BBC WORLD SERVICE: ANALYSIS (15 SEP 05)

Transcribed by Serene Ng

(??) …… word/s unsure [QL]

Madeleine Morris: Rahima Begum was born five years ago at the start
of the new millennium into extreme poverty. Her parents and three
siblings live in a hut made of plastic sheets, bamboo and tin in a
slum in southern India. She doesn't know it but her life is one
small measureable statistic in the race to achieve the promise the
United Nations made in the year of Rahima's birth … to lift people
like her and her family out of extreme poverty. The finish line is
2015 and the target, accomplishing the Millennium Development Goals.[QL]
[PARA]
""It is so decided.'' [QL]
[PARA]
In September 2000, world leaders gathered at the United Nations
in New York to sign the Millennium Declaration, a document that was
supposed to herald a new dawn in peace, security and prosperity.
Central to the Millennium Declaration were the Millennium
Development Goals, a list of eight specific aspirations to improve
the lot of the world's poor. They include commitments to reduce the
number of people living in extreme poverty by half, get all the
world's children to finish primary school, ensure equality between
women and men, reduce child deaths by two-thirds, reduce maternal
deaths by three-quarters, reverse the spread of Aids, malaria and
tuberculosis and half the number of people without clean drinking
water and sanitation; all this, by 2015. [PARA]
Kevin Watkins is author of the United Nations Human Development
Report. [QL]
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Kevin Watkins: The Millennium Development Goals were conceived
principally to establish concrete targets for reducing extreme
poverty and the underlying principle of the MDGs is a very simple
one, which is that broad aspirations that are not backed by concrete
time-bound goals really don't help anybody. You can't build a
development programme on broad commitments. You need the targets and
the MDGs provide the targets and these are the targets that the
entire international community has now united behind. [QL]
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Madeleine Morris: It was a revolutionary moment in world development
politics when all 191 members of the United Nations agreed to focus
on specific development outcomes rather than measuring the flow of
money to fund aid projects, which was previously the norm. And most
agree it has proved to be a galvanising project for both donor and
recipient countries. [PARA]
But while 191 signed the document, not everyone has shown equal
commitment. John McArthur is the director of the United Nations
Millennium Project which produced the action plan to achieve the
goals. [QL]
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John McArthur: There's no question that not every country is abiding
to them and that there are always some parts of the world that for
whatever reason are on their own agenda and it might not be one we
would all support. But as a general principle, what we've seen
around these goals is perhaps the greatest ever sense of political
agreement and operational agreement that these are the goals that
are achieveable and that they need to be guiding our collective
efforts. [QL]
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Madeleine Morris: But while the goals may have provided a unified
focus, their outcome is far from assured. When world leaders meet to
review their progress this week in the United Nations, they'll be
looking at a very mixed picture. [PARA]
Kevin Watkins again. [QL]
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Kevin Watkins: If you take the goal of halving extreme income
poverty, the number of people living on less than $1 a day, at a
global level there's a very good prospect that that target will be
met principally because of the high growth and progress in China and
India which are big-population countries. [PARA]
If you look at the same goal on a country by country basis, you
find that the target is going to be missed by around 400 million
people. [QL]
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Madeleine Morris: But even within countries, progress is mixed.
India and China may well meet the goal of halving the numbers of
their people living in extreme poverty thanks to their recent strong
economic performance, but the goals which really affect quality of
life … reducing maternal and child deaths, getting children in
primary school and reversing the spread of Aids … are likely to be
missed by a wide margin. And inequality in both countries is
growing. As the middle class forges ahead, the poor are being left
behind. Nowhere is this more apparent than here in the slum of
Premnigar(??) which sits literally in the shadow of Hyderabad's
booming IT district. [QL]
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Amadi Begum (translated): My name is Amadi Begum. I'm 30 years old
and I have four children. We live in Premnigar. My husband sells
vegetables. We earn about 50 to 100 rupees a day, about $1 - $2.
Life is hard. We don't even have a ration card. Sometimes we don't
sell any vegetables and we have to borrow from our neighbours.
Nobody does anything for us. [PARA]
The United Nations? No, I've never heard of it. [QL]
[QL]
Madeleine Morris: Amadi's life is unlikely to improve in time to be
counted as a success of the goals although she still holds out hope
for her five-year-old daughter, Rahima. [QL]
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Amadi Begum (translated): My daughter goes to school. She's studying
in class two. I want her to study so that she can grow up and be
something. Who can predict the future but maybe she'll become a
teacher one day. [QL]
[QL]
Madeleine Morris: But if India doesn't make progress soon on closing
the gap between rich and poor, Rahima's life may not be that much
better than her mother's. [PARA]
Africa too is lagging on all the goals and at its current rate is
likely to miss all of them. In fact, not one single region of the
world is on target to meet all the goals. Why are we so off track?
The reasons are complex and vary from country to country. But Todd
Moss, a research fellow at the Washington think tank the Center for
Global Development, believes the Millennium Development Goals were
ill-conceived from the outset. [QL]
