[MDGs] Poverty will kill two million children : UN

01/07/2005

Over the next decade, two million children will die, 40 million people will be without safe drinking water, and five million children will be forced out of school if current trends continue in 14 countries across Asia and the Pacific that are among the world’s least developed, a UN report said today.

Better access to international markets could prevent this, said the report from United Nations Development Program.The grim forecasts in the UNDP report sought to focus attention on countries ranging from Afghanistan and Nepal to Bangladesh and Samoa. Experts say these countries are often ignored amid spotlights on African poverty and the image of a new prosperity sweeping Asian nations like China and India.

“It seeks to explode a certain myth – that Asia is a happening place,” said Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, a consultant to the report. “The objective is to draw the attention of the international community toward these 14 least developed countries that are often ignored… I’m not saying: Ignore Africa. I’m saying: Do not ignore Asia.”

The report, which was released ahead of the Group of Eight summit of industrialised nations to be held in Scotland next week, suggested the removal of import duties and other trade restrictions against these countries to help them fight poverty.The UN report, released in New Delhi, said the 14 countries – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Kiribati, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Maldives, Burma, Nepal, Samoa, Solomon Islands, East Timor, Tuvalu and Vanuatu - accounted for some 260 million people.

The report highlighted the contrasts in the Asia-Pacific region, where it said the poorest nations were often ignored because faster growing nations made the continent’s overall development averages look good.“China and India, together accounting for nearly 40% of the world’s population and ranking among the fastest-growing countries, account for most of this progress,” the report said. “Due to the tyranny of averages, the relatively poor performance of the Asia-Pacific least developed countries gets overshadowed.”

The document painted a grim picture of these nations: Afghanistan’s forests are likely to be gone in 20 years, and in Bangladesh, about half of all citizens aged 15-24 will be illiterate in 2015.“The dynamism of Asia represents both a challenge and an opportunity. It could increase inequalities that contribute to growing tensions,” the report said.As a solution, it suggested import tariffs be removed for products from these countries, where most exports are labour-intensive and bigger sales would help workers directly.

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© Thomas Crosbie Media, 2005.

[Fair Trade] Farm subsidies keep Africa in poverty, says Brown

By Toby Helm and George Jones

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown turned up the moral pressure on European leaders to scrap the £33 billion-a-year Common Agricultural Policy yesterday by saying that over-generous subsidies paid to EU farmers were perpetuating mass poverty in Africa.
As Britain's prepares to take on the EU presidency tomorrow, and with the G8 summit at Gleneagles coming up next week, Mr Brown said developed countries could "no longer ignore" the "hypocrisy" of a regime that distorted world trade and held back Africa's poorest nations.
As part of a co-ordinated assault on the CAP, Mr Blair suggested for the first time during Prime Minister's Questions that it should be abandoned as part of a complete overhaul of the EU's finances.
Hilary Benn, the International Development Secretary, said the rich world had a "moral imperative" to achieve trade justice. He called for an end to EU and non-EU agricultural subsidies in which rich nations give their farmers £154 billion a year - 10 times the amount given in aid to Africa.
The concerted demands for action on the CAP set the stage for further disagreement between Mr Blair and Jacques Chirac, the French president, at Gleneagles, where moves to liberalise world trade to alleviate poverty will be high on the agenda.
French farmers receive 21 per cent of the CAP payments - £7 billion a year. As a result, Mr Chirac and the French political establishment defend the system fiercely. At a bad-tempered summit in Brussels this month Mr Chirac rejected Mr Blair's calls for reform and told other leaders that the system was essential to the EU's future.
In a speech to Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, Mr Brown said that some progress had been made to persuade rich nations to open up their markets and take measures to end export subsidies. But he said more needed to be done, particularly at European level. "We cannot any longer ignore what people in the poorest countries will see as our hypocrisy of developed country protectionism.
"We should be opening our markets and removing trade-distorting subsidies and, in particular, doing more to urgently tackle the waste of the Common Agricultural Policy by now setting a date for the end of export subsidies."
Under the CAP, EU farmers receive subsidies to produce and export surplus crops, driving down world commodity prices and thereby harming the economies of nations whose prosperity depends on a thriving agricultural sector.
Mr Brown said: "Think of the Mozambican sugar producer who cannot compete with European sugar beet farmers because the subsidies Europeans receive enable them to sell more expensive goods at a cheaper price."
Mr Blair surprised MPs by declaring publicly that it was his ambition "to get rid of" the Common Agricultural Policy".
Although he has previously talked of reforming the EU's farm subsidy system, it was the first time he had talked of scrapping it.
His remarks were confirmation that he intends to put radical reform of the CAP centre stage during Britain's six months at the EU helm.
It will put him on a collision course not only with France but with the Irish Republic, another leading beneficiary of CAP payments.
During noisy exchanges in the Commons, Mr Blair was accused by Michael Howard, the Conservative leader, of "shifting positions" on negotiations over the CAP and Britain's £3 billion a year rebate from the EU.
Mr Howard said the Prime Minister had assured MPs that the rebate would stay and would not be negotiated. Now he was saying that everything was open to debate as long as there was a fundamental review of the CAP.

[US Aid] Bush Exaggerates Increase in U.S. Aid

Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jun 27 (IPS) - U.S. President George W. Bush has been significantly exaggerating the amount of money his administration has provided in aid to sub-Saharan Africa, according to a new study released here Monday.

Instead of a tripling of U.S. aid to Africa between 2000 and 2005, as Bush has frequently insisted, Washington has increased aid by only 56 percent in real terms, according to the report by the Brookings Institution.

