Toronto Star | By Rieky Stuart and Bernard Weil | March 15, 2002
More than 10 million children below the age of 5 died last year of preventable causes. If the world were on track to achieve the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, adopted in 2000, two million of them would be alive today.
At the Millennium Summit two years ago, the governments of wealthy countries promised to finance a war against poverty, illiteracy, and child death. They have yet to put their money where their mouths are. Next week, they have a chance to redeem their pledge at another U.N. summit > the International Conference on Financing for Development, in Monterrey, Mexico. The Monterrey conference offers a chance to mobilize the aid needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals: halving world poverty, cutting child deaths by two-thirds, and achieving universal primary education, all by 2015. These are ambitious targets, yet they are within reach if the rich world acts now.
If they do not, and current death rates remain unchanged, by 2015, when the goals are supposed to be achieved, the lives of 56 million children will have been needlessly lost. Each of these children will have a face and a name > and each of their deaths will be an avoidable tragedy.
The scale of the problem is daunting. Dozens of countries, especially in Africa, are a long way off track. Child deaths are being reduced at less than half the rate required. And the progress report in other areas makes for equally dismal reading.
If we continue on our current trajectory, 75 million children will be denied an education in 2015; and around one billion people will still struggle to survive on less than $1 a day, most of them in Africa and Asia.
But trend is not destiny. The World Bank estimates that an additional $60 to $95 billion a year in aid would be needed to achieve the Millennium goals. Oxfam believes it may take as much as twice that amount. Sound like a lot? It's actually less than 0.2 per cent of rich countries' national income, and a small price to pay.
If the industrialized countries agree at Monterrey to increase aid spending to 0.7 per cent of their gross national product over the next five years, it would generate an additional $200 billion annually. Properly targeted, this could save those 56 million children. Why the reluctance to act?
Some say 0.7 per cent of GNP (agreed to at Lester Pearson's suggestion 40 years ago, but with no time line) is not affordable.
But the increased spending required for Europe is roughly equivalent to the subsidies the European Union now provides to corporate farms. Moreover, if the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Luxembourg can do it, why can't Germany, France, Italy and Britain?
Achieving the 0.7 target would cost the United States $17 billion annually > a lot of money, but less than one-quarter of the increase in military spending for 2003, and one seventh of the yearly tax cuts decreed for the next three years. The state of Texas receives more in corporate farm subsidies than the United States allocates to child and maternal health in poor countries.
For Canada to reach 0.7 per cent in five years, the aid budget would have to increase by $600 million each year through 2007. That may sound hefty, but it amounts to an annual increase in government expenditure of less than 0.24 per cent > equivalent to just over $19 per Canadian.
Others say aid is ineffective.
Try telling that to kids in Uganda, where aid from Canada, and other countries, helps eliminate primary education fees, builds schools, and provides teaching materials. Over 1 million children previously denied education are now in school.
In Monterrey, rich governments are bound to wheel out their favourite old chestnut, "trade not aid". Such chutzpah is breathtaking. Protectionist trade barriers in rich countries currently cost poor countries about $160 billion > twice what they receive in aid.
More important, the poorest developing countries need aid to finance investments in education, infrastructure and health so they can take advantage of trading opportunities.
To whine about the cost of aid, to question its effectiveness, to claim trade will replace it > these are but alibis to disguise an appalling lack of generosity.
Mr. Prime Minister, how much are the lives of 56 million children worth?Toronto Star:
