UNITED NATIONS: Japan Seeks Time-Bound Targets For Development

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, May 22 1996 (IPS) - Japan is seeking to transform U.N. commitments into hard realities by pushing for time-bound social and economic targets for the 185 members of the world body.

“Development targets should be output-oriented and be expressed in clear terms,” says Ambassador Hisashi Owada of Japan in a six-page paper to a U.N. Working Group on Development.

Japan says there is an urgent need for a development strategy for the 21st century based on a new North-South partnership and a vision of what should be achieved by a specific deadline.

Japan has proposed a target date of 2015 to reduce by half the proportion of people living in poverty and to achieve universal primary education in all countries.

Of the global population of 5.6 billion, more than 1.4 billion people live in absolute poverty. South Asia alone accounts for about half the world’s poor. East Asia is the only region where both the proportion and number of poor people have dropped — from a third of the population in 1970 to 10 percent today.

Japan also wants to achieve gender equality by the year 2005 and a two-thirds reduction of infant mortality rates by 2015. The country is also proposing 2015 as the year to implement all national strategies for sustainable development so as to reverse current trends in the loss of environmental resources.

The proposed targets are to be discussed at the U.N. Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) meeting in Geneva in July and at the U.N. General Assembly in New York in September.

The U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) supports the setting of targets.

“Promises are not made at conferences just to make governments look good,” argues Djibril Diallo.

Addressing a meeting of the ‘Group of 77’ developing countries last month, UNDP Administrator Gus Speth said he was seeking the commitment of developing nations to a new initiative aimed at ensuring that declarations and plans adopted at international conferences and summits held since 1990 were honoured.

“We have to breathe life into these conference agreements,” Speth said.

Called the U.N. System Conferences Action Plan, the initiative is meant to move the U.N. “from statements to action,” he said. It is important “we succeed in this, because I predict this will be one of the major reforms of the U.N. system.”

The U.N. conferences held since 1990 include the World Summit for Children in New York, the Earth Summit in Rio, the Human Rights Conference in Vienna, the Natural Disaster Conference in Yokohama, the small islands development summit in Barbados, the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the Social Summit in Copenhagen, and the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.

Another major U.N. conference — Habitat II — is scheduled to take place in Istanbul in June.

“The U.N. has a great stake in the success of these conferences and whether the agreements will bear fruit,” Speth said, adding that the unifying theme of all of the meetings is a commitment to eliminate mass poverty.

He cites the 1990 World Conference on Children as an example of a U.N. meeting which set targets and met most of the deadlines.

A group of North-South, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) had warned last year that the Social Summit would be an exercise in futility if it did not lay down targets. The meeting — unofficially referred to as ‘the poverty summit’ — failed to do this.

“The Western states are running away from commitments and targets,” Amitava Mukherjee of Actionaid India said later. “If the declaration wouldn’t even talk about eradicating poverty by a set date, what realism remains of the World Summit for Social Development?” he asked.

A special session of the Commission on Social Development is currently addressing implementation of the declaration adopted at the Social Summit in Copenhagen in March last year. The meeting, hosted by the United Nations, is expected to conclude May 31.