COMMENTARY (COMM): In the Year Two Thousand the world looked forward to a new millennium not only with fireworks, but with promises. Promises we would see an end to absolute poverty, avoidable disease, oppression of women and children without education. And for once, promises were backed with targets - the Millennium Development Goals.

The Millennium Development Goals – the MDGs - are targets for development. They were agreed by all 189 UN member states in 2000 –targets for everyone to meet by the year 2015. And they’re our theme in this new series of Life.

EVELINE HERFKENS, Director of Millennium Development Campaign: The Millennium Development Goals provide us for the first time in history with a shared vision among all of us including at the highest political level of what development is about – and who should be doing what to put an end to poverty.

HILDE FRAFJORD JOHNSON, Minister for International Development, Norway: The beauty of the Millennium Development Goals actually is that we agreed to do our bit. The rich countries have to improve significantly and so do the poor countries – there’s no way we can achieve this without both doing our job.

PROF. ADIL NAJAM, Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Pakistan: Ours is the very first generation in history that had the possibility and the ability to feed every hungry person on earth. We had the technology, we had the food, we just didn’t have the will and that’s where the MDGs come in.

COMM: Over recent years the rich countries – with a few exceptions like the UK - have given less and less of their income in foreign aid.

The Millennium Development Goals are designed reverse that trend - to set clear and measurable targets for developing countries to meet in return for foreign aid.

The idea is that taxpayers who finance foreign aid have a right to see results.

POUL NIELSON, EU Commissioner for Development: The trick is that by setting the targets of the MDGs, we are creating an agenda of things to achieve. The raw material of making that possible is basically an input of money. This money is found in one place only, in the pockets of taxpayers in the rich North.

COMM: The MDGs – it’s hoped – will persuade taxpayers to deeper dip into their pockets – either because they care, or because they’re concerned at what could happen if they don’t.

EVELINE HERFKENS: Even if people would not care, it is important to realize that indeed globalization means diseases travel, crime travels, drugs travel, terrorism travels, so we are in this all together.

Target One – eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

COMM: These are the kind of people the MDGs are meant to help.

Over ten thousand slum-dwellers in Metro Manila owe their living to scavenging on the Payatas rubbish tip. In developing countries like the Philippinnes over a billion people live on less than a dollar a day.

So Millennium Target Number One is cutting that number by half – and eradicating extreme poverty and hunger.

ADIL NAJAM: I think it can be achieved. I think it can certainly be achieved. I don’t think its simple achievement will be a source of great celebration for me. It would be just one step, in some ways it’s an easy target and the sad part is even though it is an easy target it is so difficult to achieve.

COMM: But it could be achieved with political will, as the next programme in this series of Life shows.

China has some of the poorest and most remote villages in the world – (where cameras don’t often go). But China claims to have lifted two hundred and fifty million people above its basic poverty line of sixty six cents a day.

JANE WERU, Pamoja Trust, Kenya: Target number one is achievable, it will be achieved if each one of us plays our part and does what they're supposed to. If in developing countries we develop policies that support this goal and we put money where our mouths are and also in the developed world if policies too are developed that can support this goal.

Target 2 – achieve universal primary education

COMM: In a Chinese school, they’re still working at ten at night.

On the walls, acceptance notes for the students from universities.

But to have a chance of university, children first need primary education – and in some poor countries like India many don’t even have that.

So - MDG Number Two – achieving universal primary education by Twenty Fifteen. A target that’s about more than just learning to read and write.

POUL NIELSON: The difference between having a school or not having a school means much more than the teaching of the children.

The fact is that millions of teachers become civic leaders. They stand up, so they represent a culture and hope of rising above the poverty. That is what a teacher represents in a poor country.

COMM: In some countries teachers are so scarce, children are having to teach themselves. In India, these children are organising their own education – street kids improvising street classrooms.

And in the island of Sri Lanka – scarred by civil war – Life has filmed children who’ve rebuilt their school themselves.

But around the world – and especially in Africa – there are many children who don’t have the resources to help themselves – and for whom primary education remains a distant dream.

EVELINE HERFKENS: Putting free primary education in place is something all countries – even the poorest - should be able to do if you get your budgetary priorities right – so there’s no excuse for that.

INTERVIEWER: Why not?

HERFKENS: It’s a question of political will, and that’s what it’s all about.

INTERVIEWER: But surely a government shouldn’t have to be told - by a bunch of bureaucrats in New York – to educate its children?

HERFKENS: No, they should be told by their own people.

