Fighting poverty - UN struggling to get 'millennium' goals back on track

from the Amador Ledger Dispatch

John Heilprin,

Seven years ago as the economy boomed, the United Nations agreed to a set of ambitious goals for cutting poverty and disease and improving health care and education for the world's poor by 2015. Now, those "millennium" efforts are lagging.

Midway to the deadline, progress is too slow to succeed in some key areas - notably efforts to provide food, shelter and improved care for mothers and children in sub-Saharan Africa - according to internal U.N. documents and interviews with senior diplomats and U.N. and U.S. officials.

Top diplomats and other officials say the world's nations may have set overly ambitious goals in September 2000, reflecting the still-booming world economy. The goals also were set at a time when the implications of climate change - and its many effects - were not as widely accepted.

Virtually all the world's nations signed off on the sweeping package of eight U.N. "millennium development goals" in September 2000. Building on agreements from U.N. conferences in the 1990s, the goals represented major commitments by 189 countries to take aim at rampant poverty and hunger, lack of education, gender inequality and the spread of disease.

"We are slow and it's too little, generally," General Assembly President Srgjan Kerim told The Associated Press. "Whether the glass is half-empty or half-full ... depends from which angle you regard it."

Kerim said he was not surprised at the lack of progress, however, because "there were indications that they're laying behind" due to the slowing economic growth, poorly managed governments and "bottlenecks" in cooperation among countries.

Progress is being limited by high energy and food prices, historically low food stocks, rising costs from "droughts and floods linked to climate change" - and, perhaps most importantly, the struggling world economy. "The stakes are high because maintaining strong economic growth ... is essential to generating the necessary resources to achieve the Millenium Development Goals," documents from Kerim's office say.

"Climate change is contributing to the increase in poverty and hunger, especially among the rural poor," the briefing papers say. "Progress has also been hampered by the failure to recognize and address all the multidimensional causes and effects of poverty."

There has been some success with rice farmers in Africa, schools in Haiti, micro-credit lending in Nepal and vaccinations of pregnant women in Vietnam, for example. But for the U.N. to achieve all eight of its goals, the pace must dramatically improve, diplomats and officials say.

"We're achieving them in some countries, middle-income countries, but we're not achieving them in Africa. And at the present rate of progress, we will not have achieved them by 2015," British U.N. Ambassador John Sawers told the AP. In Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been calling on nations to renew their focus on meeting the "millenium" goals.

Documents prepared for Kerim's office show that 41 percent of people living in sub-Saharan Africa were living on less than $1 a day as of 2004, down from almost 47 percent in 1990, while 31 percent in the area suffered from hunger as of 2003, down from 33 percent in 1990. But the U.N.'s goals are to reduce those proportions by half by 2015.

Other goals include providing an education for all boys and girls; reducing by two-thirds the mortality rate for children ages five and less; and halting and beginning to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and malaria.

About 570 million children are enrolled in primary schools, but 72 million others - more than half of them girls, mostly in sub-Saharan African and southern and western Asian nations - are not, according to U.N. documents.

And only four of the 46 sub-Saharan African countries are on track to reducing child mortality from the current rate of 160 deaths per 1,000 live births, the documents say. By comparison, the rate has fallen to 83 per 1,000 in south Asia; 29 in east Asia and 27 in Latin America.

The number of tuberculosis cases in sub-Saharan Africa rose to 490 per 100,000 people in 2005, compared with 331 in 1990. In Europe and Asia there has been a similar rise: TB cases rose to 137 per 100,000 in 2005, up from 83 in 1990.

"Globally, we're not doing enough," Sawers said of the U.N.'s millenium goals. "I don't think any of them are completely out of reach."

Kerim, a Macedonian diplomat and economics professor, also calls it a huge but "doable" challenge.

"We say we have 3 million more children survive every year. But then we say, on the other hand, we still have 72 million children still not in school," he said. "We say there are 2 million people now who receive AIDS treatment. Then we say half of the developing world lacks basic sanitation, which is again a gate for diseases."

The aim of creating new international partnerships to develop poor nations - what Kerim says was "just a phrase in the beginning" - has preoccupied a growing number of senior U.N. diplomats and officials and visiting dignitaries this year.

Earlier this month, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon confirmed that sub-Saharan Africa is the region most off-track from achieving the poverty goals, particularly in trying to reduce the maternal mortality rate. He cited modest progress in Malawi toward cutting child mortality rates and in Senegal toward providing better quality water and sanitation.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick told the AP that the U.N.'s progress toward the goals is complicated by rising energy and food prices.

"You get a mixed effect. Some countries are benefiting, like Nigeria and Angola and others from higher energy prices, but then it creates a different challenge, which is how you're going to use the resources," Zoellick said.

"There are a number of countries that are particularly hard-hit by both high energy and high food prices," he said. "Some of them have minerals to offset, like Zambia with copper, but a lot of them don't. So yeah, the high energy and high food prices is a challenge."

The urgency is such that Kerim is convening the 192-nation assembly for the first two days of April to debate ways of "getting back on track" with the goals, he told diplomats in a March 4 letter.

"It was adopted by all the world leaders, so there cannot be an excuse," Kerim told the AP. "We are not an institute. We are not here to offer people studies. Studies they have more than enough of. We are here to give policy recommendations."