Ten years after the United Nations launched the "Decade for the Eradication of Poverty", more than one billion people still live without access to safe drinking water, health care, adequate housing and other essentials of daily life, development experts and independent observers here say.
"Poverty is like a communicable disease that is continuously spreading throughout the world," Jesusa Gamboa told participants at a U.N. meeting called to assess the decade-long progress on poverty reduction.
Representing a civil society group from the Philippines, the 17-year-old delegate said that neither she nor her family and friends were initially aware of the campaign.
"We did not see any impact of this work. Instead, the situation is becoming worse," Gamboa told IPS in an interview. "It's we -- the children and the youth -- whom poverty strikes the hardest."
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Even as the number of hungry people has been rising, mainly, in Africa by about 6 million a year, food aid is in sharp decline, the Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) James T. Morris said today.
"Globally hunger claims more lives than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined," Mr. Morris told a special event on the food crisis in Africa organized by the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.
Speaking at the same event General Assembly President Jan Eliasson called it "shameful that we are still not good enough in providing emergency assistance when it is needed."
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) there are now 852 million hungry people worldwide and the number has been increasing by 6 million annually since 2000. Over five million children die of hunger and malnutrition every year.
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Despite the fact that poverty can be seen as a violation of basic human rights, 1.1 billion people, or about a fifth of the world's population, scrape by on less than one dollar a day.
And a total of half the world's people live on less than two dollars a day. "Poverty devastates families, communities and nations," said U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in a message marking the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on Monday.
This year's theme, "Achieving the Millennium Development Goals: Empowering the Poorest of the Poor", made clear that there is a need for partnerships with the people who are often excluded from the development process.
"Poverty is more than just income poverty. It is also manifested by the lack of access to education, basic health services, clean water and sanitation," said Jomo Kwame Sundaram, U.N. assistant secretary-general for economic development, underlining the importance of implementing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
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Two world forums start today, one economic and one social. Both offer a real chance to tackle global poverty Alex Wijeratna, Wednesday January 26, 2005, The Guardian Two meetings starting today will consider the challenges of globalisation. But they come from diametrically opposed viewpoints and experience, and it's a fair bet they will come away with different prescriptions for change. In Europe the great and the good will gather in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum, the annual talking shop of the world's political and business elite. This year's theme is Taking Responsibility For Tough Issues, covering, among other topics, equitable globalisation, governance, and climate change. A select invitation-only group of 2,200 delegates will be asked to decide their top six priorities and draw up action plans. |
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The victims of the tsunami pay the price of war on Iraq US and British aid is dwarfed by the billions both spend on slaughter George Monbiot, Tuesday January 4, 2005, The Guardian There has never been a moment like it on British television. The Vicar of Dibley, one of our gentler sitcoms, was bouncing along with its usual bonhomie on New Year's Day when it suddenly hit us with a scene from another world. Two young African children were sobbing and trying to comfort each other after their mother had died of Aids. How on earth, I wondered, would the show make us laugh after that? It made no attempt to do so. One by one the characters, famous for their parochial boorishness, stood in front of the camera wearing the white armbands which signalled their support for the Make Poverty History campaign. You would have to have been hewn from stone not to cry. The timing was perfect. In my local Oxfam shop last week, people were queueing to the door to pledge money for the tsunami fund. A pub on the other side of town raised £1,000 on Saturday night. In the pot on the counter of the local newsagent's there must be nearly £100. The woman who runs the bakery told me about the homeless man she had seen, who emptied his pockets in the bank, saying "I just want to do my bit", while the whole queue tried not to cry. |
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Dr Jack Preger MBE ~ STWR
I live next to a monumental rubbish dump, the proud possession of Kolkata (previously Calcutta) Municipal Corporation. I was here at this location in Calcutta long before the dump arrived. But that counts for nothing, of course, and I have too much rubbish of my own to face trying to move out to another, sweeter- smelling location. The Corporation has a fleet of open, aged trucks on to which the night's collection of refuse is loaded with gay abandon by a gang of labourers armed with shovels, some of which, like the trucks & the labourers, have seen much better days. When loaded, the trucks are carefully parked outside my living quarters, allowing all concerned, except, myself, a period for rest and refreshment. Perched on top of the tarpaulin covered loads of garbage, the lorry crews happily consume their life-supporting snacks. Parked conveniently close by is a small three-wheeler van, with a driver and assistant fast asleep, sprawled out across the single seat, lower limbs dangling out on either side. To avoid any mistake on the part of the public, the van is prominently marked Kolkata Corporation Carcass Van. The sleeping gentlemen are patiently waiting for the Corporation garbage collectors to arrive with their little hand-pulled, two-wheeled carts; which may contain animal carcasses as well as a heady selection of garbage. Only rarely is one privileged to see a white painted van with a black cross on the side, which is labeled Dead Body Ambulance. As though this was not enough, after declaring the adjoining property an Heritage Building (a building of historical importance) the Corporation graciously built a public conveneience next to the rubbish dump. Lacking the funds to employ staff to operate the convenience, it has remained firmly closed ever since it was built. But the public got the message OK and cheerfully urinate outside the convenience, since they can't urinate inside. As though this was not enough, in addition to the gang of garbage shovellers the dump is graced with a competing gang of scavengers. Competing, in fact, for the garbage. They pick over everything: not only is paper, glass, metal and plastic carefully separated, packed and carried off as head-loads for sale. The left-over waste food from restaurants etc is shoveled into large drums and used for animal feed. As yet, the feed is moved to the animals. At other locations, the animals live on the dumps. The scavengers frequently get injured in their work, by the garbage or by the trucks. In addition to the usual hazards, home-made bombs beloved of Kolkata's gangsters take their toll. Nor are the scavengers immune to the common afflictions of tuberculosis and malaria. |
