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Francine Mestrum

 
   



From September 20 to 22 a ͚High Level Plenary Meeting͛ will be held at the UN in New York to look at
the achievements concerning the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Once again, non
governmental organizations in wealthy countries are mobilizing their troops in order to push for
more development aid.

For those who might not remember: the MDGs are 8 objectives, 16 targets and 60 indicators
concerning development cooperation. They aim at halving extreme poverty between 1990 and 2015,
providing primary education for all children, gender equality and empowerment for women, fighting
HIV/aids and malaria, reducing child and maternal mortality and caring for a better environment. The
eighth and not quantified objective concerns the obligations of rich countries: moredevelopment
aid, 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 is
to see what has happened and what remains to be done.

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These objectives were adopted at the Millennium Summit in 2000, ten years after the end of the cold
war and before 9/11. Typically, the Millennium Declaration contains all traditional and important
principles 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 powerful
member states want to stress: free trade and strong partnerships with the private sector, for poverty
reduction 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 Declaration
some of its objectives and presented them as a separate program. Decent work and human rights
were left out. Shall we call it a coincidence that the selected objectives were totally in line with the
͚International Development Goals͛ the OECD had proposed in 1996? That was one year after theUN
Social Development Summit in Copenhagen adopted an encompassing action platform on poverty,
employment and social integration. After the adoption of the Millennium Goals, the Copenhagen
program 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 very
ambitious 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 very
controversial concept of ͚responsibility to protect͛. On the positive side, we have to mention a
reference to the need of ͚ambitious national development strategies͛ and to ͚innovative sources of
financing͛ as well as to ͚efforts to reduce capital flight and measures to curb illicit transfer of funds͛.
 However, in its preparatory report to the summit (͚ß  
͛), Secretary-General Kofi Annan
had pointed to the fact that the MDGs ͚      
    
  
 
       
 
    
   
          
  . Nevertheless, economic and
social development had disappeared from the agenda. At the G8 meeting in Gleneagles that year
Bono stood hand in hand with the NGOs and the World Bank to call for a ͚  !  " ͛.

#     

One of the major problems with the poverty reduction policies of international organizations is a
serious lack of reliable data. The World Bank is the only provider of statistics on global poverty, but it
constantly changes its methodology and ͚corrects͛ its failures. In 2000, poverty lines were changed
and extreme poverty in Subsaharan Africa rose from 39.1 to 49,7 %; a new estimate for extreme
poverty in 1980 gave 1,482 billion people instead of the former 800 million. In 2007 it modified its
estimates again for a whole series of countries. Apparently it had ͚overestimated͛ the Chinese
economy with 40 % and Indian economy with 25 %. It once again introduced new poverty lines, this
time 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 any
data 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 2003
there were only 4. The most recent UN Report on the World Social Situation (͚$%   ! ͛)
states that either Chinese poverty is underestimated, or poverty rates in other countries are
overestimated.

Be that as it may, according to the latest statistics of 2008, global extreme poverty is declining and
there is a serious chance that the MDGs will be met by 2015. Is that a major a achievement? No, it is
not. Because this ͚progress͛ is exclusively due to the declining poverty in China and India. China had
already met the MDGs in 2000, at the moment the MDGs were adopted and it was decided the
reference year was going to be 1990. Secondly, the extreme poverty rates are only very slowly
declining 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 doubling
extreme poverty from 1981 to 2005 (in number of people).

#   

The second problem with the MDGs and other poverty reduction policies, like the Poverty Reduction
Strategy Papers (PRSPs) of the World Bank and the IMF, is that they do not require any change in the
neoliberal policies the Bretton Woods institutions are still imposing. Even if there is a kind of
͚consensus͛ on the end of the ͚Washington Consensus͛, conditionality has hardly changed, free trade
is still considered as the alpha and omega of growth, liberalization, privatizations and deregulation
are still on the agenda, fiscal deficits and inflation are still perceived as the worst enemies. As an
evaluation document of 2007 of the IMF revealed, a consequence is that most aid poor countries
receive cannot even be spent but has to be put in the reserves.
As from 1990, the year in which the World Bank proposed its new poverty reduction policies, the
analysis of its poverty conceptualizations made clear that they were perfectly compatible with its
neoliberal philosophy. In fact they were meant to forget about social protection and social security,
both seen as a matter of ͚vested interests͛ of the non poor workers in the formal sector. Social
expenditures had to go to those ͚who really need it͛. Income and income inequality were neglected if
not willingly forgotten. Poverty became a problem of individuals without access to markets. And
markets were the mechanisms that would lift the poor out of poverty. In this way, poverty reduction
became a matter of redistribution from the non poor to the poor instead of from the rich to the
poor. And poverty reduction became the human face of neoliberal globalization.

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Ten years after their introduction, neither the MDGs nor the PRSPs are successful. What is clear
today and should have been clear to all in 2000 is that poverty reduction is only possible as the result
of a successful economic and social development process. And these were totally forgotten. Today,
the UN Secretariat and several of its organizations are again promoting the idea of economic and
social development, promoted by a developmental state. They rightly defend the development of
productive capacity, selective protectionist policies, flexible trade mechanisms and most of all
transformative social policies beyond poverty reduction. Universal policies are indeed more efficient
than targeted measures to the poor and should not cost more than about 4 % of national incomes.
Social policies and economic policies go hand in hand and reinforce each other. Unfortunately, the
World Bank and the IMF still see social policies as being residual.

Finally, development aid is rather meaningless if in the meantime debt servicing, capital flight and tax
evasion are dragging ten times more money out of poor countries than aid can pour in. At any rate,
the aid system will have to be seriously remodeled. It is still donor-driven and highly fragmented. A
global system based on global taxes could be more generous and more efficient.

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It seems as if the whole development world is at a crossroads. Will the lessons of the recent crisis
and of thirty years of growing impoverishment and inequality be learned? Will neoliberal policies
prevail or will the UN approach of a developmental state with coherent economic and social
development be adopted? Will the climate crisis be taken into account and will the wealthy North
accept it also has to redesign its development paradigm?

These are difficult questions that cannot be answered right away. One thing however should be
clear: poverty is not a problem of poor people but of the whole of society and of the international
community. It means the problem has to be tackled at the national and at the global level.
Development and inequality, ecological consciousness, self-determination and redistribution are an
inherent part of it.