Sustainable development is fine, but we need to get beyond the talk
What will it take to end global poverty?
By Jack Freeman
Written for Earthtimes
This June it will be five years since the nations of the United Nations agreed upon a set of "Millennium Development Goals" -- basically aimed at halving the amount of extreme poverty on the planet by the year 2015 -- and pledged their governments to work toward achieving them. Customarily the UN puts off conducting formal reviews of its major resolutions and their implementation until at least 10 years have passed, but this time it just couldn’t wait.
A UN-sponsored study of the progress made toward achieving the Millennium Goals, led by Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, is being released this month. It will surprise nobody when it calls for a greater effort toward achieving the goals and, in particular, for the world’s rich nations to at least double the official development assistance (ODA) that they give to the poorest countries.
It was 35 years ago that the UN agreed that the target level for each donor country’s development assistance should be 0.7 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP).
That target has been endorsed and re-endorsed many times, perhaps most notably at the Rio Earth Summit (the UN Conference on Environment and Development) in 1992 and the Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002. Yet it remains elusive -- and is becoming more so with the passing years. Only four nations have ever met the target with any regularity: Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands. And the world’s only economic superpower, the United States, is dead last on the list of aid givers. Its official development assistance amounts to only 0.14 percent of its GDP -- a shortfall of 80 percent from the target.
And if you think that’s the bad news, wait. It gets worse. Another, more serious, problem is that money labeled "development assistance" doesn’t always have -- indeed, hardly ever has -- the effect of reducing poverty. For example, over the past decade or so, poverty in sub-Saharan Africa has increased dramatically despite the billions of "development aid" dollars poured into the region.
Ever since it began with the US’s Marshall Plan to rebuild European economies after the Second World War, "international development assistance" has always been concerned more with politics and influence -- especially cold war politics and influence -- than with alleviating poverty or, indeed, creating the kind of economic growth that is commonly known as development.
About 15 years ago, when the cold war was winding down because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the countries of the so-called third world faced the prospect that the aid they had been receiving for decades might soon disappear. They had to find some new rationale for the rich countries to keep on sending the money. This need led to the United Nations convening an unprecedented series of global conferences in the 1990’s to deal with what many perceived as an impending crisis.
The conferences started with the Rio Earth Summit, the largest (at the time) gathering of heads of state ever held on the planet. Its theme was "sustainable development," which boiled down to a pact between the rich countries (sometimes called "the North") and the poor countries ("the South"). If the poor countries would agree to limit their development to that which is "sustainable" -- that is, environmentally sound -- the rich countries would reaffirm their commitment to the 0.7 percent-of-GDP target for their development assistance. This met some resistance within the countries of the North, since raising aid levels to the 0.7 percent figure would require them to cough up an additional $125 billion per year, but in the end the deal was struck.
The summit ended with approval of a phonebook-sized document called "Agenda 21," spelling out all that had to be done to make development sustainable in the 21st century. But there was still much grousing by delegates from the poor nations that, while the donor heads of state had brought their environment ministers with them to Rio, they had neglected to bring along their ministers of finance.
Almost immediately after Rio, aid flows began to shrink -- and they continued to shrink steadily throughout the decade. Despite that, the Earth Summit did have several positive achievements. It ratified the Framework Convention on Climate Change (which set the stage for the Kyoto Protocol), it set a new standard for participation by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in international discourse, and it marked the emergence of the women’s caucus as a power to be reckoned with, a power that would come to dominate international dialogue for much of the decade.
Another positive result of the Rio conference was the convening of a follow-up conference, held on the resort island of Barbados two years later, to deal with the environmental and development problems of the "small island developing states" (SIDS). The idea, as presented at Rio, was that these island states, with their relatively tiny populations and land areas, could serve as pilot projects, a kind of laboratory experiment to demonstrate how the sustainable development ideal of North-South cooperation could be applied anywhere.
Unfortunately, all it really proved was that the rich countries had not the slightest interest in taking part in such an experiment, let alone funding a full-scale program of cooperation. The rich countries sent no heads of state to the conference, nor even high-level cabinet ministers. Their low-level delegations had nothing to offer, no new ideas, no proposals, no money to "put on the table" to pay for anything. The poor-country delegations voiced their bitter disappointment about what they saw as promises made to them and quickly forgotten.