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Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs Director, The Earth Institute at Columbia University
Special Advisory to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan
THE US FIGHT AGAINST the FIGHT AGAINST POVERTY
The negotiations on the draft declaration for the World Summit - which opens on Tuesday - have been nothing short of bizarre. The United States government has fought a relentless battle to dissociate itself from specific obligations regarding international development, and has tried repeatedly to the quash obligations that it has taken on the past. All of this has been taking place at a time when the US itself has become an aid recipient, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The opening salvo a couple of weeks ago was the remarkable assertion by the United States government that the Millennium Development Goals do not even exist, so that the phrase itself should be expunged from the document. This was news to the rest of the world, who were gathering at the Summit first and foremost to find ways to reinforce the Millennium Development Goals. The US claimed that it had signed the Millennium Declaration but not the Millennium Development Goals. The argument was not very impressive. All 18 of the targets of the Millennium Development Goals - to halve hunger, fight disease, reduce maternal mortality, ensure access to safe drinking water, and more - are explicitly part of the Millennium Declaration. With 190 countries standing in opposition to the US position, the US relented. The longer battle has ensued around official development assistance and the target of 0.7 percent of GNP in official development aid. It seems at times that all US foreign policy regarding economic development revolves around the US insistence to pay almost nothing to help the poorest countries. US official aid levels are 0.16 percent of GNP, an increase from 0.10 percent when President Bush took office but still the lowest or second lowest of all donors (vying with Italy for the bottom slot). US aid levels for Africa are 0.03 percent of GNP, meaning that the US gives Africa just 3 cents in aid for every $100 of US GNP. Much of the rest of US aid still goes to ?strategic? countries such as Pakistan, Turkey, and Egypt, or to US consultant salaries. Why the US government is so dead-set against doing more to help impoverished and dying people is one of the great mysteries of our time. It?s not as if the poorest countries are asking for an open checkbook or an unconstrained line of credit. They are asking for rich countries to honor a modest commitment, a mere 0.7 percent of GNP, roughly one seventh of what the US is spending this year on the military and one third of what the US has spent on tax cuts in the first Bush term. Just as with the Millennium Development Goals, the US government has worked overtime to huff and puff that it never signed the 0.7 target, and thus should not be bound by it. Even if it were true that the U.S. had never signed on, the sight of the world?s richest country denying a long-standing international target in this manner is stunning. The US signed on to the 0.7 target in the Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development in March 2002. It has since bobbed and weaved to evade the implications of that agreement. In paragraph 42 of the Monterrey Consensus, the US and other signatories declared that they ?urge developed countries that have not done so to make concrete efforts toward the target of 0.7 percent of GNP in official development assistance.? The European Union took up its pledge, and has defined ?concrete efforts? as a new timetable to reach 0.56 percent of GNP in official aid by 2010 and 0.7 percent of GNP by 2015. The US on its side has simply been claiming that the target does not exist, and telling some in the corridors that signing the Monterrey pledge had been a mistake. This aggressive position has continued down to the details. The US has fought commitments to a ?Quick Win? against malaria through the mass distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets and effective medications. It has resisted commitments to quick wins in other areas as well. In the end, every specific target and timetable to help the world?s poorest of the poor has come under US fire. The US fight against the fight against poverty would be bizarre at any moment (remember John Kennedy pledging ?to those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required?) but it has been especially shocking in the face of Hurricane Katrina. The US is accepting aid from UN agencies, Mexico, Europe, and others, at the very moment it is working overtime to avoid or evade commitments to the poorest of the poor, who are dying by the millions each year due to insufficient assistance from the donor countries. There is a silver lining in all of this, believe it or not. The American people have been aghast at the failures of Washington to prepare for, and then address, the hurricane. They have been shocked that President Bush could declare that ?I don?t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees [in New Orleans]? when that risk was notorious and had been discussed for decades. Similarly, whenever they have gotten a glimpse of the UN negotiations, they have been shocked. Though the American people know little about the Millennium Development Goals (since President Bush has perhaps never even uttered the phrase), editorial writers around the country, in both liberal and conservative regions, were dismayed that the US delegation was working in America?s name to undercut the world?s measurable and monitorable poverty alleviation targets that provide a clear framework for accountable results. Perhaps the most notable bottom line this week will be that the voices of the poor are finally piercing the deep layers of indifference and misdirection. Professor Sachs is a director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and author of The End of Poverty (Penguin, 2005). Published on Tuesday, September 13, 2005 by the Financial Times/UK |
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