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After the Deputy Lord Mayor’s welcome, an introduction to the Millennium Development Goals, was read by Bert Gedin. All speakers agreed that progress had been made, but the process has been slowing down and efforts should be renewed. Some points made at this meeting, facilitated by Ravi Kumar, chairman of B’ham UNA, follow.
Former DFID Secretary, Clare Short, listed major conferences which preceded the MDG agreement, including the Beijing event focussing on the empowerment of women, Cairo on reproductive health, Rio on the environment and several major political events, including the overthrow of apartheid and release of Nelson Mandela and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Clare pointed out that the MDGs are related, for example education will be adversely affected if a child has no access to potable drinking water. To release resources, she suggested that some military spending could be transferred to education.
She described a ‘high point’, when in 2000, 189 world leaders unanimously adopted the “United Nations Millennium Declaration” at the conclusion of their Millennium Summit on 8 September 2000, and concluded that the ‘Arab Spring’ and other changes of mood offer hope that more progress will be made towards achieving the MDGs.
Malcolm Harper, now an independent international consultant after long and distinguished service as director of the United Nations Association, looked back over improvements made since the ‘60s and focussed on the factors inhibiting the achievement of the MDGs:
- the rich-poor divide – some multinational companies are far wealthier than some developing countries;
- poor rural infrastructure – for example, many needy people have to walk many miles to reach medical facilities;
- aid which is not focussed on quality – for example, increasing the number of children attending school, regardless of equipment provided and staffing levels;
- corruption – both corruptors and corruptees must be tackled.
Malcolm believed that less progress has been made towards the goal of gender equality and that this should be urgently addressed.
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John Cooper, Christian Aid’s Regional Co-ordinator for the West Midlands, spoke next. Christian Aid thinks that the Declaration’s emphasis on empowering people living in poverty was translated into telling poor counties what their priorities should be. Its emphasis on powerful countries and companies meeting their responsibilities to others was translated into a system which fails to hold them accountable for their part in fuelling global poverty.
Progress has been made with providing clean water but the other MDGs are significantly behind target level in areas, including maternal and child mortality, hunger and access to sanitation.
Christian Aid’s new report on progress towards the MDGs says that the fundamental reason for the failure of the MDGs to achieve more is that they are based on a flawed understanding of poverty – which ignores the root causes of the problem. They are blind to inequality, unsustainability and the importance of input by ordinary people to decision-making. The report argues that a successor to the MDGs after 2015, which truly reflects the ambition of the Declaration, is vital.
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Rianne ten Veen, of Green Creation, examined assertions made about the MDGs:
Too ambitious?
In 1996, the Rome Declaration on World Food Security aimed to halve the number of hungry people by 2015, but MDG 1 merely aims to halve the proportion of people in developing countries who suffer from hunger and has a baseline of 1990 instead of what would be a more ambitious 1996.
Too expensive?
The estimated cost of achieving the MDGs is $189bn but:
- Annual fossil fuel subsidies: $312bn
- Iraq War: $648bn
- Wall Street bailout: $8.5trn
Lagging because of lack of effort from poor countries?
No; because of the lack of a level playing field in terms of debt, trade and investment.The amount of debt relief is often deducted from the aid budget. Only 1% of foreign direct investment benefits the poorest and 82% FDI goes into the extractive industries.
The role of the WTO was questioned by Malcolm Harper – is it really acting in the interest of poor countries? Rianne points out that the Millennium Declaration had fair trade as its ambition, but MDG8 offers more obvious advantages for foreign multinationals, and trade liberalisation.
A brief case study of Argentina was given to illustrate the uneven playing field.The ICSID Convention is a multilateral treaty formulated by the Executive Directors of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank). ICSID’s website reveals that, in all but one of the first fifty pending cases, wealthy corporations are bringing charges against small developing countries – 24 against Argentina. The MNCs usually ‘win’.
MDG7 on environmental sustainability appears to relate only to poor countries, though the rich countries are responsible for the high greenhouse gas emissions and the poor suffer most of the consequences. Rianne concluded that Millennium Consumption Goals (MCG) could help make our development path more sustainable, by focusing on the 1.4 billion people in the richest 20 percentile of the world’s population. They consume over 80% of global output, or 60 times more than the poorest 20 percentile. Instead of viewing the rich as a problem, they should be persuaded to contribute to the solution.
A vote of thanks was given by Gill Briggs.#
NOTE: The Millennium Consumption Goals proposal was made by Prof. Munasinghe in January 2011 at the United Nations in New York. The background paper for the original proposal “MCG: How the Rich Can Make the Planet More Sustainable” is available at: http://www.mohanmunasinghe.com/pdf/Island-MCG-1Feb20112.pdf.
