| Food Crisis Threatens to Derail World's Promise to the Poor |
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As world leaders met for the latest summit on progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), ActionAid released a report to highlight how rich countries have contributed to the current food crisis. At the same time, Christian Aid and War on Want highlighted the negative impact of liberalisation and corporate abuses on the goals to eradicate global poverty. 26th September 08 - ActionAid Link to the report: Failing the Rural Poor While Prime Minister Gordon Brown is in New York trying to galvanise leaders into achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the world is in the grip of a food crisis which threatens to derail progress towards all eight of the poverty goals, warns ActionAid. In 2000 the world committed to halve the numbers of hungry people by 2015, along with other promises aimed at promoting poverty reduction, education, maternal health, gender equality and combating child mortality, Aids and other diseases. Some progress has been made, but maternal mortality – the goal most off track – has barely improved, and hunger is getting worse not better as the food crisis bites. The cost of staple foods has risen by an average of 80 per cent in two years. As a result 100 million more people have joined the ranks of the hungry, and a further 750 million are newly at risk of chronic hunger. ActionAid calculates that as many as 1.7 billion people, or a quarter of the world’s population, may now lack basic food security. In a new report, Failing the Rural Poor, ActionAid shows that over the past twenty years, rich countries have contributed to the current food crisis and aggravated the slow progress on the Millennium Development Goals by slashing aid to agriculture. Dr Claire Melamed, ActionAid’s head of policy, said that while money pledged in New York may help solve the immediate food crisis, donors must now redirect aid towards poor farmers to prevent a future, even more damaging, food crisis. "Thanks to Gordon Brown, world leaders are in New York discussing how to end poverty and hunger. But if they are serious about achieving the millennium goals and solving the food crisis they must refocus their aid efforts on solving the problems of the majority of the world’s poor people who are small farmers in poor countries. "Not only has the quantity of aid to agriculture fallen dramatically, it has been spent on the wrong things. It has not prioritised reducing hunger – the 10 countries that account for 69 per cent of the world’s hungry receive only 20 per cent of all agricultural aid," Dr Melamed said. The amount of aid to agriculture has declined steeply over the past two decades and what aid has been given has failed to target those who need it most – the poor and hungry. It has also been badly administered and coordinated, as donors themselves admit. As a proportion of all aid, agricultural aid now amounts to just 3.4% compared to 16.8% in 1980. ActionAid also believes it is no coincidence that maternal mortality, which is the most off-track goal, is also the one that depends most heavily on improving the status of women. 99% of maternal deaths occur in developing countries, with women continuing to die of pregnancy-related causes at the rate of one a minute. ActionAid says that women’s rights must be put at the centre of efforts to strengthen health systems and provide universal access to sexual and reproductive health services. How rich countries and big business undermine the MDG war on poverty 24th September 08 -Christian Aid As world leaders gather in New York for make or break talks about halving extreme global poverty, Christian Aid warns that progress is being hampered by the activities of rich countries and big business. Tomorrow’s meeting, a High-level Event organised by the United Nations, will highlight the lack of progress being made in helping the developing world achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Christian Aid says that short-sighted trade liberalisation imposed on poor countries, and the use of offshore havens by transnational corporations (TNCs) to reduce their tax liabilities in the developing world, are grievously undermining international aid efforts. ‘The aims of the MDGs are wholly desirable, but while rich countries discuss how much more aid they can afford, they are missing one very salient point,’ said Christian Aid policy manager Alex Cobham. ‘What they are giving with one hand, they are taking away with the other.’ Eight MDGs to tackle global poverty were agreed in 2000 during a UN Millennium Summit. The first seven include halving by 2015 the number of people living on less than one dollar a day, and the number suffering from hunger, promoting gender equality, achieving ‘full and productive’ employment for all, making primary education universal, and obtaining dramatic cuts in child and maternal mortality rates. An eighth MDG called for ‘a global partnership for development’ that would address the needs of least developed countries and include an ‘open, rule-based, and predictable non discriminatory trading and financial system’. The United Nations says that while significant progress has been made in the fight against poverty, ‘urgent and increased efforts’ are needed, particularly in sub- Saharan Africa. Christian Aid says that the real problem is the failure of the international community to implement MDG 8. ‘The first seven MDGs are being held back by a lack of funds. They are targets that can be met by spending, but to spend, you have to have growth that generates revenue,’ said Mr. Cobham. ‘MDG 8 sets out how that growth can be achieved. It is completely undermined, however, by the insistence on trade liberalisation in economies that are not ready for it, together with the evasion of taxes by big business.’ Trade Liberalisation: Christian Aid says that fundamental changes are needed to the manner in which the international community seeks to influence agricultural and trade policies in poor countries. Based on a doctrinaire belief that ‘free trade’ is always an engine of growth, rich countries have made aid and trade for poor countries conditional on the opening up of their markets. Forced to remove protective tariffs safeguarding domestic production, developing countries have watched helplessly as their agricultural and industrial sectors have atrophied in the face of cheaper imports from abroad, which in the case of agricultural products are often heavily subsidised in the country of origin. Although there is growing recognition of the damage caused by trade liberalisation, it remains firmly implanted as a principle of the Economic Partnership Agreements that the European Union is pressing African, Caribbean and Pacific nations to sign. ‘If the international community is really serious about realising the MDGs, then it must ensure that development is a priority in trade negotiations between rich and poor countries,’ said Mr. Cobham. Towards that end, the World Trade Organisation Doha Development Round talks which collapsed in Geneva earlier this year must be restarted, and completed in accordance with the original intention of being development focused, and of special benefit to lowest income countries. World Bank economists had concluded that the outlines of the deal being discussed in Geneva would have undermined the economies of the poorest countries, showing just how far the talks were from being a genuine Development Round. ‘Failure to deliver on MDG8 is holding back progress on the other MDGs’, said Mr. Cobham. ‘Developing countries should not be forced to sign away their economic policies, but liberalise at their own pace.’ Examples of the negative impact of liberalisation include: In Jamaica, imports of vegetable oils between 1995 and 2000 were more than double what they were between 1990 and 1994, and domestic production fell by 68 per cent. Haiti saw rice production slump after trade was liberalised in the 1990’s under pressure from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), precipitating a huge influx of heavily subsidised rice from the United States. In Ghana, where tomato cultivation was widespread, World Bank and IMF policy conditions led to the import of heavily subsidised processed tomato preserves from the EU increasing by 628 per cent between 1993 and 2003. Two local canning factories were forced to close and tomato growers throughout the country continue to face extreme hardship. Tax Evasion: Earlier this year, Christian Aid highlighted the manner in which illegal, trade related tax evasion was also depriving the developing world of badly needed revenue. It estimated that just two forms of tax evasion alone were costing poor countries US$160bn a year in lost corporation tax. That money, if used according to present spending patterns in the developing world, could have saved the lives of 5.6 million children between 2000 and 2015. One method of evasion is ‘transfer mispricing’ in which different parts of the same TNC sell goods or services to each other at manipulated prices. This enables the TNC to claim that the goods sold from the developing world fetched very low prices to reduce their tax liability. The ‘buyer’, another part of the same TNC based in a tax haven, then inflates the price when it sells the produce on, ensuring that the profits accrue off shore where they will not be taxed. The sums involved in ‘transfer mispricing’ and ‘false invoicing’ - where similar transactions take place between unrelated companies – would be more than enough to meet the extra US$40-60bn the World Bank estimates poor countries will need annually to meet the MDGs. It is also more than one and a half times the size of the combined aid budgets of the whole rich world in 2007 (US$103.7bn). ‘Steps must be taken to address the obstacles which limit the amount of money developing countries can make from tax revenues. It is far better for countries to rely on tax than aid’, said Mr. Cobham. ‘Part of the solution would be to force corporations to report what they pay in every country where they operate. That way, anomalies could be quickly spotted.’ In the face of widespread tax abuse, he added, it was ironic that big business had been asked by UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown to embark on a set of initiatives to contribute to the achievement of MDGs, including offering employment opportunities, increasing incomes and implementing responsible standards and practices. ‘Harnessing the drive to make money to the drive to achieve the MDGs could in principle be very rewarding,’ said Mr. Cobham. ‘But some mechanism must be created to monitor that what corporations are doing really is in the interests of the countries where they will roll out these programmes. ‘And without doubt, the biggest contribution some companies could make would be to stop the practice of transfer mispricing. 'We welcome Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s demand for greater global financial transparency in his speech this week to the Labour Party conference, and hope that the details of this proposal will deliver the type of structural change that will enable poorer countries to build truly effective taxation systems to support their own development.’ World failure on poverty 'unacceptable' 25th September 08 - War on Want Over a billion people will continue to face desperate poverty and starvation in 2015 as a result of governments’ failure to crack down on corporate abuses and eradicate global poverty. This warning came today from global justice charity War on Want as British prime minister Gordon Brown joined other international leaders at the UN summit in New York on the anti-poverty Millennium Development Goals. New World Bank figures show over 1.4 billion people live in extreme poverty in the developing world – 400 million more than previous estimates. With rising food and fuel prices adding to those numbers daily, even the most optimistic projections still predict over a billion people living in desperate want in 2015. War on Want executive director John Hilary said: “The global poverty epidemic remains a scar on the conscience of the world. It is unacceptable for government leaders to continue with business as usual when one in four of the world’s people are condemned to crushing poverty. All we have seen is tinkering around the edges, not the radical change needed to confront such a desperate situation.” Hilary continued: “Governments seem to have bottomless pockets when it comes to saving banks from their own failings. Yet there is no such action to protect the poorest from the ravages of finance capital. Leaders at the UN summit should examine their consciences and put the needs of the poor before the interests of the banking elite.” War on Want notes that the developing world loses £250 billion each year through business tax dodges alone – enough to reach the UN’s anti-poverty targets several times over. Tax dodging and capital flight costs Africa an estimated £75 billion each year – five times what the continent receives in aid. The charity urged Gordon Brown to take action against British tax havens – including Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Cayman Islands and Bermuda – used by multinational corporations to rob poor countries of revenues which could finance essential public services such as health, education and clean water supply. War on Want also pressed Mr Brown to drop his opposition to a stamp duty on sterling currency transactions, which could raise billions for anti-poverty programmes. The charity attacked the premier for claiming that support for the summit from UK companies including mining giant Anglo American and Wal-Mart, including its British subsidiary Asda, can help achieve the development goals. War on Want research has revealed that Anglo American operations abroad are fuelling conflict and human rights abuse in developing countries. And in addition to Wal-Mart’s notorious anti-union practices, War on Want has found workers still paid less than half a living wage producing clothes for Asda in Bangladesh. The charity says Britain must share the blame alongside other rich nations for these grim facts:
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