U.N. Seeks Rapid Action to Cut Poverty and Hunger by Thalif Deen Inter Press Service 11:50am 11th Sep, 2004   UNITED NATIONS, Sep 9 (IPS)    The world's developing nations have made ”significant progress” in reducing extreme poverty and alleviating hunger and disease, says U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in an year-end review of the U.N.'s much-publicised Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).    But he warns that progress has been hardest to come by in the 50 ”least developed countries” (LDCs) -- described as the poorest of the world's poor -- 34 of which are in sub-Saharan Africa. These LDCs range from Afghanistan and Bangladesh to Sierra Leone and Zambia.    The year 2005 will be a critical year for Africa because ”overcoming human poverty will require a quantum leap in scale and ambition,” Annan said in his address to the three-day annual meeting of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which concludes Friday.    The MDGs, which were endorsed at a meeting of world leaders in New York in Sep. 2000, set targets for progress in eight areas: poverty and hunger; primary education; gender empowerment; child mortality; maternal health; disease; environment; and a global parntership for development.    The deadline for achieving these goals, including a 50 percent reduction in poverty and hunger, is 2015.    The good news, Annan says, is that more than 200 million fewer people are living in extreme poverty now in eastern, southern and south-eastern Asia. Even countries in northern Africa are progressing toward slashing extreme poverty in half by 2015.    Primary school enrolment rates are above 90 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, most of Asia, northern Africa and the Commonwealth of Independent States (former Soviet republics) -- all of them nearing the target of universal enrolment by 2015.    But the bad news, according to Annan, is that in LDCs, there is lack of significant progress or even reversals.    ”The record of the last 12 months for the world's poorest is hardly more encouraging,” he said. To cite only one measure, the number of new HIV/AIDS infections was higher in the last calendar year than ever before, ”raising serious concerns about the development prospects for whole regions of the world in which hundreds of millions of people reside”.    ”Asking Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to meet the MDGs without offering them firm measures for debt relief is setting them up to fail,” says Daphne Davies of the Brussels-based LDC Watch, a network of NGOs working in Least Developed Countries.    According to the latest issue of the Human Development Report published by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) in July, she said, some countries such as Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso were actually worse off now than when the MDG programme started.    LDCs are consistently at the bottom of the Human Development Index with an overall rating of 0.42 compared to 0.92 for rich nations, she added.    For many LDCs in sub-Saharan Africa, including Sudan, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau and Mozambique, their debt represents more than 500 percent of their export revenues, Davies told IPS.    ”When countries are being forced to spend their income on repaying debts, how can they ever hope to fulfil the MDGs, whatever their intentions?” asked Davies.    She said that her organisation has been campaigning for a 100 percent debt relief, on the grounds ”that it is clear that since the establishment of the MDGs four years ago, the most heavily indebted countries will be unable to reach these goals without total debt cancellation and additional aid”.    Davies also said that Iraq's major creditors agreed early this year to forgive between 80 billion and 90 billion dollars of Iraq's debt, in order to help rebuild the country.    ”LDC Watch argues that this positive move to support the war-torn country should be extended to the world's poorest countries, many of which have been torn apart by conflict,” she added.    In his report, Annan argues that ”the Millennium Development Goals are still technically feasible in even the poorest countries, but the window of opportunity is rapidly narrowing and the political will remains largely absent”.    Eveline Herfkens, executive coordinator for the Millennium Development Goals Campaign, told NGO representatives that despite a degree of growing pessimism, the eight goals are achievable.    She admitted, however, that while there is progress, ”it doesn't seem adequate and particularly the situation in sub-Saharan Africa and least developed countries is worrisome”.    But even in Africa, she pointed out, countries such as Malawi and Rwanda have achieved the goals relating to education -- ”and got all their kids to school.”    Tanzania is on track on its water goals; Uganda and Senegal have been able to reverse the AIDS pandemic; and Mozambique is about to reach its child mortality goals.    ”If even some of the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa can achieve some of the goals, I will not give up believing that the goals are achievable, including in sub-Saharan Afria and the least developed countries,” Herfkens said.    She urged NGOs to sustain the pressure on politicians and parliamentarians in their home countries, and hold them accountable. ”It is political will that is needed.”    She said that parliaments hold the purse and set the laws of the land. ”That is where political will can and must be generated.”    Herfkens said the United Nations can provide the platform for governments to make promises, but the world body is only as strong as its member states allow it to be.    ”The real problem is that government leaders come to the United Nations, make beautiful speeches and promises, and take the plane back home to business as usual.”    She said this was the case with the promise world leaders made to provide 0.7 percent of their gross national product (GNP) as development aid to poor nations.    But out of 24 donor nations, only Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Luxembourg have actually achieved or surpassed the 0.7 target.    And it's the same case with pledges made four years ago on MDGs, she said. ”After their presidents and prime ministers returned home from the Millennium Summit, how many governments sat with their cabinet members to discuss how they would implement the pledges made at the United Nations?” she asked.
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