Hope floats
A wealthier world will not necessarily result in the eradication of poverty, writes Fatemah Farag
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The accountability of rich countries for the poverty of the world and the nature of aid are main focusses of HDR 2003 (source: Hegazy : Artist of the Egyptian Alleyway)
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"More than 1.2 billion people -- one in every five on Earth -- survive on less that US$1 per day. During the 1990s the share of people suffering from extreme poverty fell from 30 per cent to 23 per cent. But with a growing world population, the number fell by just 123 million -- a small fraction of the progress needed to eliminate poverty. And, excluding China, the number of extremely poor people actually increased by 28 million."
-- Human Development Report 2003
These are the stark facts that a world proud of its advancement in the realms of technology, communications, economic growth and culture, must face. The number of hungry people in the world has increased; 15 per cent of the world's population suffers from chronic hunger. In many parts of the globe the number of people with access to education remains low; more than 30,000 children worldwide die every day of preventable diseases; only 10 per cent of global research and development focusses on the health problems of 90 per cent of the world's people; gender inequality continues to result in the oppression of women; over one billion people have no access to safe water -- as a direct consequence of which the number of children who died as a result of diarrhoea in the 1990s was higher than the total number of deaths due to armed conflict since World War II. According to this year's Human Development Report (HDR) launched this week by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), "Growth can be ruthless or it can be poverty reducing, depending on its pattern, on structural aspects of the economy and on public policies. Poverty has increased in some countries that have achieved overall economic growth, and over the past two decades income inequality worsened in 33 of 66 developing countries with data."
In a press release issued at the launch, UNDP Administrator Mark Mallock Brown noted that, "This report shows that there are many countries where income levels are high enough to end absolute poverty, but where pockets of deep poverty remain, often because of worrying patterns of discrimination in the provision of basic services." Arab countries provide a case in point. According to HDR 2003, while high income has improved many aspects of human development since 1970, "of all the regions [of the world] the Arab States have the widest gap between incomes and other aspects of human development."
The HDR, which has been published annually by UNDP since 1990, is prepared by an independent team of experts and aims to measure human development in terms beyond mere per capita income. This includes access to basic requirements, freedom, dignity and human agency. HDR has developed the Human Development Index (HDI), which is a composite measure of life expectancy, education and per capita GDP. The 2003 HDI ranks 175 countries for 2001, the most recent year of available data. Norway is at the top of the list, while Sierra Leone is at the bottom; most of those countries rated as being poorer in 2000 than 1990 are in sub-Saharan Africa.
HDR argues that this trend of increasing poverty -- and all its manifestations -- can be reversed if there is political will to adopt and work towards the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). The MDG comprise eight goals, each of which is a specific commitment to contain the spread of poverty and disease by 2015. The goals were ratified by 189 countries at the UN-sponsored Millennium Summit in September 2000. Omar Noman, deputy director of the Human Development Report Office in New York, was in Cairo for the launch of 2003 HDR, and told journalists that the MDG "are not abstract goals, but clear benchmarks that provide a framework for accountability".
Most developing countries, however, have non- transparent systems where little information is available to the public and governments are not held accountable for their actions. Noman pointed out that government policy reforms were an important aspect of the MDG, stating also that in some cases where access to information had been provided, development problems had been solved. "In Uganda it became clear that 75 per cent of resources [earmarked for] education did not reach local schools. Through the involvement of the media and civil society this figure was brought down to 3 per cent. A change in the culture of accountability is possible. But the first step is to have the information." He acquiesced, however, that the MDG "will not solve all the problems of participation. But what they will have done is have pushed the envelope on the table."
A pledge to support the MDG was made again recently during the G8 Summit held last June in Evian, France. And last year, the long decline in aid flow ended and the amount of aid increased from $52.3 billion in 2001 to $57 billion in 2002; at the Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, both rich and poor countries pledged support for policy reforms and to provide new resources -- namely an annual increase in aid flows which will reach $16 billion by 2006 -- to achieve the implementation of MDG. However, the UNDP estimates that the total aid flows "will still fall far short of the $100 billion minimum needed per year to meet the goals". The 2003 HDR also points out that, "despite these welcoming commitments in principle to reducing poverty... the world is already falling short."
It is not just the amount of aid which is problematic, but its content. According to Noman, "politically motivated aid has yielded poor results... [Another] chronic problem has been short- term aid. Long-term commitments to fund recurrent costs is what is required."
According to the 2003 HDR, in order to achieve development goals "poor countries cannot on their own tackle the structural constraints that keep them in poverty traps, including rich country tariffs and subsidies that restrict market access for their exports, patents that restrict access to technology that can save lives and unsustainable debt owed to rich-country governments and multilateral institutions".
And liberalisation of economies is no longer the "one answer that fits all" solution. Asked by Al- Ahram Weekly to comment on the relationship between structural adjustment packages and human development, Noman said that, "it would take a brave person to say that privatisation has been bad for India. But premature liberalisation can also be harmful, and in the priority countries [the 50 poorest countries identified by the HDR 2003] the market will not do it. It is important to find the balance between the responsibilities of the state and the private sector. This report shifts the debate from being either with or against liberalisation to breaking the process down."
To address the fact that global achievement of the MDG is behind schedule, HDR 2003 has also launched the Millennium Development Compact (MDC), which is a partnership between developed and developing countries "aimed squarely at implementing the Millennium Declaration" by providing a "broad framework for how national development strategies and international support from donors, international agencies and others can be both better aligned and commensurate with the scale of the challenge of the goals... [putting] responsibilities squarely on both sides; requiring bold reforms from poor countries and obliging donor countries to step forward and support those efforts".
The HDR 2003 suggests increasing the level, efficiency and equity of investments in basic health, education, water and sanitation; expanding poor people's access to land, credit, skills and other economic assets; and promoting labour intensive industrial growth involving small and medium-size enterprises.
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, the report's author, noted that, "there is nothing inevitable about human poverty." All that remains it seems is to redistribute the world's wealth more equitably.
