Global Poverty Reduction Policies? Some reflections on the next UN summit

Francine Mestrum

www.globalsocialjustice.com

From September 20 to 22 a High Level Plenary Meeting will be held at the UN in New York to look atthe achievements concerning the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Once again, nongovernmental organizations in wealthy countries are mobilizing their troops in order to push formore development aid.For those who might not remember: the MDGs are 8 objectives, 16 targets and 60 indicatorsconcerning development cooperation. They aim at halving extreme poverty between 1990 and 2015,providing primary education for all children, gender equality and empowerment for women, fightingHIV/aids and malaria, reducing child and maternal mortality and caring for a better environment. Theeighth and not quantified objective concerns the obligations of rich countries: moredevelopmentaid, debt relief, access to their markets, affordable medicines and new technology.The UN wants its member states to take vigorous action. Five years before the final date, the aim isto see what has happened and what remains to be done.

A missed opportunity

These objectives were adopted at the Millennium Summit in 2000, ten years after the end of the coldwar and before 9/11. Typically, the Millennium Declaration contains all traditional and importantprinciples and values of the UN, its commitment to its charter, equal sovereignty, self-determination,peace and solidarity, shared responsibility. But it also stresses the neoliberal accents its powerfulmember states want to stress: free trade and strong partnerships with the private sector, for povertyreduction as well as for the realization of the goals of the UN.Unfortunately, after the summit, well-intentioned civil servants have taken out of this Declarationsome of its objectives and presented them as a separate program. Decent work and human rightswere left out. Shall we call it a coincidence that the selected objectives were totally in line with theInternational Development Goals the OECD had proposed in 1996? That was one year after the UNSocial Development Summit in Copenhagen adopted an encompassing action platform on poverty,employment and social integration. After the adoption of the Millennium Goals, the Copenhagenprogram was never heard of again. The international community had decided it wanted to help half of the extremely poor people and in order to prevent any criticism, they stated this was a veryambitious program. The NGOs agreed.In 2005, at the MDG+5 summit, a controversial text was adopted calling for the implementation of the MDGs but without any reference to the UN conferences of the 1990s. It introduced the verycontroversial concept of responsibility to protect. On the positive side, we have to mention areference to the need of ambitious national development strategies and to innovative sources of financing as well as to efforts to reduce capital flight and measures to curb illicit transfer of funds.

However, in its preparatory report to the summit (

n larger freedom

), Secretary-General Kofi Annanhad pointed to the fact that the MDGs 

clearly do not in themselves represent a completedevelopment agenda. They do not directly encompass some of the broader issues covered by theconferences of the 1990s, nor do they address  growing inequality

. Nevertheless, economic andsocial development had disappeared from the agenda. At the G8 meeting in Gleneagles that yearBono stood hand in hand with the NGOs and the World Bank to call for a 

Make Poverty History

.

No reliable data

One of the major problems with the poverty reduction policies of international organizations is aserious lack of reliable data. The World Bank is the only provider of statistics on global poverty, but itconstantly changes its methodology and corrects its failures. In 2000, poverty lines were changedand extreme poverty in Subsaharan Africa rose from 39.1 to 49,7 %; a new estimate for extremepoverty in 1980 gave 1,482 billion people instead of the former 800 million. In 2007 it modified itsestimates again for a whole series of countries. Apparently it had overestimated the Chineseeconomy with 40 % and Indian economy with 25 %. It once again introduced new poverty lines, thistime 1,25 $ a day for extreme poverty and 2,50 $ a day for poverty.According to the UNDP in its Human Development Report of 2005, 67 countries were lacking anydata on its population living with less than 1 $ a day, and 93 countries were lacking trend data.Today, 118 countries have data on two different moments on 16 of the 60 MDG indicators. In 2003there were only 4. The most recent UN Report on the World Social Situation (

Re-thinking Poverty

)states that either Chinese poverty is underestimated, or poverty rates in other countries areoverestimated.Be that as it may, according to the latest statistics of 2008, global extreme poverty is declining andthere is a serious chance that the MDGs will be met by 2015. Is that a major a achievement? No, it isnot. Because this progress is exclusively due to the declining poverty in China and India. China hadalready met the MDGs in 2000, at the moment the MDGs were adopted and it was decided thereference year was going to be 1990. Secondly, the extreme poverty rates are only very slowlydeclining for Subsaharan Africa (from 50,8 % in 1981 to 50,4 % in 2005) while the number of extremely poor people has been rising (from 202 million in 1981 to 384,2 million in 2005). Instead of halving extreme poverty between 1990 and 2015 (in percentage), one can almost speak of doublingextreme poverty from 1981 to 2005 (in number of people).

Neoliberal policies

The second problem with the MDGs and other poverty reduction policies, like the Poverty ReductionStrategy Papers (PRSPs) of the World Bank and the IMF, is that they do not require any change in theneoliberal policies the Bretton Woods institutions are still imposing. Even if there is a kind of consensus on the end of the Washington Consensus, conditionality has hardly changed, free tradeis still considered as the alpha and omega of growth, liberalization, privatizations and deregulationare still on the agenda, fiscal deficits and inflation are still perceived as the worst enemies. As anevaluation document of 2007 of the IMF revealed, a consequence is that most aid poor countriesreceive cannot even be spent but has to be put in the reserves.