Poverty: Gap between intent and action

Andy Rowell, Guardian News Service, London

Putting a price on the Afghanistan conflict is so far impossible, but financial analysts predict it will be "tens of billions of dollars". If the hawks have their way and the war continues against countries such as Iraq, then, they say, it could easily reach US$100 billion and dwarf the price tag of the Gulf war, which cost the U.S. alone an estimated $61 billion.

But while the needs of the military are barely questioned, there is a desperate and growing lack of funding for aid and development in Afghanistan and the rest of the developing world. Indeed, many of the war's critics argue that more political and financial emphasis should have been given to non-military solutions, such as reducing the root causes of the conflict.

Top of everyone's list is poverty. The scale of the problem is now almost unimaginable. According to the UN, 600 million children -- or one in four -- live in absolute poverty. Nearly 200 million under fives weigh less than they should and some 250 million children work full or part-time. Meanwhile, more than 130 million children of primary school age are not even in school and 11 million children die from preventable diseases every year -- that is about 30,000 every day, including on Sept. 11.

The wider picture is also bleak. Some 1.2 billion people worldwide now live on $1 day or less. The same number lack access to safe drinking water and 2.4 billion have inadequate access to sanitation. Moreover, 70 percent of the world's poor are female.

In response to these concerns British finance minister Gordon Brown announced a "new deal" for the global economy which is "against poverty and for social justice" in a speech at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York last month and he repeated it during last week's pre-budget announcements. Brown wants the west to meet its "international development targets", whose primary aim is to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by 2015.

He has been influenced by the Zedillo report, named after Ernesto Zedillo, the ex-president of Mexico, who, with experts, has co-written a report for an international conference in Mexico next March on financing for development. It concludes that "the inescapable bottom line is that much more funding is needed for official development assistance".

The Zedillo team noted how, for nearly 50 years, the rich have reneged on their commitments to the poor. In 1969, these commitments were formalized by the Pearson Commission, which called on donor countries to give 0.7 percent of their gross national product in overseas development aid -- a target that was endorsed by the UN.

Rich countries' contributions remain woefully inadequate. Last year, the figure for the OECD, the world's richest 22 countries, was 0.22 percent of GNP, or $53.1 billion, a fall from $56.4 billion the year before. Only five of the 22 countries -- Denmark, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway and Sweden -- achieved the 0.7 percent. The U.S. gave just 0.1 percent -- the lowest of any country involved. Indeed, it was criticized recently by UK international development secretary Clare Short for "almost" turning its back on the rest of the world.

In contrast, the UK government has trumpeted the $4.5 billion or 0.31 percent of GNP it gave last year and its commitment to raise it to 0.33 percent in 2003. Announcing the UK's increase of 40 percent from the previous year, Short said: "These figures are encouraging, and we should be rightly proud of our performance". But no date has been set for the UK to reach its 0.7 percent target.

Brown is proposing that the West doubles its official aid commitments by $50 billion to $100 billion a year until 2015 to meet the international development targets. But the Zedillo team also noted that the needs of the south go much further. While this proposal would be an improvement, if the rich world actually met their 0.7 percent target, aid would increase from its current $53 billion a year by about $100 billion to some $150 billion a year -- $50 billion more than Brown proposes.

If the West paid the extra $100 billion, says the Zedillo report, "it would be possible to pay for global public goods, to provide sufficient humanitarian relief, and not only achieve the UN International Development Goals (on poverty, health, gender and education inequalities) but also provide much more satisfactory levels of official development assistance for the take-off of developing countries".

But even if the 0.7 percent threshold were met by governments, there needs to be a complete re-valuation of what constitutes "aid". Historically, much has been earmarked for military spending. The majority does not even go to the poorest countries. "A lot of the projects that are called aid are not worthy of the name," says Alex Wilkes, from the Bretton Woods Project. "It should be given according to the needs of communities, not bureaucracies."

Moreover, the development community argues that there is no point in establishing new initiatives if the implementation and delivery mechanisms are not in place for existing ones. We have not been delivering on promises made years ago. Take debt relief: Of the $100 billion promised by the G-8 countries, only $13 billion has been canceled. Some of the relief offered has strings attached and is connected to stringent economic reforms that have been shown to increase poverty. Brown's initiative is widely seen as a step in the right direction, but the signs are that the west prefers to write blank cheques for military spending while offering the poor empty promises.

"It is easy to call for another global fund, but we have failed to come up with the money for the HIV and AIDS fund, failed to meet our promises on canceling third world debt and failed to do anything on bettering pro-poor trade," said a spokesperson for the World Development Movement.

"It would be nice if we met some of our existing commitments for once."