UNITED NATIONS: Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs summed up the sentiments of many participants in a meeting to review progress on the Millennium Development Goals this week with the comment, “When are we actually going to do things and not just talk about them?” Sachs, also the director of the UN Millennium Project, opened the two-day conference at the United Nations by noting that on a recent trip he took to villages in Senegal, Kenya and Ethiopia, even basic items like mosquito bed nets to prevent malaria remain scarce.
At one hospital in Kenya, the patient-to-nurse ratio was 80 to one, and each bed was shared by three people. “One person has tuberculosis, one has AIDS and one has malaria, they’re sharing a bed, and we call this civilized society,” he said.
Sachs’ speech, which also took donor countries to task for failing to live up to their oft-repeated pledge to contribute 0.7 percent of gross national income to the developing world, resonated enough with the audience that it became a frequent point of reference throughout the discussions that followed.
If the situation does not change, it is highly unlikely that the project’s goals will be met by their 2015 deadline. “We cannot have a mosquito net unless we also have a house and a bed,” noted Judith Mbula Bahemuka, Kenya’s ambassador to the United Nations.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) include a 50 percent reduction in poverty and hunger; universal primary education; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; the promotion of gender equality; and the reversal of the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, all in the next 10 years.
The interdependence of each of the MDGs on the others was a recurring theme throughout the conference.
Sub-Saharan Africa, where only six nations grew last year by more than the seven percent needed to achieve the MDGs, and which has 34 of the world’s 50 least developed countries, was frequently cited as the region most urgently in need.
“With the exception of sub-Saharan Africa, the rest of the world should gain basic sanitation access by 2015,” said Albert Wright, a coordinator of the Millennium Project’s Water and Sanitation Task Force. This means that 370,000 people worldwide will gain access to basic sanitation between now and 2015, although 3,900 children still die every day due to lack of sanitation access.
“This is the equivalent of eight jumbo jets filled with children crashing and killing them all every day,” he said.
Poverty and hunger are largely concentrated in rural areas of the world — 75 percent, by the most common estimate. Gawain Kripke of Oxfam America said one problem was a long-term decline in the prices of basic commodities like coffee and cotton. Between 1980 and 2002, the 12 major tropical agricultural commodities lost between 50 and 80 percent of their real value after inflation, translating into an annual loss of 243 billion dollars for developing countries, according to Kripke.
The overall price decline in the same period had averaged 25 percent, he said, suggesting that developing countries would need to boost production by one-third just to maintain stable revenues.
“Rather than serving as an engine for development and new resources, commodities and dependence on commodities are seen as a very large liability and a drain on resources,” Kripke said. “But nonetheless, commodities are where we’re at, and for many developing countries, they are the focus of their economies, and particularly important to the poorest countries and the poorest people who are producers of commodities.”
Abudullah Alsaidi, Yemen’s ambassador, warned that soaring oil prices were also threatening economic growth across the globe, and especially in developing countries. Noel Brown, president of Friends of the United Nations and chairman of the Rene Dubos Centre on Human Environment, offered an alternate view on where resources should be allocated, noting that recent migration patterns point toward an unmistakable shift from rural settings to cities, and from landlocked regions to coasts. The Asian tsunami, he said, particularly brought out the need to address the issue of what he called “coastal sprawl”.
Representatives from several developing countries, including Benin, Belize, Equatorial Guinea and Indonesia, said that the problem was less that their governments lacked political will, rather that they simply had inadequate resources to work with.
Participants also stressed the interdependence of education with the promotion of gender equality, citing Uganda and Kenya as positive examples of removing school fees.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.
