Venezuela criticises `market totalitarianism' at UN Millennium Development Goal summit

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52902

By Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Sep 20, 2010 (IPS) - "I am not pessimistic, but I am realistic. Under present conditions and the prevailing system of world government, the Millennium Development Goals simply cannot be achieved," Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Abelardo Moreno said in an interview with IPS.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Summit taking place Sept. 20-22 at United Nations headquarters in New York is assessing progress towards the targets just five years ahead of the deadline.

The MDGs, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 2000, are to halve the proportion of hungry and extremely poor people, guarantee universal primary education, promote gender equality and reduce child and maternal mortality, all by 2015 and taking 1990 levels as the baseline.

They also include combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability and creating a world partnership for development.

But for many countries in the developing South, meeting the MDGs is still a distant and uncertain prospect, while aid promised by industrialised nations has shrunk in real terms.

Cuba sent a delegation led by Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez and deputy Foreign Minister Moreno to attend the meeting in New York, although the govenment is critical of the MDGs, which it regards as overly modest.

Moreno said it is "almost a mockery" to propose halving the percentage of people living on incomes of less than one dollar a day, when there are now at least 150 million more hungry people in the world than there were in 2000.

"What about the other half: are they doomed to continue to live in poverty and suffer hunger?" he asked.

"We live in a world in which extreme poverty is increasing instead of declining, and where millions of children die each year around the world because they lack access to medicines and health care," he said.

Moreno contrasted this dire reality with the billions of dollars the world spends on arms, while in spite of the urgency of the human problems and "the pursuit of these meagre goals, the resources industrialised countries are supposed to devote to development aid have declined in real terms."

"The rich nations say they have increased their aid, but they have done so only nominally. In 1970 they committed themselves to giving 0.7 percent of GDP in the form of official development aid, but they are not living up to that promise," he said. The eighth MDG, "developing a global partnership for development," includes among its targets "addressing the special needs of least developed countries, landlocked countries and small island developing states," and "dealing comprehensively with the debt problems of developing countries."

"If the 'haves' are not committed to fulfilling what they themselves approved, what's left? The issue is one of political will, not of technology or methodology," stressed Moreno, who said that the fault lies not in the MDGs themselves, but in the system that makes them necessary.

Moreno insisted that "the problems of hunger, disease, poverty and lack of basic services will not be solved as long as today's unjust international economic order remains," in which once poor countries have paid off their debt, they find themselves more indebted than ever.

"This order needs to be changed. We need to get rid of selfishness, and devise policies for real solidarity," he said.

Moreno added that Cuba is on track to achieve most of the MDGs, and is attending the U.N. meeting as an example of what can be done by a developing country that is being blockaded by the United States and is poor in natural resources, but which has social policies that benefit the population.

"The few countries that have made real progress towards fulfilling the MDGs have done so by their own efforts, impelled by their own motivation," the deputy foreign minister said.

TAC press statement

22 September 2010

Replenish or MDGs perish

Maternal health and child mortality Millennium Development Goals in many countries can only be met if AIDS, TB and malaria are addressed and the Global Fund replenished with $20 billion over the next two weeks, say activists.

Activists to call a Day of Action on Tuesday September 28 in at least 20 African cities, and supported by groups around the world, to fully fund the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria

Wednesday September 22 (Nairobi, Washington)--World leaders have two weeks left to find the $20billion the Global Fund needs to set the world on track to meet the Health Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), activists said today at the start of a week of activism which culminates in a Global Day of Action next Tuesday September 28 to advocate for the replenishment of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

At the recently concluded MDG Summit in New York UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon declared that the MDGs are achievable, and called on donors to open their pockets at the Global Fund Replenishment meeting he is chairing 4-5 October.

“We are delighted that the world has woken up to the fact that efforts to tackle child mortality and maternal health (MDGs 4 and 5) are off-track – but politicians are making a grave and foolish error if they think they can deal with this at the expense of the fight against HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria (MDG 6),” said Rachel Ong, Chair of the Global Network of People living with HIV/AIDS (GNP+) and one of the initiators of the Global Fund replenishment campaign. “Maternal health and child mortality goals have no place being pitted in competition with action to tackle AIDS, TB and malaria.”

In South Africa AIDS is the main cause of death among women and children, and throughout Africa AIDS, TB and malaria are killing millions of children and women every year.