HILDE FRAFJORD JOHNSON: I haven’t up to now met any minister or President that doesn’t believe that providing education for all is extremely important.

INTERVIEWER: But some of them don’t do it.

HILDE FRAFJORD JOHNSON: And that’s because they lack financial resources. And that’s because they lack the capacity.

INTERVIEWER: But isn’t it sometimes because they can’t be bothered – it’s not a political priority –rather spend the money on defence.

HILDE FRAFJORD JOHNSON: Yes, some leaders are not sufficiently committed. And those, there’s no other way than putting hard pressure on them. And also –

INTERVIEWER: So the MDGs may have to come with pressure as well as pleas?

HILDE FRAFJORD JOHNSON: Of course, of course. And we’re doing that.

Target 3 – promote gender equality and empower women

COMM: In war-torn Afghanistan young girls are now returning to school after the fall of the Taliban. Empowering women is increasingly seen as crucial for development. It’s Millennium Development Goal Number Three.

Many women aren’t waiting to be liberated from oppression, abuse and gender bias. In Luak in Kenya a Catholic Church shelters fifty widows who have rebelled against the tradition of wife inheritance. Wife inheritance means the wives of dead men being passed onto relatives – often along with the virus that causes AIDS.

In Nepal Life visits Sita, determined to help women protect themselves against AIDS.

And in Bangladesh, Shati, a young photographer, campaigns for other girls to follow her example - to stay at school, join a profession and resist being married off too young.

SHATI: I’m taking pictures. And I’m going to many places. Lots of people know me as Shati, the photographer.

HILDE FRAFJORD JOHNSON: To educate girls and educate women is the best investment in purely economic terms that one can do in any poor country. And the reason basically is – one birth control: educated women and girls get fewer children. Second, taking care of the family’s health and their own health benefits the economy. Thirdly, they actually do send their girls to school – men that are only educated don’t do that – and their kids to school, all of their children. And fourthly they can be participants in the economy to a much larger extent as being educated.

Targets 4 and 5 – reduce child mortality and improve maternal health

COMM: But few young women in Bangladesh become photographers. Most become mothers – many too soon, too young. Maternal mortality – mothers dying in pregnancy and childbirth - is one of the few development indicators that hasn’t improved over the last few decades.

DR. NAFIS SADIK, Former Exec Director of UN Population Fund: While a lot has been done on so many fronts – maternal mortality has not budged. The rights of women have not been addressed, they're not educated, informed about their own health and you know reproductive matters.

COMM: MDG Four aims to cut child mortality by two-thirds and to reduce maternal mortality by three quarters.

But critics say the MDGs have been deliberately weakened by some of the politicians and bureaucrats who drew them up. They don’t mention the term “reproductive rights” agreed at the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population & Development. Some conservative groups claim such language could promote abortion.

NAFIS SADIK: The Millennium Development Goals would have been enormously helpful for reducing maternal mortality and doing something really, you know solid about maternal mortality if they had included the right indicators and the right targets.

I think that we could have made a difference but because of the political accommodation, the indicators and the targets don’t mention reproductive health and rights anywhere. They are just not included.

EVELINE HERFKENS: Nafis Sadik is right – these eight goals are the outcome of international negotiations – and indeed the Cairo targets on reproductive health have been dropped. But in the real world many developing countries are incorporating again in their national millennium development goal reports the issues of reproductive health either under the maternal health Goal Four or under Goal Three on gender equity – so in the real world these issues are still very much on the agenda.

Target 6 – combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases

COMM: In Zambia, Life tells the story of a hospice for people with AIDS, the worst global health disaster ever.

Of course its not just AIDS that’s a Disease of Mass Destruction in the poorer world – there’s malaria and TB. MDG Six aims to tackle them all – though it speaks only of “beginning to reverse” their spread rather than eradicating them. Still, health issues are central to other Millennium Goals too.

DR LEE JONG-WOOK, Director-General, World Health Organization: Health is clearly a precondition for any effort to make development either individually or for the society, and so I think it is not by chance that so many goals are built around health.

In fact something like a half the Millennium Development Goals are built round health. My hope was at least two-thirds.

DR. RICHARD FEACHEM, Director, Global Fund: To reduce poverty many other things have to happen first and more importantly health has to improve because better health leads to more wealth and so the big health tragedies like AIDS, TB and malaria, have to be beaten back if poverty is to reduce.

COMM: In Kenya a Church orphanage run by Father Agostinho for children whose mothers died of AIDS. It’s a model project – but sadly there are few like it.