But if the rich nations were not about to loosen their purse-strings for the sake of promoting development to save the environment, there were other rationales that might prove more motivating. At the Social Summit, held in Copenhagen in 1994, there was an attempt to redefine "development" away from economic expansion, technology and industrialization, and toward improving the living conditions of human beings, stressing education and health care. And although the Copenhagen meeting offered nothing more than lip-service to this idea (that is, no new money to pay for its implementation), more than a decade later it persists as the commonly accepted definition. Jeffrey Sachs, for example, last month listed "roads, safe drinking water and sanitation, electrification, clinics, schools, malaria bed nets, anti-retroviral medicines" as among the more important things that ODA money could buy for "Africa and other destitute regions."
One problem found in every destitute region of the world is overpopulation. The International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in
1994, called upon the governments of the poor countries to assume some of the responsibility for financing family planning programs, but it was unable to induce the rich countries to increase their contribution.
The conference did, however, approve a whole new approach to the problem of overpopulation. It called for an end to demographic targets and reliance, instead, on improving the education of girls and empowerment of women -- although, again, it provided no new funding for such activities. The Fourth World Women’s Conference, held in Beijing in 1995, gave its endorsement to these ideas, but it too failed to motivate the donor countries to provide any more aid to the poor countries. And the Habitat Conference, held in Istanbul in 1995 (with broader civil-society participation than any UN conference ever), got so tied up over whether urbanization was a good thing or bad one that it never really got around to the issue of North-South cooperation.
By the time the Millennium Summit rolled around, in Geneva in 2000, the idea of environmental sustainability had all but faded from view as the world’s leaders focused their attention almost single-mindedly on "human development" (as it had been dubbed by the late Mahbub ul-Haq of Pakistan). And though the rich nations pledged (once again) to increase their aid flows -- this time to help the poor countries deal with the human face of poverty -- those pledges have proved no more binding than those made before.
It is instructive to remember that Dr. Haq, a former finance minister of Pakistan whose expertise enriched the World Bank and the UN Development Programme, where he initiated the "Human Development Report," argued that providing assistance to the poor countries was in the enlightened self-interest of the donors. He maintained that many of the concomitants of severe poverty, such as disease, crime, political instability and terrorism, could never be contained within the borders of the poor countries but would inevitably spread to the rich countries as well -- and would cost them much more in the long run than they were being asked to provide in the form of aid. It was an interesting argument, and elegantly presented, but, as we have seen, it has not yet proved very persuasive.
The Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg in 2002, ended the cycle of UN conferences the same way that T. S. Eliot says the world will end: "Not with a bang but a whimper." The conference organizers avoided the risk of being buried under endless recriminations by announcing that it would not be looking backward at the decade that had passed since Rio but would concern itself solely with the future. Looking ahead, though, what did the delegates have to contemplate but yet another round of broken pledges? So there was nothing to say, really, except that we’ve made a beginning toward the goal of sustainable development (however that may be defined) and there is plenty of room for improvement.
Now "sustainable development" lives on chiefly in the title of the UN’s
Commission on Sustainable Development, an annual springtime talking-shop that is attended largely by the environment ministers of the UN’s member nations and observer states. The countries’ finance ministers do as they did during the Rio Summit; they stay home.
The remaining question is whether there is any reason to believe that this new effort to rally the donor nations behind the UN’s Millennium Development Goals and get them to honor the pledges they have made -- something they have never done before -- has any chance of success. The answer, unfortunately, is that it is extremely unlikely. There is certainly no chance that the United States will do that, even though it is providing more aid now under President George W. Bush than it did under President Bill Clinton.
For the US to bring its official development assistance to the target level of 0.7 percent of GDP, it would have to increase it by some $60 billion a year -- and with budget deficits already running at record levels for the foreseeable future (without even counting the cost of the war in Iraq), and the president determined to make his controversial tax cuts permanent, that is utterly beyond the realm of possibility. Other rich countries have their own budget problems and pressing domestic needs -- including electorates that are demanding tax relief for themselves as well.
It turns out that, regardless of the best intentions, we are all, rich and poor alike, living beyond our means.
(Jack Freeman, formerly of NBC News, covered every major UN conference for The Earth Times from 1991 to 2002.)