The report, entitled ”U.S. Foreign Assistance to Africa: Claims and Reality”, is almost certain to increase pressure on Bush to announce a major new initiative to bolster development in the world's poorest continent in the run-up to the Group of Eight (G8) summit meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland, to be hosted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair Jul. 6-8.

The pressure on Bush to be more forthcoming toward Africa has grown steadily despite his agreement to join a debt cancellation plan with other G8 nations that should benefit about a dozen of Africa's poorest nations. The G8 represents the world's most industrialised nations: the United States, Canada, Japan, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and Italy.

During his visit here earlier this month, Blair stressed that increased aid and other support for Africa will be among the top agenda items at Gleneagles. Along with the United Nations and the World Bank, he has called on industrialised countries to double aid to Africa over the next few years as part of a series of measures, including debt relief, to substantially reduce poverty and sustain economic growth in the region.

After Blair's visit, the leaders of several African nations who had been invited to the White House publicly criticised the administration for not disbursing aid from Bush's new Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) more quickly to needy nations. Several days later, several influential conservative black clergymen who had been wooed by the administration sent a letter to Bush calling for him to offer full support for Blair's Africa-related initiatives, including comprehensive debt relief and a doubling of official development assistance (ODA) to Africa to 50 billion dollars a year.

”Some were confused by the fact that Prime Minister Tony Blair, who stood with the president on Iraq at enormous political cost to himself, did not appear to be receiving the same level of concrete support from the president when it came to Africa,” Rev. Eugene Blyers, a Boston pastor who backed Bush's re-election last year, told the Los Angeles Times. ”It is our hope that the president will stand with the prime minister as strongly as the prime minister stood with him at the height of the controversy over the Iraq war.”

Blair's call for increased aid has been well received elsewhere, leaving Bush increasingly isolated. In late May, EU leaders agreed unanimously to almost double assistance to the world's poorest countries over the next five years. One week later, Japan promised to do the same in three years' time. In addition, key EU members, including Britain, France, Germany and Italy, have also committed to increasing their official development assistance (ODA) for poor countries to 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) by 2015.

But Bush has been far less forthcoming, insisting that his administration has already tripled U.S. aid to Africa and that a promise to provide 0.7 percent of U.S. GDP -- nearly five times what Washington provides today -- ”doesn't fit our budgetary process.” ”Over the past four years, we have tripled our assistance to Sub-Sahara Africa, and now America accounts for nearly a quarter of all the aid in the region,” he told Blair at a joint White House news conference Jun. 7. According to the Brookings study, however, aid to Africa under Bush ”has not 'tripled' or even doubled.”

The report finds instead that between fiscal year 2000, the last full year for which Bill Clinton was president, and FY 2005, total U.S. aid for Africa increased only 56 percent in real terms, with the majority of the increase consisting of emergency food aid, rather than traditional ODA that is used to promote long-term development. During the same period, Washington's ODA for Africa increased only 33 percent in real terms, according to the report, which was written by Susan Rice, who served as Clinton's top Africa aide from 1993 to 2001 and is currently with the Centre for American Progress. If funds earmarked for FY 2005 are considered, total aid to Africa will have increased by 78 percent in real terms since 2005, and ODA by 74 percent, according to the study. ”The administration has made some assertions about spending levels that are not accurate,” Rice told reporters in a teleconference Monday. ”The rhetoric has been more compelling than actual performance.”

U.S. foreign aid in general reached its nadir in the mid-1990s after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, according to Rice, who noted that it began rising again in the late 1990s. Even with the increase in assistance, Washington has been the most miserly of the major industrialised nations, contributing only about 0.16 percent of its GDP to ODA. Rice described Bush's overall record on aid to Africa as ”mixed.”

On the positive side, Bush's Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which is supposed to provide 15 billion dollars over five years in support for AIDS initiatives in 15 countries, 12 of which are in Africa, has been a major advance, she said, even if it is ”flawed” both by substantial restrictions on how the money can be spent and the fact that most of the money has been channeled through the administration's own bilateral programme rather than through the multilateral Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. At the same time, another major Bush initiative that also primarily targeted Africa, the MCA, has so far failed to gain any traction and now faces sharp budget cuts by Congress precisely because it has been so slow in disbursing aid.

The MCA, which Bush announced with great fanfare at a major U.N. summit on development finance in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002, was supposed to have provided 10 billion dollars in additional assistance to countries committed to far-reaching economic, anti-corruption and political reforms over three years beginning in fiscal 2003 and five billion dollars a year as of FY 2006. While Congress has appropriated 2.5 billion dollars for the MCA over the past two years, the new agency has so far approved just four projects, in Honduras (215 million dollars), Nicaragua (175 million dollars), Cape Verde (110 million dollars) and Madagascar (108 million dollars), as well as 400,000 dollars for administrative expenses. ”The MCA exists in name only,” according to Rice, who stressed that the agency, whose director, Paul Applegarth, announced his resignation earlier this month, illustrated the gap between the administration's rhetoric and what it was actually doing.

Aside from emergency food aid, which has increased by 184 percent from 2000 to 2005, the Africa aid accounts which increased the most over the five-year period in percentage terms, according to the Brookings Report, were mostly security-oriented. Contributions to peacekeeping operations grew 263 percent in 2005 compared to 2000, while foreign military financing -- which is used to buy training and equipment -- rose 163 percent. The costs of weapons non-proliferation, anti-terrorism, demining, and anti-drug programmes in Africa doubled over the period.

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