Realizing millennium goals

Realizing millennium goals

The Asia and Pacific meeting on the Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs) here starting today is an opportune moment to start
meaningful dialog between developing and developed countries in
the two regions about the best ways to accelerate the achievement
of global poverty-alleviation targets.

This is the first five-year juncture for the MDGs -- which
were declared by leaders from 189 countries at the United Nations
in September 2000 -- and the recommendations from this meeting
will be useful input for the global summit at the UN next month,
which will assess how the pledges have thus far been realized.

There is no question about the political will of developed and
developing countries to support the MDGs, which address in a
single package all most all the issues related to peace,
security, human rights, development and fundamental freedoms. The
MDGs not only reflect global justice and human rights but also
are key to international and national security and stability. The
rationale, as the latest UN report on the MDGs asserts, is that
poor and hungry societies are much more likely than high-income
peoples to fall into conflicts over scarce vital resources.

World leaders reaffirmed their commitment to achieving the
global poverty amelioration goals at their meeting in Monterey,
Mexico, in March 2002. The ministerial meeting of the developed
countries grouped in the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development, in Paris last May also reiterated their
commitment to the MDGs.

Yet, as the latest UN report on MDGs points out, the progress
towards the MDG deadline of 2015 could have been faster. While in
many countries the headway had been quite significant, in others,
especially sub-Saharan Africa, the process is still far off-
track.

More than one billion people still subsist on less than US$1 a
day, the UN said in its latest report.

Indonesia, meanwhile, still has almost 40 million people in
absolute poverty and twice as many on the verge of poverty, with
spending of less than $2 a day.

The senior officials of the 53 Asia-Pacific countries meeting
here should, however, avoid the mistake the participants of such
international meetings often make -- of blaming each other -- or
this gathering will degenerate into pointless finger-pointing.

There are still, it should be remembered, another 10 years
remaining for the realization of the MDGs.

The global partnership for development requires developed
countries to help create a more enabling international trade and
aid environment in which developing countries can also thrive.

However, the role of developed nations in the realization of
MDGs is complementary at best. The blunt reality remains: Each
developing country has the primary responsibility for its own
economic, social and environmental development. This means that
the achievement of the MDGs depends mainly on a country's good
governance system -- the ability of a government to facilitate
and establish the framework for economic growth through sound
macroeconomic policies and providing such public goods as basic
infrastructure, public health and education.

The experiences with poverty-alleviation programs in many
countries point to several main barriers to achieving MDGs: Bad
governance or corrupt government, poverty traps, poor economic
policies and denials of human rights.

Sound macroeconomic policies are crucial to poverty
alleviation because it is private investment that should be the
locomotive of economic growth. Although growth does not always
automatically reduce absolute poverty, it is impossible to
alleviate poverty without economic growth. And there will never
be growth without public and private investment.

Good governance is vital for achieving MDGs because the market
mechanism is not by itself effective for reducing poverty,
especially in areas trapped in absolute poverty -- such as
villages that lack access to paved roads, vehicular
transportation and are acutely short of electricity and clean
water.

Market forces tend to bypass such poverty pockets because they
don't generate consumer demand and thus have little prospects for
commercial interests. Hence, the government has to intervene in
many ways to create a more equitable distribution of income and
increase public investment in such key areas as health,
education, infrastructure and environmental management-- areas
that are key to lifting people out of absolute poverty.

Obviously, governments controlled by a corrupt political
leadership have neither the will nor the ability to realize their
country's MDGs. In this case, no amount of international
assistance will help.

However, most of the developing countries, including
Indonesia, which signed the UN Millennium Declaration on MDGs,
have well-intentioned governments, which are strongly committed
to reducing poverty. But they lack the capability to empower
their poor people because of heavy debt-servicing burdens or
inadequate institutional capacity to implement good governance
practices.

It is these governments -- too poor or unable to make
meaningful public investment in human capital and physical
infrastructure -- that deserve more aid, technical assistance
and debt-relief from developed countries to realize their MDGs.

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