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	Concerted action needed to attain Millennium Development Goals by UN News / The Guardian   Aug. 2007   UN Secretary-General urges greater efforts to achieve anti-poverty targets. (UN News)   Stating that the world was “seriously off track” to reaching some of its shared anti-poverty goals by the target date of 2015, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today called for urgently stepped-up efforts to achieve the objectives on time.   “For the next seven and a half years, every day is a new day for us to make a difference for millions of people around the world,” Mr. Ban said today in New York, urging more concerted action towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – the set of eight targets for slashing poverty and other social and economic ills, all by 2015.   A mid-point progress report on the MDGs, presented by Mr. Ban earlier this month, showed that the Goals remain achievable in most countries, but only if political leaders in rich and poor nations take urgent and concerted action.   Calling the 2015 target date a “goalpost that cannot be moved,” Mr. Ban stressed today the need to “infuse our mission with the urgency it requires.”   “As we reach the halfway point to that date, the clock is ticking louder every day,” he stated, adding that reaching the Goals on time will require strengthened partnerships between developed and developing countries and “innovative and bold” contributions from business, civil society and faith groups. “Some say we will not make it,” he said. “But I say we still can.”   July 31, 2007   UN a million miles from meeting development goals. (The Guardian)   UK prime minister Gordon Brown has used his first speech to the UN to warn the world that it is a "million miles" from meeting its promises to relieve poverty, HIV and illiteracy in poor countries.   Mr Brown told an audience of world leaders, businessmen and diplomats that, at the current rate, some of the UN"s touchstone Millennium Development Goals - due to be fulfilled by 2015 - were a century away from being honoured.   Describing this as a "global emergency", the prime minister focused relentlessly on the role businesses and faith groups - as well as governments - had to play in reinvigorating progress.   He said: "Some people call it the mobilisation of soft power. I call it people power, people power in support of the leadership of developing countries."   Mr Brown vowed to bring together 12 world leaders and 20 top business figures to sign up to a new commitment to meet the eight MDG targets - which range from maternal mortality to the spread of malaria. In strongly moral language he called it a "coalition of conscience" and a "coalition for justice", which in the end could make "globalisation a force for justice on a global scale".   The eight MDGs, signed by most of the nations on earth in 2000 with a deadline of 2015, set out to halve the proportion of the world"s population living on under a dollar a day; to halve the proportion of people suffering from hunger; to provide universal primary education for all the world"s citizens, principally in Africa; to ensure that all girls had the right to be educated to at least primary if not secondary level; to cut by two thirds the under-five mortality rate; to cut by 75% the maternal mortality rate; to begin to reverse the spread of both HIV and malaria; to halve the number of people without access to fresh drinking water, and to cut developing world debt and increase aid.   Mr Brown told his audience: "We cannot allow our promises that became pledges to descend into just aspirations, and then wishful thinking, and then only words that symbolise broken promises.   "We did not make the commitment to the Millennium Development Goals only for us to be remembered as the generation that betrayed promises rather than honoured them and undermined trust that promises can ever be kept. "So it is time to call it what it is: a development emergency which needs emergency action.   "If 30,000 children died needlessly and avoidably every day in America or Britain we would call it an emergency. And an emergency is what it is."   On current rates, Mr Brown pointed out that it would take until 2100, not 2015, to provide worldwide primary education.   A UN progress report on meeting the goals found that while the proportion of people living on one dollar a day or less had declined from 45.9% to 41.1% since 1999, reaching the MDG target of halving the extent of extreme poverty by 2015 required that the current pace be almost doubled.   There had been progress towards universal primary education, with enrolment increasing from 57% in 1999 to 70% in 2005 - but a gap of 30% remained, and the number of school-age children was increasing daily.   Although the share of parliamentary seats held by women had increased substantially, from 7% in 1990 to 17% this year, the share of women who earned a salary, aside from farming, still stood at less than one third in 2005.   Mr Brown said he wanted to "call into being, beyond governments alone, a global partnership for development and together harness the energy, the ideas and the talents of the private sector, consumers, non-governmental organisations and faith groups and citizens everywhere".   "In 1960, in America, President John Kennedy called for a peace corps, an international commitment to harness the idealism many felt in the face of threats to human progress and world peace.   "Today we should evoke the same spirit to forge a coalition for justice. "And when conscience is joined to conscience, moral force to moral force, think how much our power to do good can achieve. "Governments, business, scientists, engineers, doctors, nurses, charities and faith groups coming together to make globalisation a force for justice on a global scale."   August 2, 2007   We can help Make Poverty History, by Tim Costello.   It was in a Manila slum almost two decades ago that I experienced one of the most profound, heart-rending illustrations of how poverty kills.   I sat in a tiny, dirt-floor shack — which served as a family home — in front of a mother who told me how a few weeks previously one of her three children had fallen seriously ill. The antibiotics her son required cost 15 pesos. Yet she was faced with a dreadful choice — if she bought the medication her other children would have to go without any substantial food for three weeks. So she let her son die.   Back then I was a father of three young children; this woman"s story rocked me to my very core. It underscored to me why poverty is one of the great moral evils of our time. But we are winning the war on poverty.   In the past two decades, the number of people living on less than $US1 a day has fallen by 135 million. Since 2000 an extra 34 million more children have been able to go to primary school for the first time. Deaths from diseases such as measles have been halved.   Further, debt relief has allowed 29 of the world"s poorest countries to more than double their spending on health, education and other initiatives to reduce poverty.   It has enabled Uganda to boost access to health services from 49 per cent of its population to 80 per cent. Tanzania used its debt relief to build 31,000 new classrooms and 1000 new schools, while Zambia provided free health care to people living in rural areas. Yet while we are winning the war on poverty, we have not won. There are still big issues that are unresolved.   Promises of debt forgiveness — despite already totalling billions of dollars — are still only half fulfilled.   The AIDS epidemic has not yet been turned around and we still have massive agricultural subsidies preventing a level playing field for trade.   It is also true that climate change is only beginning to be understood as a major threat to development and poverty reduction and is likely to increase the number and scale of humanitarian crises.   And we still live in a world where every three seconds poverty claims another young person — some 30,000 children a day. While it used to be 55,000 children dying each day some 40 years ago, it is still a horrifying toll.   Back in 2000 world leaders came together at the United Nations to commit themselves to the Millennium Development Goals — eight goals aimed at halving the number of people living on less than $US1 a day by 2015.   Yet despite the universal pledge by nations to combat poverty, the chances of achieving the Millennium Development Goals are under threat. According to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, the failure of rich countries to deliver on the promises of increasing overseas aid is threatening to strangle the process.   And here the Australian Government could make a significant impact by acting on its promise to boost aid to 0.7 per cent of gross national income — a promise that has been awaiting fulfilment since 1970. The Australian Government likes to pride itself on its generosity, but in recent years our country has rarely been a leader in overseas aid. When compared with other developed nations, we rank equal 15th out of the world"s 22 rich nations.   Australians do care about overseas aid. Individually we are among the most generous givers to overseas aid in the world, second only to the Irish. And research conducted for World Vision shows people want our Government to do more. Some 62 per cent said Australia should be a world leader in reducing global poverty, with 71 per cent believing we should be in the top 10 of donor nations. And 74 per cent said they thought Australia should meet its international commitment of 0.7 per cent for aid.   I believe political parties can no longer ignore the movement for change — the movement to Make Poverty History. I believe it is why Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd last month pledged to boost overseas aid spending to 0.5 per cent of GNI by 2015.   If delivered, the extra aid could allow Australia to fund programs to achieve all of the following: reduce child deaths by 140,000 each year, provide access to safe drinking water for almost 37 million people, and access to basic education for more than 200,000 children.   We can all help to Make Poverty History. We just need the political will to make it so.   * Tim Costello is chief executive of World Vision Australia.