Anti-retroviral drugs – ARVs - of the kind used here can help people with AIDS, but few poor Africans can afford them. There are now international programmes to distribute ARV drugs. But critics say there’s no clear agreement who’s in charge of the global war on AIDS.

INTERVIEWER: Who’s actually responsible for delivering the Millennium Development Goals on AIDS?

FEACHEM: Well many people and that might sound like a confusion and a weak answer. But I think it’s the right answer and a good thing.

INTERVIEWER: Doesn’t many people mean nobody in practice?

FEACHEM: Well that’s the danger and that’s what we have to guard against.

Target 7 – ensure environmental sustainability

COMM: Target Seven is sustainable development - more controversial than you might think.

In practice development increasingly means urbanization. Citizens in countries like Kenya are voting with their feet – incredibly they often prefer to take their chances in the slums of Nairobi than to endure poverty in the remote countryside. And yet across the world governments have failed to recognize that so many people want to live in cities – no matter how squalid they may seem.

NAISON MUTIZWA MANGIZA, UN-Habitat: History shows that the entire civilisation – global civilisation is moving towards urbanisation. Cities are the engines of national economic growth, cities are where everything is happening…

So encouraging urbanisation and urban growth is actually a positive thing, it's not a negative thing.

INTERVIEWER: How many governments have been planning for urbanization?

NAISON: Unfortunately very few.

COMM: The Chinese government – with its history of central control – is one of the few governments actually promoting urbanization in some regions as a way of relieving rural poverty.

Elsewhere – in Khayalitsha outside Cape Town in South Africa for example – urbanization is a more unplanned affair – leading to pressure on sanitation and safe water supplies.

MDG Seven aims to halve the number of people without safe water and to improve the lives of at least a hundred million slum dwellers by 2020.

JANE WERU, Pamoja Trust, Kenya: Slowly, slowly we’re beginning to see this recognition in the Millennium Development Goals we have a target that indicates that one of the things we have to do is to change the lives of slum dwellers and I think this is the beginning of a change in the way the world begins to view developing country cities and I think it is a positive thing.

NAISON: When we are talking about slums we have two types of slums – we have what we call slums of hope and slums of despair and our view is that the majority of slums in the world are actually slums of hope because fundamentally because of the willingness of slum residents to improve their own accommodation – they just need a few things in place - I'm thinking here of water, I'm thinking of sanitation. These are the critical ingredients or missing ingredients in slums.

Target 8 – a global partnership for development

COMM: Removing the obstacles to development will also involve the rich countries meeting some tough targets. Like many poor farmers in the developing world, dairy producers in the Caribbean suffer from what they see as unfair trade practices by the rich world.

Farmers in Jamaica complain they can’t compete with subsidized powdered milk shipped in from countries like the Netherlands.

EVELINE HERFKENS: Two-thirds of the world’s poor live in rural areas and depend on agriculture, or activity related to rural agriculture. As long as rich countries subsidize their own production, leading to overproduction, overproduction, more than we can ever swallow at home, and then dump the surpluses, subsidized, on poor countries’ markets, there is no chance that the first Millennium Goal – halving the number of poor people – will ever be reached.

COMM: In Ethiopia even many efficient farmers are going hungry because they can’t what they believe is a fair price for their produce – including the best grade coffee beans.

ETHIOPIAN FARMER: It’s a buyers’ market – not an exporters’ or not a producers’ market.

COMM: Target Eight of the MDGs urges a Global Partnership for Development – including helping farmers like those here in Jimma by creating a fairer trade system.

But for the rich countries to dismantle trade barriers by Twenty Fifteen would be to cut a deal that’s eluded the world for decades.

YOUBA SOKONA, Enda-TM Senegal: We are in 2003 and 2015 is only 12 years, this is very short. And at the same time a lot of people are dying because of the trade issues. It is not because they are not producing, it's not because they are not working.

If we are serious about aid the best way of aiding those people is to get from them is to get them to get maximised profit from what they are doing for themselves.

POUL NIELSON: This is in fact already happening, and we are gradually changing our system of subsidising agriculture in Europe. The real sinner here is the United States.

INTERVIEWER: Well, you always say that; they always blame you...

NIELSON: Yeah. Both are right, but one is more right than the other.

INTERVIEWER: You mean you are?

NIELSON: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: But we do give the poor countries a lot of money in aid, doesn't that outweigh any damage we do them by unfair trade?

