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by Balakrishna Pisupati, Head, Regional Biodiversity Programme, Asia Colombo, Sri Lanka

In September 2000 the world's leaders gathered at the UN Millennium Summit to commit their nations to strengthen efforts for upholding human dignity, equality and equity through principles of peace, democracy, human rights, strong governance, environmental sustainability, poverty reduction and partnerships.

The resulting Millennium Declaration adopted by 189 countries includes urgent, collective commitments to overcome the poverty that impedes human development. Armed with 8 goals, 18 targets to be met using 48 indicators, governments are beginning to come to grips with implementation options.

The agenda for such accelerated development is left for countries to adopt so that development planning can be more ambitious and sustainable. However, it is important that global policy attention need to focus on countries facing the steepest development challenges.

Living on the margins in Lanka

Focusing on the issues, the Human Development Report (HDR) for 2003 was launched worldwide on July 8, 2003. The theme for 2003 HDR is "Millennium Development Goals: A compact among nations to end human poverty." Global analysis of development issues based on national and local indices suggest the following six policy clusters that can help countries break out of their poverty traps.

* Invest early and ambitiously in basic education and health while fostering gender equity.

These are preconditions to sustained economic growth. Growth, in turn, can generate employment and raise incomes - feeding back into further gains in education and health gains.

* Increase the productivity of small farmers in unfavourable environments - that is, the majority of the world's hungry people. A reliable estimate is that 70% of the world's poorest people live in rural areas and depend on agriculture.

* Improve basic infrastructure - such as ports, roads, power and communications - to reduce the costs of doing business and overcome geographic barriers.

* Develop an industrial development policy that nurtures entrepreneurial activity and helps diversify the economy away from dependence on primary commodity exports - with an active role for small and medium size enterprises.

* Promote democratic governance and human rights to remove discrimination, secure social justice and promote the well-being of all people.

* Ensure environmental sustainability and sound urban management so that development improvements are long-term.

The following sections provide a cursory look at the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and their implications for national actions.

Goal: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

As mentioned in the UNDP HDR 2003, though the numbers of hungry people fell by nearly 20 million in the 1990s, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa continue to home the largest concentration of hungry people. In South Asia the challenge is more to do with efficient distribution of food followed by need for more production while in Sub-Saharan Africa the need is to increase production of food.

Agrarian reform, buffer stocks, secure land tenures form the key areas of focus that needs attention. These are followed by reforms in investments in infrastructure, public sector support and import tariffs. Enormous subsidies in rich countries reduce incentives to invest in long-term food security and depress world market prices.

Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education

According to HDR 2003, across developing regions, more than 80% of children are enrolled in primary school. Yet some 115 million children do not attend primary school, and enrolments are woefully low in Sub Saharan Africa (57%) and South Asia (84%).

Once enrolled, it is pitiful to note that one in three have a chance to complete primary school, In addition, one in six of the world's adults are illiterate. And gaping gender gaps remain: three-fifths of the 115 million children out of school are girls, and two-thirds of the 876 million illiterate adults are women.

Lack of education robs an individual of a full life. It also robs society of a foundation for sustainable development because education is critical to improving health, nutrition and productivity. The education goal is thus central in meeting the other goals.

The key challenges to achieving this goal lie in meeting the household costs, reducing gender disparity, improving operational efficiencies, meeting recurrent costs like salaries for teachers and maintaining infrastructure. Lack of private sector support to education and decreasing donor funding, however, are key concerns. Countries can usually spend more on education as their economies grow but for poorest countries such initial investments and hand to provide.

Goal 3 Promote gender equality and empower women

Women play a critical role in development of all societies. Education contributes to better health, better health to better productivity and enhanced economic growth at household level.

Gender equality and equity also helps better management of natural resources and this sustainable environmental protection. Thus achieving goal 3 creates a significant ripple effect to achieving the other goals as well.

goal 4-6 Reduce Child mortality, improve maternal health and combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases

According to HDR 2003 every year more than 10 million children die of preventable illnesses - 30,000 a day. More than 500,000 women a year die in pregnancy and childbirth with such deaths 100 times more likely in Sub-Saharan Africa than in high-income OECD countries.

Around the world 42 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, 39 million of them in developing countries. Tuberculosis remains (along with AIDS) the leading infectious killer of adults, causing up to 2 million deaths a year. Malaria deaths, now 1 million a year, could double in the next 20 years.

Without much faster progress, the Millennium development goals in these areas (goals 4-6 ) will not be met. Even for the child mortality goal where progress has been steady at the current pace Sub-Saharan Africa will not reduce child mortality by two-thirds until 150 years later than the date set by the goal.