	A surer way to feed the poor by IPS / IHT / New York Times Kenya / USA   August 24, 2007   Mutiny Shakes US Food Aid Industry, by Ellen Massey. (IPS)   One of the largest international aid organizations in the world turned the food aid industry on its head recently by declaring that they will turn down 46 million dollars in food subsidies from the U.S. government.The United States budgets 2 billion dollars a year in food aid, which buys U.S. crops to feed populations facing starvation amidst crisis or those that endure chronic hunger.   But the U.S.-based CARE International has forfeited its substantial slice of the food aid pie that is the U.S. “Food for Peace” program, claiming that the way the U.S. government distributes food hurts small poor farmers in the very communities and countries the program is supposed to help.   CARE has been one of the largest suppliers of food aid around the world for the past 50 years so its shift in policy could have a dramatic effect on the food aid industry.   The reasoning behind CARE’s decision is part of a years-long debate that has influenced everything from U.S. trade and domestic legislation to the Doha Round of the World Trade Organization talks.   The objection to the current system is that the donation and sale of U.S.-subsidized crops in developing countries where people regularly go hungry actually weakens local farming. “We are not against emergency food aid for things like drought and famine,” CARE spokeswoman Alina Labrada said last week, but local farmers are “being hurt instead of helped by this mechanism”.   Though the policy to phase out U.S. government subsidies has been in place for more than a year, CARE’s rejection of the status quo has been catapulted into the spotlight as the U.S. Congress debates the Farm Bill, a massive 25-billion-dollar piece of legislation that establishes the funding structures for agricultural research, rural development, government subsidies and food aid policy.   The U.S. food aid program was established in the 1950s and designed to use some of the crop surpluses generated by government subsidies. Therefore, U.S. laws place strict limits on how that money can be used. All of the food the U.S. sends to food crisis areas must be grown in the U.S. and 75 percent of that food must be transported by U.S shipping lines.   Many aid organizations have called attention to the fact that this often means that the food aid doesn’t get to where it’s needed in time to help.   A year-long investigation by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, also found that the ballooning costs of logistics and shipping food overseas to where it is needed most have nearly halved the amount of U.S. food that is delivered to the hungry around the world in the past five years.   The U.S. policy implements the practice of monetization, a food aid policy in which the U.S. government buys crops from U.S. farms and ships it to aid organizations working around the world. The aid organizations then sell the U.S.-grown crops to local populations, often at a dramatically reduced cost.   The aid organizations use proceeds from these sales to fund their development and anti-poverty programmes. But several groups, with CARE at the forefront, have pointed out that this policy often has the effect of undermining local farmers and destabilizing the very system that aid organizations are working to strengthen.   However, this is point of view is not universally accepted, and CARE’s public rejection of the current system has created a rift in the aid community.   Last year, CARE, along with Catholic Relief Services, Save the Children and several British, French and Canadian aid groups, signed a statement that called the practice of monetization inefficient and said that such sales divert food from the direct transfers to the people that need it.   The European Union has also been critical of the U.S. food aid program. In addition to their suspicions that the U.S. uses these programs to avoid limits on farm subsidies, in the 1990s European countries all but phased out the practice of monetization and only 10 percent of their budgeted food aid is reserved for crops grown in Europe.   The U.N. World Food Program, the largest distributor of food aid in the world, has rejected the practice of monetization and doesn’t allow its grain to be sold by NGOs.   August 6, 2007   A surer way to feed the poor. (International Herald Tribune)   Globally, about 800 million people are chronically hungry, and the number rises every year. The Bush administration is pushing what should be an obvious policy change to help those most acutely in need. Instead of shipping American-grown food abroad, Washington would send U.S. dollars to buy food from local farmers.   The present food aid system is a favorite of American farmers. But it is also slow, expensive and leaves people hungry who could easily be fed. President George W. Bush has rightly proposed shifting $300 million from farm subsidies to enable governments and relief groups to buy food locally.   This plan struck a responsive chord almost everywhere except the Congress. The House omitted the idea from the farm bill it passed last week. And prospects for the Senate approving anything more than a pilot program seem dim.   This is sad but unsurprising. U.S. farm policy continues to be dominated by farm-state legislators who prefer the traditional approach of sending surplus food abroad, further enriching heavily subsidized farmers as well as the shipping industry.   A recent article by Celia Dugger of The New York Times shows why that makes so little sense. Starving Africans in the arid reaches of northwestern Kenya desperately needed food. Kenyan officials did not want surplus American corn because they feared driving down the prices for local farmers. The obvious answer was for the Americans to buy local corn, but American law prevented this. So the corn was never shipped and people continued to go hungry.   