JAMES WOLFENSOHN, President, World Bank: Well a lot of money is relative. In total something of the order of 50 billion dollars is given in overseas development assistance, but more than 350 billion dollars is given in agricultural subsidies in the rich countries. So it far outweighs the level of development assistance that is given, and in addition to the subsidies there are of course tariff barriers and other barriers to entry, so it is very, very clear that development will not take place at the pace that we would all like unless we address the question of liberalisation of trade.

COMM: In Malawi they’re recovering from a devastating food shortage made worse by mismanagement and corruption.

MDG Eight outlines the responsibilities of the rich world to help countries like Malawi - by relieving debt, helping with new technologies, and increasing foreign aid. In return poor countries must deliver better governance and tackle corruption.

Together MDGs One to Eight aim to tackle the root causes of poverty. Though some critics claim key issues have been avoided.

CAROL JONES, Trinidad & Tobago: The Millennium Development Goals are silent in some of the key social economic issues that drive poverty such as crime, the arms trade, the drugs trade, you know a whole range of social issues that have not been targeted in some of those goals.

EVELINE HERKENS: A lot of conflict, drugs and crime are the result of young people having no opportunity - the boulevard of broken dreams - if you have no other options, and if we can take away the root causes, which are poverty, it will make it much more difficult to find the recruits, for terrorists, for crime, for drug trafficking etc.

COMM: In Malawi and some other African countries the Millennium Development Goals are now being written into the Poverty Strategy Reduction Plans they are asked to agree in return for Western aid. The idea is to create a national consensus around the MDGs – though there’s a long way to go.

YOUBA SOKONA: The problem is I travel a lot in the north as well as in Africa and every time I come in the north and particularly in UK I hear about the Millennium Development Goals. But in Africa I never heard about the Millennium Development Goals.

EVELINE HERFKENS: That’s too negative – I know many civil society organizations that are increasingly using the package of these goals to create alliances, to indeed make governments accountable. More and more of the main Millennium Development Goals are integrated objectives of the poverty reduction strategies. I was in Latin America a few weeks ago – Brazil – Lula’s programme – putting an end to hunger – is in fact Goal One.

COMM: But the so-called War on Terror has created a new obstacle to the rich countries delivering their side of the MDG bargain. Since Nine Eleven – and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – the political attention of the rich countries has been diverted from development to defence. Some now fear the rich countries will fail to deliver on their commitments, making real global security even harder to achieve.

JAMES WOLFENSOHN: The thing which troubles me in relation to the Millennium Development Goals is not the goals themselves which I think are totally admirable, but - that there is a large gap between the assistance that needs to be given to achieve those millennial development goals and the rhetoric.

And if you compare for example the 50 billion dollars which is broadly the figure of development assistance, with a thousand billion dollars which is spent on defence – a thousand billion dollars – it seems to be that that imbalance doesn’t recognise the true basis on which one needs to build a peace, rather than a defence against terror and war.

DR LEE JONG-WOOK, Director-General, World Health Organization Whatever we do so we have to build it on the reality. But clearly if somebody spent five hundred billion, or even fifty billion, maybe even more, on the MDGs, of course it will be good news. But perhaps I’m dreaming?

COMM: For some the MDGs represent an even more ambitious agenda than eradicating poverty. They’re about restoring faith in multilateralism – the dream of a common global project that can unite a divided world.

POUL NIELSON: It’s not about a country here or a donor there playing the heroic role or doing something nice in Africa, it’s the organisation of it, the globalisation of it. Everybody talks about the international society, the shared - we don’t have one. Some of us are trying to create one, and the MDGs is a tool in that endeavour.

INTERVIEWER: Isn’t the problem about a common global project that everybody leaves it to everybody else? Nobody really takes the responsibility?

HILDE FRAFJORD JOHNSON: There’s always a risk of that. And I think that in this case, there is a difference, because we have not only agreed some vague formulations on the declaration of the UN conferences, but we’ve actually made commitments…

The poor countries have to improve their governance, the way they are running their business, and we have to improve both trade, debt and aid conditions. And actually what we see now is that there is a mobilization around these goals – we have agreed on the goals and on how to reach them.

COMM: But whatever the grand political agenda behind them, the MDGs represent modest targets. Little more, really, than a decent life - for everyone.

EVELINE HERFKENS: It’s basically very simple – investment, clean water, preventable diseases, primary education, schooling, public health systems, simple investments… It took us in northern Europe a century, it took Japan half a century, Korea a quarter of a century.

What we did, we can do on a worldwide scale, if we get our act together.

END

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