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Todd Moss: Well, the problem is setting global universal targets
where you have a country like China or Vietnam having the same
target in many cases as a country like Mali or Malawi and clearly it
doesn't make sense to have universal goals in lots of cases but for
political reasons, because this is the UN, every child has a right
to be in school, we set the same goal. In many cases, the goals are
way too ambitious for lots of poor countries. Lots of African
countries, for example, have primary school enrolment below 50 per
cent and they're now being asked to reach universal primary
completion by 2015. Now that's a transition that took about a
century in the rich countries and we're now asking African countries
to do this in a really short time period. And the risk is that
countries that make progress will still be deemed failures even if
they do great things just because the goal is overly ambitious. [QL]
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Madeleine Morris: But Todd Moss's view is not one that's widely
heard amongst the global development community, even though it may
in some cases be held privately. Rather, the prevailing view is that
lack of money is the main factor impeding the goals' achievement. [PARA]
John McArthur again from the United Nations Millennium Project. [QL]
[QL]
John McArthur: Probably the biggest issue on the table this year is
the question of resources and making resources available to fund the
basic investments needed to half poverty within the decade. There's
no question that money isn't the only thing that matters but there's
a simple reality that if we don't get the fertiliser in the ground
in Africa, we won't grow enough food. If we don't pay the salaries
for the nurses, they won't actually be able to staff the clinics and
if we don't pay for the basic medicines that dying and sick people
need, they will continue to be sick and indeed die in mass number. [QL]
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Madeleine Morris: This is the point at which the global community
divides. The United States threw a spanner in the works when three
weeks ago it produced its own draft of the outcome document all
member states will sign at the end of this UN Summit. Where the
original draft document authored by General Assembly president Jean
Ping contained explicit commitments to the Millennium Development
Goals and urged donor countries to give 0.7 per cent of their gross
national income in aid, the American draft under the leadership of
its new and controversial UN ambassador John Bolton cast out all
mention of the Millennium Development Goals and their financing. [PARA]
Todd Moss again. [QL]
[QL]
Todd Moss: The issue is whether the US is going to make a commitment
to long-term aid targets and I think the answer to that is no. Even
if the administration wanted to do that, that would be
counterproductive with Congress and it's unlikely to happen and
that's what the administration is trying to avoid in New York. [QL]
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Madeleine Morris: The United States argues that because Congress
controls its budget, it's unable to make financial commitments 10
years into the future. But there are deeper cultural differences at
work too. [QL]
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Todd Moss: The view in Europe that America hates foreign aid is not
really true. Americans are willing to finance foreign assistance but
the default position in the US is that you have to show me that this
money is going to be well-spent before we allocate it. And we're not
going to focus on the overall flows until we know what it's going to
be spent on and show that there are going to be results. Now in
Europe, I know the focus is very much on let's start with the bottom
line … how much do we need, how do we get the overall aid flows up …
and then we'll think about what are the best ways to spend this
effectively. So really it's kind of, it's the mirror image here. [QL]
[QL]
Madeleine Morris: After two weeks of late night, high level
discussions, the draft document does commit to Millennium
Development Goals although in a much more watered down form than the
original. But the furore shows just how fragile the MDGs are. The UN
says $200 billion are needed in order to achieve the goals. Whatever
the disputes about whether such a large cash injection could be used
effectively to produce results, at present financial commitments for
aid are nowhere near that level. Only a third of their way into the
time frame, the consensus is that 2005 is the make or break year for
Millennium Development Goals, as Kevin Watkins from the United
Nations Human Development Report explains. [QL]
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Kevin Watkins: 2005 is a crossroads for development. If we don't
break now with the business-as-usual inert approach that we've seen
over the past five years, these goals will be missed, the promise
will be broken and the consequences of that broken promise will be
suffered above all by the people at the sharp end, by the kids who
don't go to school, by the children who die unnecessarily but it
would be folly, I think, for the citizens of rich countries to
imagine that mass poverty and the extremes of wealth inequality that
we see in the world today will not affect their own security and
prosperity in the long run. We're all in this together, we're a
global community, we do in a sense sink or swim together and now is
the time to start swimming and to use this summit to set a new
course. [QL]
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Madeleine Morris: But there are limits to what this summit can
actually achieve. Reiterating commitment to the goals is important
to their effectiveness as targets but whether they can be met hinges
on a variety of factors, many of which are beyond the scope of the
UN. The end result of the Doha round of trade talks of the World
Trade Organisation, the global oil price and internal factors like
corruption and even climate change are just as important to the
prospects of developing countries as aid, if not more so. [PARA]
While no one disputes the aim of eliminating poverty, the means
of getting there and the role of the Millennium Development Goals
are still not clear.

End