“The choice is simple: replenish or the MDGs will perish,” said Vuyiseka Dubula, the HIV+ Secretary General of South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), one of the leading forces behind the Global Week of Action. “If leaders have decided that maternal and child mortality are the problem, then they must know that finding $20billion for the Fund is a big part of the solution.”

In less than a decade the Global Fund has saved nearly 6 million lives and the organisation is highly regarded as a responsible steward of donor money, already proving itself capable of handling traditional aid and innovative financing.

“All countries should play their role. Contributions are needed from all governments, including lower-income countries, who have a duty to prioritise health. But the urgent priority right now is to replenish the Global Fund to put the world on track to meet the health MDGs,” said Paula Akugizibwe from the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa (ARASA). “The establishment of the Global Fund was an unprecedented show of unified political will to respond to pressing global health crises. If governments turn their backs on their own commitments now after all the progress that has been made, they are sending the clear message that they view health – and hence, basic human development – as optional, depending on the price tag.”

Ong Akugizibwe and Dubula are among a global coalition of activists who have convened a week of activism culminating in a Global Day of Action to demand that the Global Fund gets the funds it needs. The week of action started on Monday 20 September with marches in Paris, France and outside the UN MDG Summit in New York.

It culminates on Tuesday 28 September in dozens of marches, press conferences and other actions organised by community groups across the African region taking place in Kenya, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, Lesotho, Malawi, Botswana, Mauritius, Tanzania, Mali, Ethiopia, Cameroon and Nigeria. At the same time a viral video campaign will be launched across 30 Asian countries, and supportive actions will take place in Canada, Italy, Russia and other places.

Further information:

Vuyiseka Dubula, General Secretary, Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), South Africa
+27 82 763 005 / +27 83 532 4511

Paula Akugizibwe
Advocacy Coordinator, AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa (ARASA)
+27 83 627 1317 / +27 78 511 9439

More information on the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria can be found at http://www.theglobalfund.org

More information on the Global Week of Action can be found at
http://www.globalfundreplenishment.org

By Cameron Duodu

2010-09-23, Issue 497

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/67184

In the next few days, many sweet words will once again be issued from the UN about the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Africa, given the special summit being held in New York.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in the United States, who is not normally uncritical of the performance of the G8 when it comes to their attitude towards the eradication of poverty in Africa, is quite upbeat about the possibilities available to rich nations before the 2015 landmark for achieving the MDGs arrives.

Writing in the London Guardian on 21 September 2010, Sachs declared: ‘The Millennium Development Goals have triggered the largest cooperative effort in world history to fight poverty, hunger, and disease. They have become a rallying cry in poor and rich countries alike. Ten years after their adoption, they are alive and stronger than ever, inspiring breakthroughs around the globe. The world wants them to work. We are just five years from the target year 2015. If we aim high, great outcomes are within reach.

‘Africa can achieve food security; all boys and girls can complete primary education, and millions more, secondary education; solar and other energy sources can bring electricity into remote villages and primary healthcare can prevent millions of deaths annually and encourage families to have fewer children in the confidence they will stay alive. We can choose, in short, to achieve the millennium development goals, and look beyond 2015 to the end of extreme poverty in our generation.’

It is tempting to mock Sachs for having been infected with a mild form of euphoria by the proximity of so many heads of state in the UN building, all brandishing well-researched papers enthusing about what will be happening by 2015; what can be done and what is projected to be achieved.

In fact, Sachs himself, in an earlier article published in the Guardian on 4 July 2010 gave the G8 a ‘fail’ mark when he juxtaposed the promises they had made, especially at the Gleneagles summit in Scotland in 2005, with the achievements - or non-achievements - recorded in development since then. The United Kingdom government was the only one that passed the Sachs ‘accountability test’. Of the rest, he found that not only were some not attempting to achieve goals they had themselves pledged to achieve, but also that some of them were deliberately fudging figures to give the wrong impression.

For instance, figures were at times badly stated in today's money and had not taken account of how inflation had eaten into them since they were pledged five years ago. The ‘most important pledge of all the G8's promises,’ Sachs wrote, was ‘the Gleneagles one which stated that by 2010, they would increase the yearly development assistance to the world's poor, by $50bn, relative to 2004. Half of the increase, or $25bn per year, would go to Africa, the G8 said.’

But the G8, says Sachs, ‘fell far short of this goal, especially with respect to Africa... Aid to Africa rose by $10bn-$15bn per year, rather than $25bn. The properly measured shortfall is even greater, because the promises that were made in 2005 should be adjusted for inflation. Re-stating those commitments in real terms...aid to Africa should have risen by around $30bn. In effect, the G8 fulfilled only half of its promise to Africa - roughly $15bn in increased aid rather than $30bn.’

