The Millennium Development Goals: Three Years to 2015What Waits After?

by Engels C. Del Rosario

Introduction In September 2000, United Nation (UN) members came together to forge a commitment to achieve a set of objectives by 2015 collectively known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The major concern of this global initiative is to reduce extreme poverty by half and ameliorate other social ills that hamper development in the South by 2015. After more than a decade, poverty rates across developing and least developed countries (LDCs) have significantly and dramatically dropped by 22% (UN 2011). Primary school enrollment and prevention of deadly diseases also showed positive progress. Based on the latest UN MDG progress report of 2011, more than half of these targets are unlikely to be met due to various reasons. With three years left to go, much work still needs to be done to close the gap in the rest of the MDGs. Already at this point, assessment and prognosis are as timely as exerting drastic efforts to fulfill the goals as satisfactorily as possible by 2015. This essay will provide a brief background and overview of the current progress and prospects of MDG project, discuss the critique of the project from the point of view of official development discourse, discuss the story and theories of development and their lessons, and situate the prospect of the project in light of current political and economic realities. The essay concludes by pointing to the need to shift focus from development as economic growth to development as equality. MDG as the latest global development project The UN leads the advocacy, campaign, and monitoring of the MDG project. Before the Millennium Declaration of the MDGs in 2000, no equivalent efforts in terms of scope, specificity, and timeline have been started. In fact, the indicators and baseline data by which monitoring of MDG progress could be measured were neither made uniform nor available until 1990 when UN came up with the Human Development Index (HDI). Prior to 1990, each sub-organization within the UN had individual sets of task to perform and each pursued their separate mandates. Notable examples of huge UN-led international efforts were the Live Aid campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s to combat poverty, hunger, diseases, in Africa, Bangladesh and other fragile states. But these were one-off episodes of intervention rather than medium- or long-term development programs. Though the MDG project is mostly associated with the UN as a whole, its origin could be traced to a paper written in 1996 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international partner organization of UN comprised of 34 of the richest nations. The paper entitled Shaping the 21st Century: The Contribution of Development Cooperation (1996), pushed for the achievement of the following goals by 2015, namely, (i) a reduction by one-half in the proportion of people living in extreme poverty; (ii) universal primary education in all countries; (iii) demonstrated progress toward gender equality and the empowerment of women by eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education; (iv) a reduction by two-thirds in the mortality rates for infants and children under age 5; (v) reduction by threefourths in maternal mortality; (vi) access through the primary health-care system to reproductive health services for all individuals of appropriate ages; and (vii) implementation of national strategies for sustainable development in all countries by 2005, so as to ensure that current

trends in the loss of environmental resources are effectively reversed at both global and national levels (Ibid). All of these have been adopted by the UN with the addition of a set of targets under one goal: pursue global partnerships to address issues in trade, debt relief, employment, technology, and special needs of LDCs. Table 1. The Millennium Development Goals and Current Progress Status The 8 MDGs 1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger Progress Status Progress in poverty but no change in hunger 2. Achieve universal primary education 3. Promote gender equality and empower women Moderate Progress in enrolment parity but lagging in jobs parity 4. Reduce child mortality 5. Improve maternal health 6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases 7. Ensure environmental sustainability 8. Develop a global partnership for development
Note: This is derived from UN Millennium Development Goals Report 2011.