In 1997 average public spending on health was a mere $ 6 per capita in the least developed countries and $ 13 in other low-income countries - compared with $ 125 in upper-middle-income countries and $ 1,356 in high-income countries. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimate that $ 35-40 per capita is the bare minimum for basic health services. In poor countries it is basically impossible to pay international prices for life-saving medicines, according to the HDR 2003.

Achieving the health goal depends on mobilising resources, increasing aid and debt relief, achieving greater equity at all levels of society and making health system work better.

Because private health care providers are the first port of call from many poor people, governments must bring them into the public domain through better regulation.

Many measures can help: consumer protection legislation, accreditation to signal to consumers which providers are registered, having practitioners agree to restrict their practices to essential medicines. But where higher-level services have been privatised through the use of managed care services, as in many Latin American countries, the experience has been less than positive for the poorest people.

Goal 7 Ensure environmental sustainability

According to HDR 2003, Soil degradation affects nearly 2 billion hectares, damaging the livelihoods of up to 1 billion people living on dry lands. Around 70% of commercial fisheries are either fully or over exploited, and 1.7 billion people-a-third of the developing world's population live in countries facing water stress.

Policies that promote environmental sustainability should stress the importance of involving local people in the solutions. They should also stress the importance of policy changes in rich countries. Some of the policy priorities include:

. Improving institutions and governance

. Addressing environmental protection and management

. Improving the functioning of markets

. Strengthening international mechanism

. Investing in science and technology

. Conserving critical ecosystems

A new partnership is needed between rich and poor countries for these policies to take root and bear fruit. For a fair division of responsibilities, large countries need to contribute more to litigating environmental degradation and apply more resources to reversing it. In this, as in other goals, there is an urgent need to rectify some glaring imbalances.

Goal 8 Develop a global partnership for development

Primary to achieving all the other goals of MDG is that of goal 8. Poor countries cannot manage dealing with the structural challenges to come out of the poverty trap. They have limited or no resources to finance investments needed to reach the minimum threshold levels of developments in infrastructure, education and health.

The partnership framework of the Millennium Declaration and the Monetary consensus makes clear that the primary responsibility for achieving goals 1-7 lies with developing countries. What is needed is not only more aid but more effective aid. Commitments to this effect were reiterated in the Rome Declaration on Harmonisation, adopted by the heads of multilateral and bilateral development institutions in February 2003.

The other critical element to this issue is expanding market access to help countries diversify and expand track. Trade policies in rich countries remain highly discriminatory against developing country experts. The need for protecting interests of developing countries on TRIPs and issues under WTO are crucial now than before. Issues like the 2001 WTO commitment that

TRIPs agreement should not prevent poor countries from making essential medicine accessible to their people should receive attention.

The HDR 2003 purposes that rich countries set targets to:

* Increase official development assistance to fill financing gaps (estimated to be at least $50 billion).

* Develop concrete measures for implementing the Rome Declaration on Harmonization.

* Remove tariffs and quotas on agricultural products, textiles and clothing exported by developing countries.

* Remove subsidies on agricultural exports from developing countries.

* Agree and finance, for HIPCs, a compensatory financing facility for external shocks - including collapses in commodity prices.

* Agree and finance deeper debt reduction for HIPCs having reached their completion points, to ensure sustainability.

* Introduce protection and remuneration of traditional knowledge in the TRIPs agreement.

* Agree on what countries without sufficient manufacturing capacity can do to protect public health under the TRIPs agreement.

Way forward

The Millennium Development Goals present the world with daunting challenges and also shows the commitments made by countries for sustainable development. Recent estimates show that the total amount of finances required to achieve the MDGs range between USD 40 billion to 60 billion in addition to existing foreign aid, annually.

As the HDR 2003 mentions, there is the question of whether this $39-$54 billion in aid, even if accompanied by improvements in policies and institutions, would strain the "absorptive capacity" of recipient countries. There are different ways to look at absorptive capacity. One way is to examine whether there are diminishing returns to aid. One piece of recent research on the growth impact additional aid calculates that, for countries which have policies and institutions that are among the best of developing countries, a "saturation point" - the pint beyond which the growth impact is zero-is reached when aid is around 30 per cent of GDP. By contrast, the saturation point for countries with extremely weak policies and institutions is calculated to be around 6 percent of GDP (Figure 1).

Therefore, we must understand that additional money is one of many inputs required to reach MDGs. Money alone will not guarantee reaching the goals. Policies and institutions are fundamental to progress on poverty reduction in all its dimensions.

The pervasive poverty we witness today is the result of contemporary development pathways. The poor are poor because they have either no or limited productive assets land, education and technical skills. Use of new technological tools and empowerment offer opportunities for including these excluded. While many question the complexity of the situation today so as to achieve sustainable development in a balanced way, globally, we should ensure complexity should not be an excuse for inaction!

"A hungry person listens neither to religion not reason, nor is bent by prayers".
Seneca

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