800 million still hungry and poor despite progress of millennium goals: UN

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LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation): About 800 million people still live in dire poverty and suffer from hunger despite the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) being the most successful anti-poverty push in history, the UN said on Monday.

The number of people living in extreme poverty on less than $ 1.25 a day has more than halved, to 836 million from 1.9 billion in 1990, the UN said in a report analysing eight development goals set out in the Millennium Declaration in 2000.

“Following profound and consistent gains, we now know that extreme poverty can be eradicated within one more generation,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement.

“The MDGs have greatly contributed to this progress and have taught us how governments, business and civil society can work together to achieve transformational breakthroughs.”

But progress has been uneven across regions and countries, the UN said, and the new sustainable development agenda should focus on inequalities to improve the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable people.

World leaders are due to adopt a set of new development objectives - known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – at a UN summit in September. The new goals aim to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030.

War and development

Conflicts, which in 2014 uprooted almost 60 million people in countries such as Syria, Iraq, Central African Republic, Nigeria and Pakistan, remain the biggest threat to human development, and fragile and conflict-affected states have the highest poverty rates, the UN said.

In the Middle East there has been a resurgence of poverty after years of progress and poverty rates are expected to increase to 2.6% from 1.5% between 2011 and 2015, the report said.

Across the globe, women continue to experience discrimination in access to work, wages and decision making, despite gaining ground in parliamentary representation in 90% of the 174 countries analysed in the report.

The number of children dying before their fifth birthday has fallen by more than half since 1990, yet 16,000 children still die each day, mostly from preventable causes, the report said.

Thanks to investments in fighting diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria, the new HIV infections fell by 40% between 2000 and 2013 and the number of people dying from malaria has fallen almost by half since 1990.

Sub-Saharan Africa remains the region most severely affected by the HIV epidemic with 1.5 million new infections in 2013, almost half of which occurred in just three countries: Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda.

Rejecting criticism that the new 17 goals and 169 targets, which range from ending hunger to combating climate change, are too many and too costly, the UN said goal setting had succeeded in lifting millions of people out of poverty. With targeted interventions and political will even the poorest people can make progress, it said.

“The emerging post-2015 development agenda, including the set of Sustainable Development Goals, strives to build on our successes and put all countries, together, firmly on track towards a more prosperous, sustainable and equitable world,” said Ban.

New UN development goals will drive nations ‘nuts’: Indian economist

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NEW DELHI (Thomson Reuters Foundation): An Indian economist and member of a key government panel which formulates policy on social issues slammed the United Nations’ new development goals on Tuesday, saying that having so many goals and targets would drive governments ‘nuts’.

World leaders are due to adopt a set of new development objectives in September, to replace eight expiring UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These will include objectives like ending poverty, reducing child mortality and tackling climate change.

Although the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be finalised only in September, UN officials say member states have identified 17 goals and 169 targets.

Bibek Debroy, member of the NITI Ayog – a panel appointed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to act as a think-tank and advise on development priorities – said the SDGs were overly ambitious.

“I am going to provoke my hosts, but I am greatly disturbed by what is happening on the SDGs. Eight goals, 21 targets, I can understand. But 17 goals, 169 targets? We’ll go nuts. Imagine the plight of the countries which will now have to collect data for these, if collecting that data at all is possible,” he said.

Debroy, who was speaking at a news conference organised by the United Nations to launch a report on the Asia-Pacific region’s progress on the MDGs, said he thought the SDGs would not have the ‘virtue’ that the MDGs had.

“I look at some of those proposed goals and I don’t understand what they mean. It’s as if you are looking for a unified field theory and are trying to solve every problem under the sun.”

United Nations officials said they agreed that there were many SDGs, but said the number of goals and targets was decided by all 193 member states.

“I agree with his (Debroy’s) analysis and his concern that the goals and indicators are too many to be implementable and to be measured and monitored. This is a very serious concern,” Rebecca Tavares, UN representative for India, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“The good news is that the SDG process was a broad-based consultative process that member states themselves managed. The member states took control over the process and consulted all groups over many years. There were so many proposals and it was difficult to hone to down to a manageable number.”

Like most countries, India has achieved some goals, but failed on others, the UN report said.

India has achieved 12 of the 21 targets.

These include halving the number of people living on less than $ 1.25 a day, ensuring universal primary schooling, achieving gender parity in primary schools, halving the number of people without access to clean drinking water and increasing forest cover, the report said.

The country has, however, been slow to reduce the number of underweight children, and to curb the number of women dying in childbirth and the number of infants dying, it added.

Debroy, a free-market ideologue, said people had to be careful when focusing on goals and should not make ‘value judgments’ on people’s lifestyle.

“For example, should people have piped drinking water? Everyone will say yes. But in India in 2001, 45,000 villages had populations less than 100, some of those villages are in hilly areas where they get perfectly clean drinking water from streams,” he said.

“So what is the objective? Is it to get drinking water from taps or just to get clean drinking water?”