On track On track On track Moderate, no change Moderate

Curiously, the OECD paper did not see the need to include in their proposed agenda issues on global trade and finance. Just a year later, the 1997 Asian financial crisis indicated that macroeconomic issues could no longer be ignored. Retrospectively, it was wise for the UN to add the eighth goal to precisely address the long-standing challenges posed by the realities of underregulated trading and financial systems then and now. Of the 18 targets1, at present the gains are mainly in the areas of poverty reduction (but not hunger), reduction of child mortality, improvement of maternal care, fighting diseases (HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis), access to safe drinking water, and spread of information and communication technologies (UN 2011). With a cursory look at the current MDG gains (See Table 1), it is not difficult to notice that these goals have been the areas the UN has been working on ever since. Achievements in these areas, we may say, could have been made easier by long-running efforts directed at poverty and health issues. On the other hand, the remaining challenges for these MDG targets are in the areas of hunger, literacy, gender equity, environment, aid, trade, debt relief, and employment. If achievement gaps in these targets persist or worsen, the UN can definitely claim success in its primary goalreducing extreme poverty by 2015but without any sense of satisfaction. But even this can be contested as the decline in the number of poor people from 1.8 billion in 1990 to 1.4 billion in 2005 was mainly driven by improvements made by China and India, two of the most populous nations in the South.

The number of target or sub-goals has varied from 18 to 21. This figure is based on the latest UN MDG Report of 2011.

With only three years to go, it is safe to say that at the rate progress is going, half of these will not be satisfactorily met. Why? Let us take a look at some of the criticisms from the official discourses. Too ambitious, too little time The Center for Global Development (2005) issued a working paper exactly four years after the launch of the MDG project that said The vast majority of developing countries will miss most of the MDG targets in 2015. Nearly all African countries will miss most of them (ibid). The report argues that the MDGs are not practical targets because they are not realistic. It would require a consistent 7% growth rate in the economies of, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa to reduce extreme poverty by half. Fifteen years will not just be enough for such LDCs to catch up with development. They agree, however, that MDGs are noble goals, except that UN should be reminded that development is not a sprint, but a marathon (ibid). Lack of policy coherence, economic security, and ODA Bourguignon et al (2008) offered an analytical framework to understand why progress in MDG achievement is slow. In a report commissioned by the European Union, they suggested that three things must be considered namely, the global economic environment, official development assistance (ODA), and policy coherence. The current crisis in the North hindered the economic growth opportunities for much of the LDCs, especially in Africa. Aid, though slowly increasing in the past several years, was not enough and was not efficiently used. And lastly, harmonizing the MDGs with each countrys national and sectoral policies has proven to be a challenge. In a quite circuitous reasoning, Jeffrey Sachs (2005) identified four major reasons why some of the MDGs will not be met. He mentions governance failure, poverty traps, pockets of poverty, and some areas of specific policy neglect. Sachss recommendations point to securing that capital accumulation, including most especially human capital, goes on smoothly by curbing corruption, pouring in public investment, attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), and sustaining economic growth. Development: Narrative and Theories To better appreciate the context of MDG as a global development project, we must take a quick review of how development was conceived, practiced, and debated. As we shall see, the fate of the MDG project, besides the issue of whether the 2015 deadline will be met, rests on the ideas and habits we cultivated, for better or worse, as we struggle to attain better quality of lives for all. Before the end of World War II, the world was not divided into First, Second, and Third Worlds or into developed and developing countries. The emergence of developmental thinking is associated with the Marshall Plan of the United States, an international effort to provide aid for the rehabilitation of European countries most devastated by war. This was largely understood to be a geopolitical move of the US to fend off threats and win the ideological war against the Soviet Union and later, against the spread of communism in regions that are now classified as Third World. Then US president Harry Truman spoke of the need to help the underdeveloped parts of the world (Escobar 1995). In the wake of reconstruction efforts, nations subscribed in varying manner to the following set of development theories and policies; modernization theory, Keynesianism, import substitution industrialization (ISI), dependency theory, world systems theory, and lately, neoliberalism, globalization, sustainable development, and

