millennium goals fall short
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The Millennium Development Goals,
adopted by governments in 2000, set
targets for reducing poverty, hunger,
disease, illiteracy, environmental
degradation and discrimination
against women by 2015. One aim is “to
reduce by half the number of people
living in extreme poverty by 2015”;
another is to halve the proportion of
people who suffer from hunger within
the same period.
This ambitious initiative deserves
to be taken seriously. However, it is
far from perfect and current
implementation policies fail to
address some of the underlying
structural causes of poverty and
hunger. These policies tend to have a
technocratic, neoliberal approach
that defines poverty very narrowly,
in terms of income (GNP) and
consumption flows. Secondly, massive
infrastructure projects are proposed
in order to accelerate economic
growth in developing countries
without taking the social and
ecological impacts into account.
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Thirdly, the proposal for a new Green
Revolution and GM agriculture is doomed to
fail in alleviating poverty and hunger. It
is also important to note that global
climate change, if not urgently addressed,
could undermine all of the Millennium
Development Goals.
The findings of a separate process, the
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, were
released by the United Nations Environment
Program, international scientific groups
and NGOs in March 2005. The result of four
years of research by 1300 scientists from
95 countries, it assesses the impact that
changes to ecosystems will have on human
well-being. The report found that humans
have changed ecosystems more rapidly and
extensively over the last 50 years than in
any comparable period of time in history,
and that the changes made are unsustainable
and have left many in poverty. It concludes
that the degradation of ecosystems could
grow significantly worse over the next
fifty years and could serve as a barrier to
achieving the Millennium Development
Goals.
Although assigning financial worth to
natural resources can be a dangerous
approach, it is interesting to note some of
the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment's
calculations of the value of various
ecosystems and the services they provide.
An intact mangrove in Thailand was valued
at US$1,000 per hectare; after clearing for
aquaculture it was worth US$200. A 3,000
hectare coastal peat bog in Sri Lanka is
valued at $5 million a year for the flood
control services it provides locally. The
burning of 10 million hectares of Indonesia
's forests in the late 1990s cost an
estimated $9 billion in increased health
care, lost production and lost tourism
revenues. In short, taking care of
ecosystems can save huge amounts of money
in the long run, but it is doubtful whether
this message will resonate well with
short-sighted governments and corporations.
