Analysis: Aid, trade and U.N. development

by Nicole Duarte

published by UPI, September 7, 2005

The U.N. Development Program Wednesday called for no compromise on aid and trade technology, and for a strengthened commitment to the Millennium Development Goals in next week's world summit.

The 372-page annual Human Development Report, which ranks the development of nations, was released at U.N. World Headquarters a week before the conclave focusing on the goals and U.N. reform opens.

"The fundamental question for this summit is, if we can't deliver on this commitment, on these targets, what does it say about the capacity of the international community to cooperate in addressing the really profound challenges that face us all, the challenge of shared prosperity, the challenge of shared security," Kevin Watkins, the report's author, said Tuesday.

The goals were eight internationally agreed, time-bound and quantified targets to reduce global poverty by 2015. UNDP said the world had already missed a 2005 deadline for universal primary school education and was off track to meet its 2015 commitments.

In addition to detailed development data for 2005, the UNDP report answered the question, if we improve nothing else, what will poverty look like in 2015?

"If current trends continue, there will be large gaps between MDG targets and outcomes," the report said.

The UNDP report said "on average" poverty in developing nations was decreasing, and more than 130 million people escaped extreme poverty since 2000. However, Watkins blamed the pace of development, which was much slower than prescribed by the MDGs, for what he described would be "preventable" human casualties.

Watkins offered the example of child mortality.

Assuming no further development efforts, by 2015, "we're 4.4 million child lives off track," he said.

The 4.4 million referred to avoidable child deaths, a number equivalent to the combined under-5 populations of New York , London and Tokyo .

Additionally, the report said if trends continued unabated, in 10 years 380 million people would be forced, unnecessarily, to survive on less than $1 a day.

More, better-coordinated aid is necessary to alleviating poverty, the UNDP report said.

Although the United States, the world's largest aid donor, has steadily increased its aid donations, by $8 billion since 2000, the richest nations still only contributed 0.25 percent of gross national product in aid, lower than the 1990 rate, but on the rise since 1997, the report said.

Even tremendous civil society pressure exercised on world leaders at a recent Group of Eight summit in Gleneagles , Scotland , and unprecedented commitments toward debt relief for poor nations was not enough to persuade nations to implement timetables for increasing development aid to 0.7 percent of GNP, as prescribed by UNDP.

Regardless, Watkins said he hoped civil society scrutiny during the September summit would nudge world leaders toward real progress. He added, in light of the pledges made in Gleneagles, rich countries should arrive at the summit," not with promises, but with concrete spending plans showing how they're going to deliver on those plans.

Aid is not the only avenue to development progress, Watkins said.

"We know the international trading system is a far better catalyst for poverty reduction than aid, under the right conditions, but we know those conditions haven't been created," he added.

The UNDP report urged nations to adopt development-friendly trade policies, including export subsidy elimination, a contentious topic in many trade negotiations, including those of the World Trade Organization and the Doha Round on development.

"We say in the report that the way in which the European Union and the United States subsidize agriculture is destroying small farmer production in developing nations," said Watkins.

The UNDP report said, "On average the trade barriers faced by developing countries exporting to rich countries are three to four times higher than those faced by rich countries when they trade with each other."

In the last round of trade negotiations, rich nations pledged to reduce their agricultural subsidies. However, UNDP said, those subsidies have increased. As a result, grocery prices in developing nations plummeted along with profits to local producers.

"Is it too much to expect the rich countries to go beyond the rhetoric of free markets and to ask them to actually open their markets to the world's poorest countries?" Watkins asked.

Another crucial tool for the advancement of poor nations was technology, said Watkins, who advocated for a less encumbered active technology transfer mechanism to assist developing nations.

"The technological divide between nations is one of the critical inequalities, and it's an inequality that is underestimated in its importance," said Watkins.

"Inequalities of education and technology now are the income inequalities of tomorrow," he added.

Income inequality was a growing problem in nations supporting 80 percent of the world's population, UNDP said.

"Income inequalities interact with other life chance inequalities," the report said, noting race, gender, language, and education as examples.

The resulting marginalization produced certain contradictions.

For example, Malaysia , with one-fourth the average income of the United States , boasted the same infant mortality rate, the report said. Although the United States is the leading world spender on healthcare, African-Americans in Washington suffered a higher infant mortality rate than residents of Kerala , India , said Watkins.

Furthermore, despite advanced technology, social inequalities affected the ability of an individual to pay for sophisticated treatment, and ultimately limited the reach of medical science, said the report.

Watkins urged world leaders to consider such complicated repercussions of delayed development in their summit negotiations. While time may be limited, he added, the three-day summit at headquarters nevertheless offered an opportunity to set clear, practical priorities for the future.

"What this summit can do," he said, "is go beyond the broad aspiration and say; we have goals, we have targets against which to judge performance and more important than that, we have the means to ensure these targets are met."