UN WORLD SUMMIT 2005: WHAT IS AT STAKE

Over the last few weeks, the focus of the world\'s media has turned towards negotiations within the United Nations on the outcome document for the September World Summit. While detailed negotiations on 39-page bureaucratic documents don\'t usually make for great headlines, the battles raging between Member States have caught the attention of the international press. This is because Member States have been arguing about the most minimal of collective commitments, even simple restatements of past promises. Most worrying has been the possibility that Member States dilute their commitment to the Millennium Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), writes Eveline Herfkens, Secretary General\'s Executive Coordinator for the Millennium Development Goals Campaign. The first five years since the adoption of the Goals show why we cannot rest on our laurels. While there has some progress, it is limited and patchy and it has been slow. If current trends continue there will be large gaps between targets and outcomes by 2015. The human costs of the failure to meet the Goals would be staggering. Focusing on just one indicator, according to the 2005 Human Development Report, based on current trends we are likely to miss the target for reducing child mortality, meaning an additional 41 million of avoidable child deaths between now and 2015. Perhaps most crucially and this is an area where quite frankly there has been very little progress developed countries need to reform trade and agricultural policies. Even if rich countries prefer to make formal commitments in the context of WTO negotiations, they need to fully engage now to ensure that the Doha round of negotiations will indeed be a development round as promised. They need to be proactive in pushing the negotiations forward, for example by setting dates for the elimination of agricultural subsidies that distort the markets that poor countries depend upon, and by committing to full duty- and quota-free access for all low-income countries to allow them to sell their products on rich country consumer markets.

WHITE BAND DAY: A GLOBAL CALL TO END POVERTY

In September the heads of state will return to the UN in New York to evaluate their progress on the UN Millennium goal of ending poverty by 2015. Before that, G-8 leaders will meet in Scotland, and for the first time their agenda will focus on Africa and poverty. In December in Hong Kong trade ministers will meet in an effort to restart the talks that were begun at Cancun and which are absolutely central to development. In response to these three fundamental meetings, a global movement was created to exert pressure to bring about an end to poverty, write Eveline Herfkens, representative of the UN Secretary General for the Millennium Development Goals, and Walter Veltroni, mayor of Rome. The authors write in this article that the Global Call to Action Against Poverty is a movement comprised of more than 1000 international networks. Three dates for mobilisations in more than seventy countries have been set before the three major meetings. The symbol that will unite all of these events will be a white band, a sign of commitment, which will encircle not only wrists but also important buildings, for example, Rome\'s Trevi Fountain (a band of light in this case) and the Colosseum (an 80 metre band). Wearing the white band serves as a reminder to the powers of this earth that eradicating poverty is a duty, and that the path to the future passes through every part of the earth, not only the developed world.

WE CAN END WORLD POVERTY, IF WE WANT

In September 2000, 189 world leaders signed the Millennium Declaration, a global deal committing themselves to \'\'free our fellow men, women, and children from the abject and dehumanising conditions of extreme poverty\'\' by 2015 by achieving the 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDG), writes Eveline Herfkens, Secretary-General\'s Executive Coordinator for the MDG and Netherlands Minister for Development Cooperation from 1998 to 2002. But there are real concerns about the rate and breadth of progress, which has been inadequate in still too many poor countries. . The goals are achievable: the world has the resources, and we know what to do. Even in Sub-Saharan Africa and the least-developed countries success is possible: Malawi, Rwanda and Tanzania will achieve goal 2 on basic education; Tanzania is also on track to achieving the water goal; Uganda and Senegal have reversed the AIDS pandemic; and Mozambique\'s child mortality goal might be in reach. In these countries the \'global deal\' is in place: they have reasonably good policies, while the donor community has been relatively generous with aid and debt relief. If some of the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa can achieve some of the goals, why would they not they be achievable everywhere? The real problem is that many government leaders come to the United Nations make beautiful speeches and promises and fly back to resume business as usual.