RP Debt

At Large : A meeting of hypocrites

Rina Jimenez-David
Inquirer News Service

"MEET the Fakers" is the title New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof used for his column on the UN Millennium Summit which just ended.

"The biggest gathering of leaders in history unfolds this week at the United Nations, as they preen and boast about how much they're helping the world's poor. In short, it may be the greatest assembly in history-of hypocrites," Kristof wrote.

"The fact is that with just a few exceptions, the presidents and prime ministers coming to the UN summit are doing a disgraceful job in helping the poor."

Kristof's harsh judgment is based on the dismal results (based on reports submitted by the governments led by the "hypocrites" he denounces) of efforts in the last five years to meet their self-imposed goals to bring an end to poverty, hunger, injustice and ignorance in their countries.

At the UN Millennium Summit of 2000, the world's leaders, including former President Joseph Estrada, pledged, among others, to cut extreme poverty in half, reduce child mortality by two-thirds, and maternal mortality by three-fourths-by the year 2015 or 10 years from now. Those goals are contained in the Millennium Development Goals or MDGs, an eight-point distillation of the pledges at the Summit with statistical, time-bound targets for measuring progress in health, education, gender equality and other areas.

Though Christ has said that "the poor will always be with us," meeting the MDGs is, by most estimates, feasible and attainable by 2015, but only if the world's governments, especially the richest governments, are willing to back rhetoric with money and other forms of aid.

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THAT, however, doesn't seem forthcoming. In an opinion piece for the Financial Times, American professor and economist Jeffrey Sachs laments the lack of focus and will of the Bush administration. "It seems at times that all US foreign policy regarding economic development revolves around the US insistence to pay almost nothing to help the poorest countries," Sachs wrote.

"US official aid levels are 0.16 percent of GNP, an increase from 0.10 percent when President Bush took office but still the lowest or second lowest of all donors (vying with Italy for the bottom slot). US aid levels for Africa are 0.03 percent of GNP, meaning that the US gives Africa just three cents in aid for every $100 of US GNP. Much of the rest of US aid still goes to 'strategic' countries such as Pakistan, Turkey, and Egypt, or to US consultants' salaries.

"Why the US government is so dead-set against doing more to help impoverished and dying people is one of the great mysteries of our time. It's not as if the poorest countries are asking for an open checkbook or an unconstrained line of credit. They are asking for rich countries to honor a modest commitment, a mere 0.7 percent of GNP, roughly one-seventh of what the US is spending this year on the military and one-third of what the US has spent on tax cuts in the first Bush term."

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BUT other governments are not off the hook, either. While some countries, says Kristof, from Bangladesh to Indonesia, Brazil to Mongolia, are on track to meet the MDGs, "most of the world appears likely to miss the goals."

The columnist singles out two countries-China and India-that should take the lead for developing countries but are performing dismally. In India, among children from one to five years old, girls are 50 percent more likely to die than boys, "meaning that each year, 130,000 Indian girls are discriminated to death." The two countries' performance is even more shameful when compared to the achievements of other, smaller and poorer countries.

Observes Kristof: "Bangladesh has now overtaken India in improving child mortality, and Vietnam has overtaken China. If India had matched Bangladesh's rate of reduction in child mortality over the last decade, according to the UN Development Program, it would have saved 732,000 children's lives this year."

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THE UNDP, in a report released to coincide with the Summit, notes that "the promise to the world's poor is being broken." Reports show that the gap between the commitments made in 2000 and the trends in actual performance of the signatory governments "amounts to 41 million children dying before their fifth birthday over the next decade."

What makes such a sorry record truly puzzling and inexcusable is that each signatory government was free to set specific targets for itself in pursuit of the MDGs. The Philippines, for example, chose to set for itself the goal of eliminating "gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005, and all levels of education not later than 2015" under Goal Number 3, which is "Promote Gender Equality." This is disingenuous at best, since girls' access to primary and secondary education has never really been a serious problem in the Philippines. Indeed, experts maintain that more Pinoy boys than girls drop out from school, under pressure from their families to start working and earning a living. If it truly wished to pursue gender equality, the government should have set its sights on other, more urgent concerns, such as violence against women.

Then, too, given the erosion of support for the government's reproductive health program, an offshoot of policy emanating from Malacanang itself, it's doubtful if the country could even hope to reach its goal of increased access to basic reproductive health services to 100 percent by 2015.

If President Macapagal-Arroyo truly wishes to convince our creditors to condone as much as 50 percent of our foreign debts as equity in poverty-reduction measures, then the government should first prove that it will put that money where it's meant to go. So far, though, its record in that regard is dubious.