postdevelopmentalism. Their individual definition and comparative merits and demerits cannot be taken up here. For the purposes of this essay, these ideas about development are roughly grouped into three complexes of tendencies, a classification that is familiar today: (i) tendency to emphasize the importance of free market capitalism; (ii) tendency to emphasize the importance of state and protectionism; and (iii) tendency to mix both free market and state intervention in the economy. The most familiar narrative of development goes like this (See for example, Peet and Hartwick 2009): Each development theory enjoyed its own period of popularity and relevance. The succession of one set of ideas by another happened by way of critique and out of frustration. Keynesianism was used in the aftermath of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Modernization and growth theories were dominant during the first few postwar decades followed by the shortlived application of ISI. Marxist-inspired theories of dependency and world systems gained prominence in the 1970s, but these were overtaken by the rise of neoliberalism then sustainable development in the following decades. Dependency theories were a reaction to the faults of modernization theory. Neoliberalism and globalization theory overthrew dependency theory in the 1980s, only to be tempered by sustainable development as a result of growing concern for the environmental effects of economic development. The most recent school of thought to tackle development, and perhaps the exception to the three-way classification above, is postdevelomentalism. Postdevelopmentalists reject altogether the premises of development as led by and defined by rich, imperialist nations and technocrats of whatever ideologies. As a crude summary of the story of development, development efforts swung from free market to statist protectionism (1950s to 1970s), then back to free market (1980s to 1990s) then hovered at the center of the mixed economy model. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the current dilemma of experts in pointing out what made China as successful as it is today. There is an underside to the development story above that demonstrates it takes more than economic strategies to initiate dramatic progress. A number of authors have written about the significant political role the United States played in steering the fast track growths of nations like Japan, Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore in the early stages (See Bello 2006; Johnson 2005). In the context of the Cold War between US and Soviet Russia, America made sure that it would win the ideological battle by propping up the economies of the said nations which served as satellites that guarded the only superpowers geopolitical interests. In exchange for ideological allegiance and establishment of military bases, America opened its market for the exports of these countries. With its sizeable middle class, well-oiled credit system, and lowered tariffs, the US market provided a haven for the products of its allies, in turn fueling the export-led growth of the East Asian Miracle. The newly industrializing countries (NICs), for their part, ushered in an arguably unique development model known as Capitalism with Asian values or Asian Modernization. Roughly speaking, it is a relatively authoritarian political regime directing a capitalist economy, an idea that betrays the classical paradigm of free market with the least government intervention. This unique confluence of political and economic maneuverings is not contained in the principles of any past development theory. Even the political economy-heavy dependency and world systems theories, their critics remarked, were not able to explain how a very small island nation like Singapore could achieve and develop so much without delinking itself from the supposedly predatory global capitalist system that was managed by the core nations. It is like a template for success that Japan and the NICs created for China to follow later on after the death of Mao Zedong. It was no secret after all that a strong state must steer capitalist elements to its own desired achievements. The mixed economy model that delegates disproportionate steering function to the state is the way to go. At least that was how British and Dutch capitalism gained

ground and came to dominate the global economy in the 1700s to 1800s). In todays so-called neoliberal economy, most developed nations actively intervene in economic management though arguably protectionist gestures of reluctant reduction of tariffs and heavy subsidies while they pressure developing countries to liberalize their economies further. In defense, developing countries demonstrate that they, too, can play the same game of paying lip service to free trade while jealously guarding their market advantages. What unites the mainstream development theories are their common focal concern for economic growth. In fact, one can also say that the idea of development as economic growth is the thread that runs though the criticisms of the MDG project. However, it is worth arguing that a respectable rate of growth is not all there is to development. Continuous growth means having a bigger and bigger pie to share. But how equally the pie is shared is a different thing altogether. Poverty, inequality, economic growth can exist side by side with each other (Todaro and Smith 2006). Such ironic cases are major reasons for the postdevelopmentalists rejection of development as the way to end poverty and inequality among nations through the benefits of abiding by the western, industrial, capitalist, or socialist model. Postdevelopmentalists are especially antagonistic to development as a thinly veiled form of Westernization with their emphasis on cultural difference and trust in local knowledge and practices (W. Sachs 1992) At roughly about the same time in the mid-1990s, major postdevelopment texts appeared alongside efforts to define the international development agenda for the 21st century. Whether it was a conscious effort or not, the OECD seemed to have a timely response to the postdevelopmental critique that development did not work and is now obsolete (Ibid.). However, instead of offering a new and radical approach to development challenges, the OECD paper continues to believe in the benefits of ODA. As Bourguignon et al (2008) has shown, aid had not been so much of a factor in development. Crises, Clashes, and Conservatives Having reviewed theories of development that accompanied the evolution of related attitudes and practices, we now turn back to the MDGs and its present context. The events of 2011 throw into sharp relief the deep the need to focus on the issue of equality. Discontented citizens of Middle East and North Africa have risen up and toppled their authoritarian governments in their quest for democratization. They live in a region that is as very rich (because of oil) as it is highly unequal (Todaro and Smith 2006). Statistics show that the wide income disparity has remained constant through the years (Ibid). In Europe, protests, riots, lootings have become frequent and more militant in the midst of the implementation of austerity measures that would cut pensions and raise tuition fees in order to save the bankrupt nations. In the US, Americans took to the streets to New York City to demand accountability from Wall Street bankers. The working and middle classes felt cheated that the federal government bailed out the perpetrators of the worst economic crisis to hit the America since the Great Depression while they continue to lose their homes and jobs. These are reminders that within developed nations of the North, equally tragic circumstances, like famine and epidemics in Africa, can take place in a different guise. Challenges to development do not stop when a country reaches a First World status. In view of the present realities, what can we look forward to as far as the MDGs are concerned? Moving beyond economic growth, the first seven MDGs constitute some elements of what we can call development as equality. The first seven are survival goals in the sense that wider and

more equitable access to livelihood, food, health services, education, potable water, sanitation, and habitat should now be taken as vital as the three basic needs of food, shelter, and clothing. These presume that no one can lead a basic, functional life in a world of rapid obsolescence of knowledge, rapid spread of diseases, and rapid depletion of life-sustaining natural resources. In addition, gender parity and women empowerment must go hand in hand with investment in human capital (the first seven MDGs) to fully eradicate poverty characterized today as becoming more feminized. It is highly commendable and providential that the UN included targets like favorable trade agreements to LDCs, debt relief, and spread of technology, under the goal of develop global partnership for development. In contrast to the first seven goals that any responsible state must obtain for its citizens, the last set of goals can be seen to be directed more to the developed nations than to LDCs. Every UN member nation is engaged to forge an open, rule-based, predictable, non-discriminatory trading and financial system. For a long time, rich countries that attribute their wealth and progress to free market have likewise been models of protectionism. As more developing nations reduce their tariffs and quotas to almost zero in line with international trade agreements, developed nations hardly make progress in eliminating subsidies. The eighth MDG will be a good measure to really level the playing field. This is good for development as economic growth and for development as equality. Conclusion The latest UN progress report indicates that lives have been saved or changed for the better but despite real progress, we are failing to reach the most vulnerable (UN 2011). Ironic as it may be, it is not unrealistic to predict that we can have progress without development, just as there is jobless growth. No amount of openness in the economy or ODA or FDI can make for genuine development if the channels through which economic gains are distributed remain hierarchical. Clearly, much greater effort must be done to ensure fairness, justice, and equality not just distribution of assets and delivery of public goods within and among nations. If the current composition of G8 leadership is of any indication, much of the same or perhaps even worse can be expected. Except for US President Barack Obama who is a Democrat and liberal, the rest of the national leaders of the richest nations are from Conservative parties, and conservative politicians are known to be unresponsive to demands for greater equality. But it will be interesting to see the struggle for democracy in the Middle East will gain a foothold once the Arab Spring wanes. The MDG has been criticized for being unrealistic. As a project it did not promise low and may not deliver high. But that is because it is only the start of bolder development efforts in the future. It is ambitious. On balance, it is definitely necessary.

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