Plan to end world poverty off track

from The Age

Brendan Nicholson

AN international plan to halve global poverty by 2015 is running well behind schedule — and most of Australia's neighbours are among the countries most in need.

In a report to be released today, aid group World Vision says that of Australia's 22 neighbours, eight are significantly off track and struggling.

And a separate report from the World Bank has challenged Australia to allow thousands of unskilled Pacific Island guest workers to be given temporary jobs here to help prevent the collapse of small economies in the region.

It says fewer than 10 per cent of job seekers in some Pacific countries will be able to find paid work at home in the future, raising the prospect of a serious economic crisis.

It is nearly six years since Australia and 190 other nations committed to using foreign aid to meet eight "millennium development goals".

The targets included reducing poverty, hunger, gender inequality in education, child mortality, maternal mortality and deaths from major diseases and to provide universal primary education.

World Vision chief executive Tim Costello said some Asian-Pacific states could fail because of inadequate and poorly targeted aid from Australia and other rich countries.

Mr Costello said Australia had lifted its game in the region with an impressive white paper on overseas aid and a commitment to increase its overseas aid budget. "But even this will see us languish at 18th of 22 rich nations in 2010," he said.

The G20 meeting in Melbourne in November and next year's budget would be crucial opportunities to do more, Mr Costello said.

World Vision said eight countries — Papua New Guinea, Laos, Cambodia, East Timor, Burma, the Philippines, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands — needed immediate additional help.

A high priority was lowering death rates among children and mothers.

In Cambodia 33 per cent of the population is undernourished while PNG has the highest percentage of 15 to 49-year-olds with HIV/AIDS and the lowest access to clean water at 29 per cent, World Vision said.

The World Vision report recommends that the Australian Government work with other donor countries to ensure increased and better targeted aid and further debt relief.

"If we are serious … Australia must ensure aid is increased and better targeted to those countries most at risk and to key social services," Mr Costello said.

The World Bank report found that giving workers from countries such as Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands access to seasonal employment in rich countries including Australia will be essential for the viability of the Pacific.

"We know that lack of job opportunities can contribute to social and political instability in regions like the Pacific Islands where the youth population is as high as 40 per cent in some countries," said the report's lead author, Dr Manjula Luthria, an economist at the bank.

The report says a quota of unskilled Pacific Islanders should be allowed to spend part of the year in countries such as Australia and then go home with their savings, skills and new ideas.

Australia could benefit from such a scheme because labour shortages will become more acute in some industries as the population ages.

The Australian horticultural industry could employ between 16,000 to 24,000 offshore seasonal workers in any one month of the year, the bank said. At the Pacific Islands Forum late last year, Prime Minister John Howard resisted pressure from other members to introduce a guest-worker scheme for Pacific Islanders, but in December a Government report said a guest-worker program should be considered.