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Halfway through a process initiated by world leaders in 2000, the world is still facing a daunting task in its way to realize the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of eight goals that all U.N. member states have agreed to try to achieve by the year 2015.

6th Dec 07 - ChinaView

Seven years ago, world leaders at the U.N. Millennium Summit launched the MDGs, which include halving the number of people suffering from poverty and hunger, promoting gender equality, increasing access to education and health resources and improving environmental sustainability.

Since then, as a series of recent reports released by the United Nations and other international organizations showed, the collective record so far has been mixed.

Despite some gains in cutting extreme poverty, progress toward achieving the benchmarks on development and health care targets was poor at a time when the world reached 2007, the midpoint between the adoption of the MDGs and the 2015 target date.

Overall, the world has made headway in reducing extreme poverty. Worldwide, the number of people in developing countries living on less than 1 U.S. dollar a day fell to 980 million in 2004 -- down from 1.25 billion in 1990 and the proportion of people living in extreme poverty fell from nearly a third to 19 percent over this period, according to U.N. figures.

U.N. experts said if the trend continues, the MDG poverty reduction target will be met for the world as a whole and for most regions.

Statistics also showed improved coverage in education. More children in developing countries are going to school as enrollment in primary education in developing countries rose from 80 percent in 1991 to 88 percent in 2005.

Child mortality subsided and progress was also made in controlling malaria and the tuberculosis epidemic.

In spite of the gains, however, an overall success in realizing the MDGs is far from assured, as evidenced by the fact that nearly1 billion people are still living in extreme poverty, more than 5 million children die from malnutrition each year, death toll from AIDS keeps rising every year, half the population of the developing world still has no access to basic sanitation, and the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change are already being felt.

Currently, only one out of eight regional groups is on track to meet all the goals by 2015 and the gains were unevenly distributed. The decline in global poverty was largely due to rapid economic growth in Asia, particularly in Southern, Southeastern and Eastern Asia.

But in Western Asia, the poverty rate more than doubled during the same period. Even those regions with the largest strides face challenges in areas such as health and environmental sustainability

In Africa, home to a large majority of the poorest countries in the world, no single country will meet all the goals and the continent as a whole lags far behind. Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, is behind schedule on all of the MDGs with 41.1 percent of its population still living on 1 dollar a day or less.

Moreover, a spate of other challenges, including environment degradation, gender inequalities, high HIV prevalence and on-going wars and conflicts, are seriously impeding international efforts to achieve the MDGs.

On the other hand, international cooperation on implementing the development agenda has been moving slowly as a trend of giving priority to security over development persists.

At the turn of a new millennium, particularly in the aftermath of the 9/11, wars went on in many parts of the world and terrorism and other unconventional threats posed a growing threat to international security, distracting international attention from development issues.

U.N. experts said the MDGs cannot be achieved by the poorest countries alone without adequate resources provided by their development partners, mainly donors in the developed world.

But the harsh reality is that there has been a lack of any significant increase in Official Development Assistance (ODA) since 2004, which makes it even more difficult for developing countries to meet the MDGs. Total official development assistance declined in real terms by 5.1 percent between 2005 and 2006 and is expected to continue through 2007 as debt relief declines further.

The European Union member states have promised to achieve the ODA target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income by 2015 and so far only five countries -- Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden -- have met the target.

And despite promises made by the Group of Eight industrialized countries in 2005 to double their aid to African countries by 2010,little has been done so far. Aid to the least developed countries has essentially stalled since 2003 and aid to sub-Saharan Africa, excluding debt relief for Nigeria, increased by only 2 percent between 2005 and 2006.

"The world wants no new promises. It is imperative that all stakeholders meet, in their entirety, the commitments already in the Millennium Declaration, the 2002 Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development, and the 2005 World Summit," U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon said in a foreword to a report issued in July.

Regardless of the challenges and difficulties, the MDGs are still achievable if the international community takes urgent and concerted action, Ban said, warning that the lack of any significant increase in official development assistance since 2004makes it impossible, even for well-governed countries, to meet the MDGs.

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