Reuters | By Evelyn Leopold | July 8, 2003
The boom of the 1990s left some 50 nations worse off than they were 10 years earlier, jeopardizing pledges by world leaders to cut poverty in half by 2015, a major U.N. report said.
Foreign aid declined in the 1990s, debt increased for poor nations, AIDS (news - web sites) statistics soared and prices dropped for crucial commodities, the main exports from poor nations, according to the annual U.N. Human Development Report, released on Tuesday.
"In the so-called great decade, a very significant hard core of countries ended further behind with more poor people," said Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the U.N. Development Program, which produced the report.
This year's survey documented the progress of 175 countries toward eight U.N. Millennium development goals agreed to by world leaders three years ago, ranging from reducing extreme poverty to halting the spread of AIDS by 2015.
Fifty-four countries, almost half of them in Africa, are poorer now than in 1990, and some will not meet the goals for 50 years.
In Dublin, Irish rock star Bono, frontman for U2, vowed to lead a civil disobedience campaign to spur rich nations to increase aid and forgive the debt of impoverished countries.
"This issue is the defining issue of our time," he said during an introduction of the report. "We are about to get noisy, we are about to bang a lot of dustbin lids."
For Arab states and Latin America and the Caribbean, reaching the goals by 2015 is possible. But the report said it would take 20 sub-Saharan African nations until 2129 to achieve universal primary education, until 2147 to halve extreme poverty and until 2165 to cut child mortality by two-thirds.
The report added the goal of cutting world poverty in half by 2015 may be met because of economic growth in China and India.
DOUBLING OF FOREIGN AID URGED
The report again called for foreign aid to be doubled to $100 billion annually. Of the current $50 billion to $55 billion, only a fraction was spent on implementing Millennium goals, it said.
"Every European cow is getting a $3 a day subsidy whereas 40 percent of Africans live on less than $1 a day," Malloch Brown said. In the United States, cotton farmers received subsidies of $10.7 million a day, three times higher than U.S. aid to sub-Saharan Africa, he said.
The report argued for a broader view of how to lift the least developed nations out of extreme poverty rather than the "Washington consensus" of the World Bank (news - web sites) and International Monetary Fund (news - web sites) that included budget discipline, deregulation and the liberalization of trade and finance.
It contended a single set of policies for all countries could do more harm than good.
"The IMF and the World Bank should no longer set these kind of ceilings," Malloch Brown said.
The report asked poor nations to map out reasonable plans to reach the eight Millennium goals and show what funds and programs would be needed to obtain them.
"You can't spend money you don't have. But in any spending plan you need to clearly demonstrate what you need from the donor community to meet the Millennium goals," Malloch Brown said.
Since 1990, East Asia and the Pacific, led by China, had nearly halved extreme income poverty, the report said.
Poverty soared over the past decade in central Asia after the breakup of the Soviet Union, as well as in Algeria, Mongolia, Nigeria, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
The report included a Human Development Index that rated countries according to education, life expectancy and per capita income. Norway, for the third consecutive year, ranked on top, the United States was in seventh place and Sierra Leone again was in last place among 175 rankings.Reuters:
