World poverty and global economic justice: millennium development goals

The idea that only justice will bring genuine stability has a long history. But it does rather beg the question ‘What is justice? ’, which has an even longer history. For a long time mainstream IR sought to avoid the question, regarding it as masking the real questions concerning power relations. But the post-1945 world has proven an increasingly fertile arena for exploring questions of international justice and a lot of effort and money has gone in to trying to meet the demands that this places upon the international community.

One large scale example of this can be seen in the construction of the development goals of the UN. The dawn of a new millennium provided, in the words of the Secretary General Kofi Annan, the opportunity for the peoples of the world under the auspices of the UN ‘to reflect on their common destiny at a moment when they find themselves interconnected as never before’. At the Millennium Summit held in New York in September 2000, 189 nations adopted the UN General Assembly resolution the ‘Millennium Declaration’. This resolution provided the basis for political cooperation towards eight millennium development goals (MDGs). These are as follows:

Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.

Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education.

Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women.

Goal 4: Reduce child mortality.

Goal 5: Improve maternal health.

Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.

Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability.

Goal 8: Develop a Global Partnership for Development.

These goals were to be met by 2015. The millennium development goals are far more than wordy declarations. They are time-specific, measurable and enjoy immense political support. Yet the progress towards these goals in the millennium development goals report 2005 did not make encouraging reading. All of these goals are immensely important and represent vital challenges for the international com­munity but to get a sense of the scale of the problem, the approach to tackling the issues and the progress to date we shall focus solely on poverty and child mortality.

The headline target we are interested in is the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger. The MDG is to halve, by 2015, the number of people living on less than $1 a day. While this goal includes all people and not just children, we can get some idea of the enormity of this problem from two pieces of data. The first is that more than a quarter of children in the developing world are malnourished and that is around 146 million.

Second, every year around 11 million children under the age of 5 die. That is 30, 000 children a day. Child mortality is closely linked to poverty and so it is not surprising that the peoples of the United Nations sought to act. However, one third of the time we set ourselves to halve poverty has passed but while progress is being made, the MDG’s report 2005 is clear that we are far from winning this vital battle.

In fact the problem is such that progress towards eradicating hunger is not keeping up with global population growth and it is likely that hitting the target will take more than 130 years rather than the 15 the UN envisaged. It is the case that while progress is made in one area, ground is being lost in another. So while it is true that the average income of the very poor in most of the developing world has increased from $0.80 a day to $0.82 a day the income of the very poorest in Sub-Saharan Africa has actually decreased from $0.62 a day to $0.60. That leads to another 34 million people having insufficient food.

The political language and effort of the UN and the global partner­ship should not be underestimated but what is it that is preventing a reasonably united UN from hitting its targets? A system of sovereign states where the priority of the actors is self-help does not seem to be the most fruitful ground for sowing the seed of global economic equity. For some political commentators our moral obligations are very clear. We are committed to human rights, to the eradication of poverty and to the establishment of social institutions that are capable of delivering on these commitments. Yet we persistently fail to live up to these standards.