Eight Millennium Goals Were to Be Achieved by 2015 and There Are Only Five Years to Go
Copyright (c) 2010 Alison Withers
In 2000 to mark the beginning of the new millennium the United Nations set eight ambitious goals to be achieved by 2015.
Halving those numbers of people in the world living in poverty and reducing by two-thirds the numbers of children dying before they reached their fifth birthday are among the eight goals.
But in advance of a UN summit in September 2010 to review progress on the goals - plus a UN emergency meeting for September 24 on dramatically rising food prices -there has been a deluge of press releases and statistics that suggest meeting the millennium goals within the next five years is going to be a challenge.
The charity, Save the Children, says that there have been four million preventable child deaths in the last decade because of states' failure to help the poorest in their societies.
The charity claims that developing countries use methods to reduce deaths that lead to the lives of children from better off communities being saved while those most disadvantaged are not, which it describes as a dangerous trend.
Unicef too reports a huge and growing divides between children from rich and poor backgrounds.
This feeds into another issue, highlighted by a report from the Institute of Development Studies, 1.3 billion of the world's poor live in what are called Middle Income Countries (MICs) compared to 20 years ago when 93% lived in low-income countries.
According to the paper the nature and directing of aid is going to have to change in order to find new ways of helping the poorest in places liek India and China, whose economies have both been taking of but who have mot made much progress in lifteing their poorest citizens out of poverty.
It is a message already picked up by the UK Government which has protected its aid budget despite plans to cut back dramatically on spending in other Government departments to try to repair the damage done by the global financial crisis that began in 2007-08.
UK Deputy PM Nick Glegg is expected to inform the UN summit that the UK will be re-targeting its entire aid budget towards the most vulnerable women and babies.
A persistent and indeed growing problem in the last couple of years has been access to food and rising costs.
There have been several conflicting reports on this issue, most recently an opinion piece by a spokesomean from the UK's Soil Association, arguing that it is incorrect to say, as many agencies have, that world food production needs to double by 2050 to meet the growing population.
In fact, the Association argues, figures have been misrepresented and doubling only applies to specific foods like meat rather than total food production, that the projections actually need to change to reflect changing diet patterns in some parts of the world reflecting increased wealth and that they ignore the issues of access, distribution and affordability as well as preventing other visions of food production and farming from being taken seriously.
It cirtes one study which claims that organic agriculture would "probably" feed the projected 2050 world population given relatively modest diets and a reduction in the inequality of food distribution.
Some low-tech solutions are about. In western India, for example basic pay as you go mobile phones are enabling farmers to access local weather reports and market prices for their products while India's leading phone company Bharti Airtel is running a pilot project in Maharashtra testing the use of farm sprinkler systems that can be activated via a mobile phone.
Biopesticides Developers have a part to play in moving to a more sustainable system of agriculture by using the range of low-chem biopesticies and yield enhancers that they are devising and are as useful to poor, small-scale farmers as they are to larger agricultural businesses. Their licensing, production and distribution needs to be quicker and more affordable and accessible to those small farmers who could make use of them.
Plainly there needs to be a good deal more subtlety in the coming debate and more attention paid to specific situations in different parts of the world if there is to be any hope of reaching those millennium goals by the deadline.
About the Author
The UN's eight millennium goals to be achieved by 2015 aiming to reduce income, education and food inequality. Can access to food be made more equal with the help of low-chem agricultural products, asks writer Ali Withers. http://www.agraquest.com
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