the millennium development goals for
sale!
At the
change of the Millennium, Heads of States
from all over the world came together at
the United Nations to set themselves an
ambitious set of goals: the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs). They pledged,
stronger and more concretely than they had
ever done before, to combat poverty,
hunger, disease, the discrimination of
women, and environmental degradation.
Concrete goals were set, amongst others, to
eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, to
promote gender equality and empower women,
to combat the most important diseases and
child mortality and to ensure environmental
sustainability. Specific targets were set
for each of these goals, including the
target to integrate the principles of
sustainable development into country
policies and programmes and reverse the
loss of environmental resources, and the
target to halve, by 2015, the proportion of
people without sustainable access to safe
drinking water.
Yet, as concluded by the first reports
of the Millennium Development Project,
which reviews progress in achieving these
targets, the lack of financial resources is
a major stumbling block for the
implementation of these goals. The money
that is pumped into the war in Iraq is more
than enough to meet all the MDGs, yet
regretfully, securing access to oil has
turned out to be a higher priority for the
world’richest governments than combating
poverty, hunger and AIDS.
But IFIs and other promoters of the
Washington consensus found a way out of the
dilemma: privatizing the Millennium
Development Goals. The new recipe is called
public-private partnerships. By involving
the private sector, including large NGOs,
in the implementation of the Millennium
Development Goals, new sources of private
funding could be tapped. Governments were
recommended, and often even forced, to
involve the private sector in the provision
of a wide array of basic services, ranging
from water, education and health care, to
environmental protection. As a result,
corporations play an increasingly large
role in the implementation of the MDGs: in
some countries, for example, the
overwhelming majority of reproductive
health care centres is in private
hands.
The privatization of environmental
governance in general also entails the
severe risk that the corporations who
provide generous financial contributions to
the implementation of environmental
commitments, will also start to set
environmental policies. An alarming example
is the new partnerships between
multilateral environmental agreements and
industry. Bayer for example, a
multinational with a vested interest in
biotechnology, is contributing generously
to the implementation of the Convention to
Combat Desertification. Needless to say,
genetically modified crops are one of the
solutions to desertification promoted by
this partnership. Carbon traders like the
FACE foundation are involved as
“independent advisors” on carbon
sequestration policies in the Climate
Convention. The Nature Conservancy acts as
an “independent advisor” on protected area
policies for the Convention on
Biodiversity. Even more fascinating is the
joint policy paper full of beautiful photos
of colourful birds and trees on protected
areas that was produced by the Secretariat
to the Convention on Biodiversity in
partnership with the multinational oil
company Shell Inc. Needless to say this
policy paper included the remarkable
recommendation that oil exploration in
protected areas should be possible, as long
as it is done under certain conditions.
And even the UN Environment Program, one
of the poorest of all UN institutions, is
increasingly reaching out its hands to the
private sector - for financial
contributions that is. Now that governments
are still refusing to pay the normal
mandatory contributions to this UN
institution, UNEP’s functioning is
frighteningly dependent on voluntary
contributions, including voluntary
contributions from its “partners” in
business and industry.
Yet, this corporate control and
privatization of public policy comes at a
price. This publication describes in detail
how privatization of water and biodiversity
has lead to severe negative social and
environmental impacts in many countries. It
is the monetary poor, especially women, who
pay the highest price, which makes this
approach de facto incompatible with the
first and third MDGs.
It is time governments stop selling out
their responsibilities. In countries like
Indonesia, there is a tendency for
governments to withdraw even further from
sectors like education and health care, now
that public-private partnerships are taking
over the implementation of the Millennium
Development Goals in the field of education
and health care. But it is governments who
committed themselves to the MDGs. It is
governments who committed themselves, at
the World Summit for Social Development, to
dedicate 20 percent of their budget to
social services like education and health
care. It is governments who committed
themselves to the implementation of Agenda
21, the 600-plus-page book of
recommendations that came out of the United
Nations Conference on Environment and
Development in 1992, and the Johannesburg
Plan of Action that came out of the World
Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002.
It is governments who committed themselves
to the almostclassical targetof 0.7
percentGDP for Official Development
Assistance. It is governments who should
ensure MDG 7 to ensure environmental
sustainability is fulfilled. And it is
governments who should fulfil the MDG to
eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.
If there is one thing we learned from
the war in Iraq, it is that there is no
lack of money. There is no need to sell
nature and other commons, if governments
would just, for once, fulfil their
promises.
more information
United Nations Millennium
Development Goals
