Some have calculated that, with current development trends remaining the norm, poverty will be eradicated in something like 70 or more years.
________
* : I agree with those who use the word impoverish as opposed to poverty since impoverish focuses on the act-of-making-poor rather than on its outcome. (J. Taylor) This goes together with Vicente Navarro’s “it is not inequalities that kill people; it is those who are responsible for these inequalities that kill people”.
**: As opposed to well-being, among other including preventable ill-health, preventable malnutrition and preventable premature deaths.
1. The easiest and shortest way for this Reader to make its point here is to elevate a number of truisms about the MDGs to the category of ‘mini-iron-laws’. These would add to several truisms about the MDGs presented in previous Readers (see www.humaninfo.org/aviva under No.69). The new mini-iron-laws are the following:
i) MDGs are not really global at all; they place all the responsibility on the separate national governments with no global authority really in charge of their enforcement. [In the case of the nutrition MDG, official responses, so far, seem to be more concerned with quelling or preventing food riots than with addressing the underlying and basic deeper causes of chronic malnutrition (George Kent)].
ii) Since donors continue marching in lockstep to the beat of the market fundamentalism drums (D. Sogge), MDGs do not represent a development paradigm break; they are instead a set of indicators embedded in a paradigm –the neoliberal paradigm– which was not replaced at the time the MDGs were set. [Note that China, Cuba and Vietnam have long focused on core MDG concerns, but have simply not labeled them as such].
iii) MDGs have provided something that pretends to be a moral compass together with a-set-of-yardsticks to measure some types of progress, but they have failed to provide a real sense of ownership either by poor countries’ governments or their civil society actors.
iv) The MDGs approach can be described as ‘human development meets results-based management’.
v) MDGs have ‘ghettoized’ the problems of development and mostly provide a template-of-targets-for-the-bureaucratic-mind.
vi) MDGs do not query ‘how we get to the goal’ (processes); they rather focus on numerical outcomes.
vii) The MDGs have been too much of a counting and accounting exercise.
viii) Unfortunately, MDG-driven agencies feel tempted to manipulate statistics. (A. Sumner)
ix) MDGs often miss what most matters to people who happen to be poor (‘the bottom billion’), i.e., they overlook or ignore issues of risk, security, respect, status, dignity, voice and livelihood vulnerability –all more important to this group than mainly income and consumption issues.
[Risk, security, respect, status, dignity, voice and livelihood vulnerability are more relevant for measuring well-being of poor households than the division into sectoral goals the MDGs approach uses].
x) MDGs do not ask who commands resources, who is able to fulfill their rights with those resources and who is better–off as perceived by the claim holders themselves. (A. Sumner)
xi) The negative consequences of current unfair international trade policies are one of the other major oversights of the MDGs.
2. For all these reasons, the MDGs approach badly needs rethinking. We badly need a post-MDGs architecture (or one earlier than ‘post-‘, in an attempt to minimize harm and disenchantment come 2015?). By sticking to the MDGs paradigm, inequalities are staring us in the face now, but will be shouting at us after 2015. (C. Gore)
3. Applying the internationally agreed human rights framework to the MDGs approach (or replacing the approach outright) would put the spotlight on the discrimination and social exclusion gaps that we see as the most significant human rights gap in the current application of the MDGs. (H. Grady)
4. Localizing and tailoring MDGs to, for instance, the district level (or equivalent small territorial unit rather than setting national goals) can much better reflect the violated rights and aspirations of local groups.
5. In closing, I wonder, is there truth in the sarcastic view that the MDGs should really be an acronym for ‘Most Distractive Gimmick’?
6. As N. Fraser says in The Broker: We have to avoid ‘othering’ people as ‘poor’ and thus as inferior to the non-poor. [Isn’t that what the MDGs implicitly do a bit (or a lot)?].
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org