THAILAND: Report on Development Goals Receives Kudos

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jun 23 2004 (IPS) - In an effort to blaze a trail within the developing world, Thailand announced Wednesday that it was pursuing higher targets to meet eight globally recognised development goals, which include poverty reduction and better health care.

Bangkok’s new blueprint to help the economically and socially deprived slices of Thai society was unveiled in a report that amplified the country’s impressive achievements to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Thailand will achieve ”most if not all” the MDGs ahead of the 2015 deadline, the 75-page ‘Thailand Millennium Development Goals Report 2004’ revealed.

The country’s first MDG report is ”a story of success ambition and tough challenges,” states the report. ”The internationally set targets for poverty, hunger, gender, HIV/AIDS, malaria have been achieved more than 15 years ahead of schedule.”

This tone of triumph was even echoed by a senior U.N. official during the launch of the report in the Thai capital.

”This is a celebration of Thailand’s development achievement,” said Robert England, U.N. resident coordinator in Thailand at a press conference.

”It is a landmark report for a middle-income country,” he told reporters.

At the 2000 United Nations Millennium Summit held in New York, leaders of 189 countries pledged to pursue time-bound goals to raise from misery the millions of the world’s poor living in the developing countries.

Eight areas were identified as key targets that had to be met.

These MDGs included eradicating poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education for girls and boys, promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health and confronting killer diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

More specifically, Third World countries were expected to halve by 2015 the proportion of people living in extreme poverty from the benchmark year 1990. The same reduction was expected for the number of people who suffer from hunger.

In education, developing countries had to ensure that all boys and girls were in primary schools by 2015 and that by that year all levels of education would not have any gender disparities.

Also in the health sector, developing countries had to start reversing the spread of killer disease HIV/AIDS and malaria by 2015.

In all three areas, the Thai scorecard registers goals met over 10 years ahead of schedule.

Overall poverty, for instance, has dropped to 9.8 percent in 2002 from 27.2 percent in 1990, states the report.

In education, the report notes that males and females in this South-east Asian country not only enjoy equal education opportunities, but ”girls are outnumbering boys in higher education.”

And in combating HIV/AIDS, Thailand has gone from being one of this region’s worst affected countries to one that has succeeded in dramatically reducing the annual infection rates of this killer disease.

In 1991, the annual infection rate was over 140,000, but by 2003, it was down to 19,000 cases a year, states the report.

Consequently, the Thai government has been inspired to set new benchmarks for the country to achieve under the MDG framework.

They include efforts to reduce poverty to less than four percent by 2009, which, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), would mean ”a stunning four fifths reduction since 1990.”

The new plan also aims to reduce HIV prevalence among adults to one percent by 2006 from the current 1.5 percent prevalence rate, and to achieve gender parity to double the proportion of women in parliament, in the bureaucracy and local administrative bodies by 2006.

According to the UNDP, these new development benchmarks set by Thailand make it ”the first country in the world to place the bar much higher with an ‘MDG Plus’ concept (with) new tailor- made country-specific goals on poverty, education, health gender equality and the environment.”

That pursuit, gains in significance since it comes after 57 countries have produced reports of their respective progress in meeting the MDGs, including seven Asian countries – Afghanistan, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Nepal, Philippines and Vietnam.

However, Thai development experts admit that the rosy picture of achievement painted by statistics concealed some worrying areas.

They include the disparity between the development success story in Bangkok and the poverty stricken areas of the north- eastern and southern provinces.

According to the report, the north-east had the highest concentration of people living below the poverty line – 17.7 percent, as against the national average of 9.8 percent.

The picture of poverty in three southern provinces, which, since January, has witnessed an upsurge in anti-state violence, is just as troubling.

Over 20 percent of the people living in the provinces of Pattani and Yala and over 30 percent of the people in Narathiwat province are below the poverty line.

According to the National Economic and Social Development Board (NESDB), a policy-making body of the Thai government, the country has 6.2 million people of the 63 million people living below the poverty line.

Of that number, 5.4 million live in the rural areas of the north-east and the south.

Thailand’s poverty line is measured according a monthly average income of 1,000 baht (24.4 U.S. dollars).

”The uncertainty in incomes from agriculture and the lack of opportunities for other jobs have contributed to this,” Kitisak Sinthuvanich, deputy secretary-general of the NESDB, told IPS.

”There are structural problems that also need to be addressed to help them, such as improving the quality of their education,” he added.