LONDON: At a special United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, all 189 of its member-governments set the bold target of halving world poverty by 2015 as one of its Millennium Development Goals - and campaigners believe 2005 could be a breakthrough year:
In March Tony Blair's Commission for Africa is due is expected to make ten recommendations for action to tackle poverty in Africa. Then, three months later in July, the UK government hosts the annual G8 summit in Scotland, with poverty high on the agenda. And lastly, in September, a special session of the UN General Assembly will assess progress on the promise to halve poverty.
However, despite agreement from the UN, governments, campaigners and NGOs alike of the urgent need to address the issue once and for all, opinion is as sharply divided as ever on how to achieve this.
A recent report from the UN Millennium Project has come under strong criticism from the London-based World Development Movement (WDM) for promoting free-market solutions, which it claims have been proved to be ineffective. Although broadly supported by Western governments, campaigners tend to favour trade reforms.
Mark Curtis, director of the WDM, believes the report represents "a dangerous step backwards in the UN's thinking on development, which could damage the fight against poverty. It is especially damaging that these policies are coming with a UN stamp of approval."
He sees trade liberalisation as the most controversial suggestion and claims this approach has been a disaster in Africa, where the countries worst affected being those that had liberalised most.
He also says that the report fails to address issues of regulation of multinational corporations, and that having a report on global poverty without mentioning big business 'is a bit like having a report on malaria without mentioning mosquitoes'.
He also claims the report ignores the findings of many other UN agencies that trade liberalization over the past two decades has increased poverty, pointing to work by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) which found that the rapid and extensive trade liberalization undertaken by the least developed countries during the 1990s, failed to benefit the poor.
Also, a 2002 UN report on the least developed countries said that recent evidence from liberalization in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America suggests that they have often been accompanied by an increase in unemployment.
This backed up a 2001 UN Economic Commission for Africa report, which suggested that further liberalization "as advocated by developed countries leads to higher unemployment and poverty".
Curtis sees this seeming backing of free-market solutions as signs the UN has been co-opted into pushing the agenda of developed nations, ignoring widespread protests and opposition in the poorer parts of the world.
Where campaigners are in agreement with the UN is over the need for a big increase in development aid. In the 1970s, governments set a target of allocating 0.7 per cent of their GDPs to aid. Thirty years on however, most are giving less than half that amount.
Campaigners are also pressing for urgent action on debt. They point out that despite grand statements from world leaders, only $46bn of the $375bn of debt owed by poor nations has been cancelled, with most financed from aid budgets.
"Since debt relief began in 1996, aid overall has decreased by approximately the same as debt relief has gone up," says Ashok Sinha of the London-based Jubilee Debt Campaign.
As part of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, over a hundred UK non-governmental organizations have launched a "Make Poverty History" campaign. They plan to hold a huge rally in Scotland's capital city Edinburgh on the eve of the G8 meeting.
With 30,000 children a day dying from poverty-related disease, campaigners hope poverty will be the major international issue of the year. -Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
