” he added.

“That is why I believe special attention should be given to the 50 LDCs to lift them out of the morass of poverty,” Chowdhury said.

Diverting a tiny fraction of the world’s arms expenditures – including funds earmarked for Iraq – would result in a miraculous transformation of LDCs, he added.

Despite such talk, Saradha Iyer of the non-governmental organisation Third World Network (TWN) believes the UNCTAD meeting in Sao Paulo is unlikely to seriously affect, much less influence, ODA spending and the aid value systems that dominate today.

“The United Nations is only showing up in force at Sao Paulo because the MDGs in 2005 is going to show up all its inadequacies, and this is the primary building block for the wall of excuses it will have to erect to explain why so many countries in sub-Saharan Africa are unable to meet the MDGs,” Iyer told IPS.

The U.N. General Assembly is scheduled to hold a special session in late 2005 to assess why developing nations are falling behind in their targets to meet MDGs.