You see why I am surprised at the optimism with which Sachs views the possibilities opened by the UN summit on the MDGs? People's future behaviour is usually predicated upon their past behaviour. If, in spite of the hopes aroused by the G8 at Gleneagles to, in the words of one of the campaigning groups, ‘make poverty history’, only 50 per cent of aid pledged to Africa materialised, why should anyone take what the G8 say at the New York summit seriously?

One of the more penetrating observations made by Sachs in his accounting of G8 pledges of aid and delivery, was his detection of the fact that ‘much’ of the overall G8 increase in aid ‘went to Iraq and Afghanistan, as part of the US-led war effort, rather than to Africa’.

(However, in case anyone is tempted to believe that any country that wants increased aid would be best advised to invite the US to invade it, the true situation should be known: much of the ‘aid’ to Iraq and Afghanistan usually goes into the pockets of American companies which carry out contract work for the US military. The rest mainly consists of arms to the client governments of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is wrongly classified as ‘aid’, because, in Iraq, for instance, seven years after the Americans landed there, electricity has not been generally restored and health facilities and schools bombed to the ground remain in that state.)

Expanding on his charge that the G8 manipulate aid figures, Sachs describes what is in effect a sleight of hand by the G8 (though he fails to call the practice by its correct name). He writes:

‘Since the G8 was off track in its aid commitments for many years, I long wondered what the G8 would say in 2010, when the commitments actually fell due. In fact, the G8 displayed two approaches. First, in an “accountability report”, the G8 stated the 2005 commitments in current dollars rather, than in inflation-adjusted dollars, in order to minimise the size of the reported shortfall.

‘Second, the G8…simply did not mention the unmet commitments at all. In other words, the G8 accountability principle became: if the G8 fails to meet an important target, stop mentioning the target - a cynical stance, especially at a summit (Canada 2010) heralded for “accountability.”’

Sachs adds: ‘The G8 did not fail because of the current financial crisis. Even before the crisis, the G8 countries were not taking serious steps to meet their pledges to Africa.’ Giving praise where praise is due, Sachs points out that this year, despite a ‘massive budget crisis, the UK government has heroically honoured its aid commitments, showing that other countries could have done so if they had tried.’

What this situations tells every government in Africa is that they must understand, even more clearly than before, that we in Africa are our own saviours and that we should stop spending money on stupid things, such as purchasing luxury aircraft for presidential flights, while our children are dying from curable diseases, or from sheer malnutrition.

I noticed that recently precious money was expended in Ghana to hold a conference to ‘brand Ghana’. Even as the conference was taking place, a correspondent who visited Ghana five years ago went back to see the progress that had been made since his last visit. He chose to visit a little girl who was born exactly five years ago.

He met the girl, Hannah Klutsey, running from her family's single-room house with tears in her eyes. A mouthful of bread had lodged in her throat and her eyes were bloodshot and bulging.

Her mother, Mary, dropped the bundle of firewood she had carried into the dusty compound and rushed to the huge plastic water pot in front of their ramshackle kitchen. She came back with a plastic cup of water, which Hannah gulped down. Only later, when the youngster was recovering on her mother's knee, did they notice the mosquito larvae at the bottom of the cup, ‘half a dozen wormlike creatures writhing in the water’.

‘The pot must have been left open for mosquitoes to lay eggs in the water,’ said the mother, whose immediate concern was that her only daughter, who had recently recovered from severe skin rashes, could fall ill again. ‘She survived her recent sickness by miracle: another illness could kill her,’ said the girl's father. There is no running water in Kpobiman, the poverty-stricken community outside Accra in which the family live. Like most of their neighbours, the household use water from a shallow borehole. ‘Others are forced to draw water from stagnant pools, where germs and parasites are abundant.’ Added the correspondent: ‘The water is so bad you can't imagine this community is just a stone's throw from the capital city of Ghana, Accra.’

Need I say that if the money used yearly to send delegations to listen to sweet words at the UN (sleep through them would be a more accurate description of what happens) had been used to improve life in the village visited by the correspondent, he would have contributed to ‘branding’ Ghana as a country in which progress is being made, not as one where life is getting worse for some people. Oh, and by the way, that type of ‘branding’ would not have cost the Ghanaian taxpayer a single penny.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Cameron Duodu is a journalist, writer and commentator.