Although you might have missed it, two reports were issued by the UN today ahead of the upcoming meeting of the General Assembly. One has received huge publicity because of some disgraceful corruption by a few officials at the UN. The other is being pushed into the background but it has far greater implications for the future of the welfare of the planet’s children.
The report on the oil-for-food program rightly criticises the corruption and points the need for UN reform. Just such reforms are being proposed by Kofi Annan but the Bush hitman has issued a late list of 750 changes they want to see. Among these are a proposal to exponge the Millenium Goals from the UN’s agenda. The other report today points out just what effect the existing poor progress will have, let alone trying to ignore them all together.
The Human Development Report 2005 lists just what the existing progress on the MDG’s will have. The starkest figure is that if the current rate is maintained, at least 4.4 Million children will die un-necessariy each year.
One reason this may not be getting much publicity is that the United States has dropped from 8th to 10th place in a league table showing each country’s “Human Development Index”. The overview in Chapter 1 (page 11) is extremely worrying:
For most of the past 40 years human capabilities have been gradually converging. From a low base, developing countries as a group have been catching up with rich countries in such areas as life expectancy, child mortality and literacy. A worrying aspect of human development today is that the overall rate of convergence is slowing–and for a large group of countries divergence is becoming the order of the day
The MDG’s did not seek to extinguish extreme poverty, only halve it. On present trends, that will not be achieved. The starkest condemnation for a President so keen to promote a “life culture” is that the policies his appointee has presented will have this effect:
The projected gap between the 2015 target and the outcome that would take place if current trends continued represents a huge loss of life. It translates into an additional 4.4 million child deaths in 2015 above those that would occur if the MDG target were achieved (figure 1.18). Charting a linear trend from the cumulative cost of additional child deaths for 2003-15 provides an indicator for the annualized gap between target and outcome. The cumulative cost of that gap represents more than 41 million additional child deaths between now and 2015–almost all of them in developing countries (figure 1.19). These are lives that would be saved if the targets were met.
A lot is said about the inquity of income within countries but the global inequality is even more so:
On the (conservative) assumption that the world’s 500 richest people listed by Forbes magazine have an income equivalent to no more than 5% of their assets, their income exceeds that of the poorest 416 million people.
Now the USA has real problems with the fallout from Katrina. Just as you can now see the fallacy of moving funds away from infrastrucure to the war machine in the name of “security”, not addressing the needs of the world’s poorest is going to store up trouble for the future. Terrorism might not be born from extreme poverty but it is certainly fed by it. The report opens with the words of FDR at his second inauguration in 1937, I can write no finer words to close.
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.