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 16th May 07 - Eveline Herfkens, Global Policy Forum
In a few weeks, eight of the world’s most important leaders will meet in Heiligendamm. Joining them will be media and activists from around the world, closely following the proceedings, ready to analyse the implications of every word. So as the G8 meets again, what can we expect? Well, for those working towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, I would say not much. What we know is that leaders are likely to announce a few small sectoral initiatives on poverty. While I am sure that these will make the headlines and sound important, I’m equally convinced they won’t make much of a difference. And even if leaders were to surprise us with more ‘important sounding’ announcements, I would still remain nonplussed. Why? Because I’ve seen it all before. Remember Gleneagles? It seems the G8 leaders would conveniently forget. And going further back – remember the Africa Action Plan from Kananaskis, in 2002, where G8 leaders promised that no poor country with the plans and policies to reduce poverty would be thwarted in their efforts because of lack of funding? |
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 13th May 07 - Jeffrey Sachs, MiamiHerald.comThe Millennium Development Goals are the world's agreed goals to cut poverty, hunger and disease. Established in 2000, their targets were to be met by 2015. We are now at the halfway point. So far, despite endless words about increasing aid to poor countries, the rich G-8 countries are reneging on their part of the bargain. Cynicism abounds here. At the G-8 Gleneagles Summit in 2005, member countries pledged to double aid to Africa by 2010. Soon after the summit, I was invited to a small, high-level meeting to discuss the summit's follow-up. I asked for a spreadsheet showing the year-by-year planned increases and the allocation of those planned increases across donor and recipient countries. |
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25 April 07 - Larry Elliott and Kate Connolly, The Guardian The west's foot-dragging over aid pledges to Africa was described last night as "grotesque" and a threat to the lives of the world's poor by the body set up by Tony Blair to monitor the results of Britain's Gleneagles summit. Almost two years after the G8 group of leading industrial nations promised to boost development assistance by $50bn a year by 2010, the Africa Progress Panel headed by the former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan said rich countries were only 10% of the way to their target. |
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 21st April 07, Stephen Browne, openDemocracy
It is exactly twenty years since Gro Harlem Brundtland's World Commission on Environment and Development produced Our Common Future. The report exhorted humanity to pursue "the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". It firmly affixed the word "sustainable" to development and coined what is still the most commonly used phrase for the process of global advancement.
Has its time come at last?
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 27th March 07 - Bob Edgar, Tompaine.com Last week marked the 200th anniversary of the end of the transatlantic slave trade. Two centuries later, it is clear that one of history’s most towering evils, the enslavement of human beings, came to an end only when citizens challenged their governments to understand slavery as incompatible with basic laws of God and humanity. Around the world today, citizen campaigners are leading their governments to understand that deadly poverty and crippling debt, slaveries of our own age, similarly are incompatible with the basic laws of human dignity. Despite the international community’s new commitments to poverty eradication over the past seven years, particularly the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals , the basic inequities that fuel deadly poverty in our world are as pronounced as ever. Every day, 13 percent of the world’s population goes to bed hungry and nearly 15,000 people die of AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. |
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 22nd Feb 07 - Aseem Shrivastava, STWR
"An epitome of beauty, serenity and colonial charm…” - From an advertisement for The Carlton, a luxury hotel- created by The Rahejas in Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu Two competing notions of development are increasingly at war in the Indian economic landscape. One model is familiar to economists and policy-makers of an earlier era. We shall discuss that model later. Development according to developers: the new Indian way
With changing times it would be folly to cling to outmoded concepts. One such concept, which wasted the nation’s best resources during the days of the license-permit, Neta-Babu Raj, was the post-war notion of development. It sucked the human, capital and natural resources of the country for over four decades – for which we have little to show. There is thus urgent need to create and implement an entirely new model of development which answers Indian aspirations in a globalized world with far greater success. Here is what it looks like. |
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31st Jan 07 - Imani Countess, Common Dreams.org During its annual meeting in December, The National Caucus of Black State Legislators (NCBSL) called on the Bush administration and the U.S. Congress to recognize the important role that debt cancellation plays in African development. |
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