At the turn of this century, in the year 2000, the largest meeting of global leaders in history came together to adopt the "Millenium Development Goals" (MDGs).
It was a warm and surprisingly un-fuzzy moment of clarity about what really matters to the "human family" that the United Nations intends to represent; a brightly trumpetted call for global altruism.
But meeting the ambitious targets of the MDGs proved to be as elusive as the nearly concurrent vow taken by a handful of UN member nations to search for WMDs. And like the search for WMDs, the powers that be charged with implementing and monitoring their own progress have claimed that at least some of the goals have been met.
Mission Accomplished. So let's pat ourselves on the back and soldier on...
Read on for a look at Goal #1: Eradicate Extreme Hunger and Poverty...
Goal 1: Target 1. Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day.
Easy peasy. The World Bank announced it reached this target four years ago.
The bank said preliminary estimates for 2010 showed that the world’s extreme poverty rate — people living below $1.25 a day — had fallen to less than half of its 1990 value. That meets the first Millennium Development Goal of halving extreme poverty from its 1990 level, before its 2015 deadline, the Washington-based development institution said.
What a difference two bits make. And wouldn't adding a quarter to the poverty threshold actually increase the number of people targetted for the lift out of poverty? Indeed, it would. But this is just one of several factors in presentation that begin to become a bit fuzzy. A recent
report, "A Measured Approach to Ending Poverty and Boosting Shared Prosperity," states that:
In 2013, the World Bank Group adopted two new goals to guide its work: ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity.
New goals? But I thought the Bank had already declared "Mission Accomplished"?
To be fair, the "new" goals specifically call for the reduction of extreme poverty to less than 3% by 2030. But in the World Bank's own words,
... for the first time, the Bank has explicitly included a goal linked to ensuring that growth is shared by all. [emphasis mine]
Oh, I see. The initial success did not apply to all; like qualifying for a "gold" credit card, it was exclusive.
This is exactly the reason I question what seems to be a premature and feigned declaration of "Mission Accomplished" (not that it's easy to trust any statement coming from an institution that is clearly "too big to fail"). The quantification of human life is inevitably riddled with biases and inaccuracies, even in highly developed nations like the United States.
I don't claim to be an expert on poverty, and Lord knows I am not a financial genius. I have also never travelled to Southern Asia, the area of the world with the ignoble distinction of having the highest levels of poverty, nor have I ever been to Sub-Saharan Africa, a close second in poverty.
But I have travelled to three countries that are all quintessential examples of poverty in the Western Hemisphere: Honduras; Bolivia; and Bosnia & Herzegovina. I have seen domiciles constructed of corn stalks. I have seen children living in land fills. I have stayed in a gracious host's tiny one-room wattle and daub structure that slept eleven (twelve with me as the guest). I have had desperate mothers offer me their children, and young men volunteer to be my slave if I would take them away with me to the States. I am no expert, but it does not take a PhD to know for a fact that the extreme poor are uncountable. One need only consider the realities of human trafficking and slavery to know the amount of "disposable people" are unknown.
Goal 1: Target 2. Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.
One in every nine people on our planet go to bed hungry each night... The vast majority of hungry people (791 million) live in developing countries, where 13.5 percent of the population is chronically undernourished... One out of six children -- roughly 101 million -- in developing countries is underweight... Poor nutrition causes nearly half (45%) of deaths in children under five - 3.1 million children each year... Hunger kills more people each year than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. [link]
What people who are not directly involved in Doctors Without Borders or otherwise employed by the health care profession do not realize is that chronic malnutrition is not just
hunger. Growing up with chronic malnutrition means that internal organs are never given enough nutrients to fully develop. Those lucky enough to live beyond childhood still have weak and underdeveloped kidneys, liver, lungs, heart, digestive tract -- even brain function can be severely damaged or stunted. This cannot be alleviated by simply providing three square meals a day -- though that's an essential ideal.
As for the United States:
Hunger exists in every community in the nation, from urban city centers, throughout the suburbs, and across rural America... Under the Supplemental Poverty Measure, there are 49.7 million people living in poverty, nearly 3 million more than are represented by the official poverty measure (47.0 million)... In 2013, 14 percent of households (17.5 million households) were food insecure... 49.1 million Americans lived in food insecure households, including 33.3 million adults and 15.8 million children. [link]
A bit of good news on the American end: Even given the global financial crisis, food insecurity in the US is slightly less now than it was when Obama took office, down from 14.6 percent in
2008.
But according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), there were roughly 850 million people living in hunger in 1990. The current global status of the hungry is far from half that number.
That the MDGs have fallen short is not to say they are not, at least in theory, for the greater good. But they are not an absolute good (if such a thing exists) in that finding an end to all poverty and hunger is the altruistic ideal. Thus the UN's strongly-worded, quantified goals are bound for inevitable failure. But it's not just word choice that makes them so. The choices made within each goal seem to have been bound to fail from the beginning.
An analysis conducted by New York University and the Brookings Institution, "How the Millenium Development Goals are Unfair to Africa", contends that:
A notable feature of the MDG campaign is that it has emphasized the failure of Sub-Saharan Africa compared to other regions. Those involved in the MDG effort have been virtually unanimous, that Sub-Saharan Africa stands out in that it will not meet ANY of the goals... If this point is correct, does this imply someone is to blame? The MDGs emerged as a process of consultation between many international agencies and poor country governments, which has continued to evolve over time, and so identifying who did what is nearly impossible...
Measuring social and economic progress is not at all as straightforward as discussion of the MDGs makes it seem. Setting targets in a particular way will make some regions look better and others look worse depending on a number of choices that any target-setting exercise must make... There has been little discussion of these choices that were made in setting the MDGs. Sometimes, the choices made seem a priori to make no sense; other times, they seem arbitrary; they require particular assumptions on social welfare functions which there is no attempt to justify; finally, the choices do not seem consistent across the [eight] MDGs...
Amnesty International adds to this argument:
Amongst the causes of the failure to meet commitments made at the Millennium Summit are a lack of funding and expertise, and corruption. UN declarations and government statements repeatedly link the problem of development to the realization of human rights. Yet the MDGs and their targets include very few concrete benchmarks to measure progress in implementing existing human rights commitments. There is no Goal with associated targets, for example, to realize access to justice for the poor, to abolish discriminatory laws, to address violence against women, to ensure people living in slums are accorded protection of the police, or to enact and implement right to information legislation...
Above all, the key problem with the Goals is a lack of accountability. Developed countries promise aid and fair trade but don’t deliver. Poor countries buy expensive weapons rather than invest in education. Commitments to women’s empowerment are not translated into effective policy and pervasive violence keeps women marginalized. There are no real consequences for governments’ failure to deliver – except on the lives of the poor...
Perhaps the ultimate cause for the inevitability of failure lies in leaving a "too big to fail" institution -- a fox, if you will -- to guard the henhouse and count the eggs of the successes accumulating in its own basket.
At the time of this writing, we still have three days to make good on the World Bank's claim of "Mission Accomplished." So let's soldier on...