The United States is the world"s most generous provider of food aid, amounting to $2 billion annually. But too much of that aid is wasted in overhead, mainly shipping costs. At the other end of the pipeline, subsidized American food can hurt local farmers, while local procurement gives them a commercial outlet. Administration officials also note that food purchased in the United States usually takes four months to reach its destination. Food purchased locally takes days.   The virtues of Bush"s idea are self-evident. What it needs is full congressional support. It would be nice if, for once, America"s farm bloc could think of interests other than its own.   July 30, 2007   Kenyan farmers" fate caught up in U.S. aid rules, by Celia W. Dugger. (NYT)   LOKWII, Kenya: As the United States Congress debates an omnibus farm bill, it is considering a small change that advocates say could make a big difference to the world"s hungriest people: allowing the U.S. government to buy some food in Africa to feed the famished, rather than shipping it all overseas from America.   The Bush administration, with odd-bedfellows support from liberal Democrats, has called for allowing the purchase of some food in poor countries to quicken responses to emergencies. But even so, its proposal would not have prevented the paradoxical deepening of hunger here during a long-term project to combat hunger in the harsh, arid reaches of northwestern Kenya.   Families participating in an American-financed irrigation project from 2002 to 2006 were promised payment in corn for clearing the land and digging canals. The Kenyan government objected to the importation of American corn because the country was awash in a bumper harvest that had caused corn prices to plunge.   The result: American officials, prohibited by law from buying the corn locally, could not deliver it. As the impoverished families waited in vain for sustenance from the American heartland, malnutrition among the youngest children worsened and five people died of hunger-related causes.   Ikai Moru, 19, still recalls the hunger that gnawed at her and her mother as they chopped down thorny acacia trees on their tiny plot, hoping one day to reap a bountiful harvest from the parched earth. She watched her mother grow thinner and paler, and finally sicken and die. "My mother was a very hard worker," Moru offered in a brief epitaph.   Through sheer grit, the 2,000 families finished the irrigation system last year and are successfully farming. But long-term projects to help Africa"s rural poor feed themselves are chronically underfinanced, charities say.   Across Africa, the United States is more likely to give people a fish — caught in America — that feeds them for a day than to teach them to fish for themselves. Since last year, for example, the United States has donated $136 million worth of American food to feed the hungry in Kenya, but spent $36 million on agricultural projects to help Kenyan farmers grow and earn more.   And even that small budget for long-term projects in Kenya is expected to dwindle. The United States Agency for International Development, known as Usaid, in seeking to concentrate scarce resources, has dropped Kenya from the list of countries eligible for undertakings like the irrigation project here.   Such efforts are dwarfed by the epic scale of the need. Viewed from a prop plane buzzing like a mosquito overhead, the irrigated land here shimmers as a tiny oasis in a vast, dun-colored landscape.   With the guidance of the charity World Vision, which implemented the project, the families hacked an irrigation system from the barren landscape with machetes, hoes and shovels, clearing 1,000 acres and digging 99 miles of canals along the Kerio River.   Moru will soon be feeding her four younger brothers and sisters with an abundance of sorghum and corn harvested from their half-acre farm, fulfilling her mother:s dream.   The success is noteworthy, but the families" sacrifices also illustrate the risks of an American food aid system that is designed to benefit domestic agribusiness and shipping interests and enmeshed in an intricate framework of farm subsidies.   Members of Congress who favor the current system say the support of influential commercial groups is needed to sustain political support for food aid. They warn that ill-timed purchases of food in Africa in times of scarcity could send food prices higher, harming poor consumers.   But critics in Congress contend that the United States could feed far more people more quickly if it could buy surplus food in Africa. It might also help boost the incomes of African farmers, by providing a market for their crops, they say.   The Bush administration is now trying to change the law so that up to $300 million of food can be bought in poor countries during emergencies.   The Senate Agriculture Committee chairman, Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, where growers and landowners got $1.58 billion in corn subsidies in 2005, is advocating a $25 million pilot program to test buying food in poor countries for both emergency and long-term aid.   Even that modest proposal is meeting stiff resistance from farm state legislators. The House Agriculture Committee"s version of the farm bill includes no such pilot. The committee chairman, Collin Peterson, Democrat of Minnesota, said of his members, "They"re still of the mode that this should be American products we"re using our tax dollars to provide them."   * Visit the link below to access the rest of this story. Visit the related web page
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