cmf@un

Newsletter of the Claretian Ministry at the United Nations

Vol. 2, Issue 2 September 2014

The Claretian
Ministry at the

The UNs assault on poverty:

United Nations in
New York City

Millennium Development Goals

attends open
meetings of sub-
jects of particu-
lar interest to the

A t a United Nations

un.org
Claretian congre-
gation
summit in 2000,
nations pledged to
attends NGO half poverty and
meetings on make great strides in
these subjects
improving health, edu-
and takes part in
cation, and living con-
discussions that
ditions for the worlds
lead to the for-
poor by 2015. This
mation of policies
effort was called the
Millennium Develop-
ment Goals (MDGs).
Developed countries
were to assist the devel-
oping countries by
reducing debt, agree-
ing to more favorable measures to increase fair MDG 1: Eradicate extreme poverty (earning
trade, and providing more developmental aid. less than $1 a day) and reduce hunger by half.
By 2008 the goal of halving povertythe While this goal has been achieved already and
number of households making less than $1 a is continuing to make advances, some critics
dayhad already been achieved. Yet in 2013 a believe it was set too low. In 2005 there were
UN report assessed progress so far and found still 1.4 billion living on less than $1.25 a day.
results mixed: Some goals were also near Then that part of the goal that promised
accomplishing, others will be met by 2015 with safe and fair-wage jobs or reducing hunger had
renewed effort, and still others are a long way mixed results. Jobs overall improved, but not
off. for youth and women. Ten million people con-
In 2015 there will be another summit to set tinue to go hungry each day. Finally, progress
a new post-2015 agenda. Yet Secretary Gen- has been remarkable in East Asia, especially
eral Ban Ki-Moon, focusing on what he sees as China, but hardly unchanged in sub-Saharan
remarkable achievements, has already claimed Africa.
that this UN effort has been the most success-
ful anti-poverty push in history. He nonethe- MDG 2: Achieve universal primary educa-
less admitted some of the failings and the need tion. In 2000 there were 120 million children
to accelerate action. Below is an assessment of out of school. That number has been reduced
the progress: to 57 million and is expected to be reduced

cmf@un September 2014 1

 further by 2015. While a substantial
achievement, progress have been
uneven. In some places a quantitative
success has been a qualitative disas-
ter: After four years of schooling, mil-
lions of children are still functionally
illiterate. The education of girls still lags
behind because of sexist discrimination
and cultural and religious taboos.

MDG 3: Promote gender equality and

empower women. Most of the worlds
poor are women and girls. In the past,
efforts for amelioration of poverty
too often focused on men and boys,
although women are crucial to lifting
families out of poverty. Discrimination
against women was built into cultures
by prejudice and abusetoo often nur-
Access the UN on the tured by religion.
web at www.un.org Few countries have met the goal
Watch debates, meetings of including girls in primary educa-
on webtv.un.org tion, much less promoting them to
secondary and university education.
Economic and legal barriers to women
Important meetings over
owning property or working outside The Beatitudes by Cerezo Barredo, C.M.F.
the summer:
the household continue.
August 2729, 2014: Still what progress has been made is assist at birth lags, often because it is seens as
65th Annual UN DPI/ remarkable and bears hope for the future. a lower priority.
NGO Conference: Women have succeeded, through micro- MDG 4 is not only about reducing child
The Role of Civil Society lending, to manage their money and establish mortality at birth, but also in the first five
in the Post-2015 Devel- years, and about reducing stunted growth
enterprises in South Asia, have entered local
opment Agenda afterwards. In 1990 there were 12.5 million
and national legislatures, and even have been
Sept. 22-23, 2014: elected to lead their countries. Still greater children who died before reaching the age of
World Conference on attention must be given the disparities that 5 years; by 2008 that number was reduced to
Indigenous Peoples persist between men and women in income, 8.8 million. The greatest success has been in
education, and civic participation. More East Asia, whereas sub-Saharan Africa lags.
recently world attention has been drawn to Infant mortality is also an issue in some
sexual abuse and rape of women and the need developed countriessome developing coun-
for strong legal prosecution of these crimes. tries in Africa do better than some minority
neighborhoods in the United States.
MDG 4: Reduce child mortality. MDG 5: MDG 5 was to reduce maternal mortal-
Improve maternal health. These goals are ity by three-fourths. This is usually due to
closely related. Pre-natal care is often the best inadequate pre- and post-natal care, as well
protection and hope of a safe and healthy as at child-birth. Again sub-Saharan Africa
delivery for mother and child. Yet in devel- lags, but in some countries there have been
oping countries the training of personnel to remarkable successes where governments
2 cmf@un September 2014
placed this as among their first priorities.
MDG 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria,
tuberculosis, and other diseases. When the
MDGs were first formulated, HIV/AIDS cast
a more menacing specter over global heath,
but there was also hope with the emergence of
anti-retroviral treatment and the numbers of
people living productive lives with HIV.
The goal was universal access to the anti-
retroviral drugs. Here the world is lagging,
since only 55 per cent of the 14.4 million peo-
ple in developing countries in need of treat-
ment have access. Again sub-Saharan Africa
is the most heavily affected region and the
place of 72 percent of new infection. Still there
have been great strides in virus-free births to
infected mothers.
There has been great success in curbing
tuberculosis, though it is still the greatest
killer after HIV/AIDS. Efforts to fight malaria
have had mixed result. The disease is the
more easily fought, because the means are less
expensive. One success has been the reduc-
tion of malaria among children through the
distribution of mosquito nets.
MDG 7: Ensure environmental sustain-
ability. This is probably the biggest issue for
the 21st century and one to which the United
Nations has given extensive attention. The
issue is very broad, from reducing climate
change by curbing carbon emissions to pro-
tecting the native habitat of endangered spe-
cies and to renewing the seas.
Also within this goal is to halve the num-
ber of people without access to good drinking
water and safe sanitation. There is still time
to improve on this goal before 2015. The UN
has, for example, supported a campaign to
end public defecation, which is very common
in developing countries where there is a lack
of adequate latrines.
The large issue of climate change has been
politically sensitive between developing and
developed countries, and will take hard nego-
tiating.
MDG 8: Global partnership for develop-
ment. At the time the MDGs were for-
mulated, the economies of the developed
countries were stroong, while many of the
developing countries were burdened under
debt. Richer coun-
tries have offered
schemes to lower the
debt of poor coun-
tries and proposed
more generous terms
for trade and have
reduced tariffs for
developing coun-
tries.
Technology
transfers, especially
in information and
Available at www.un.org/
communications, greatly helped. While still
millenniumgoals/pdf/
not as common as in developing countries, report-2013/mdg-report-
the mobile phone and the Internet can now 2013-english.pdf
be found in most of the developing world.
Not so successful are the promises made
to developing countries for financial aid. In
2005, for example, the developed countries
promised $50 billion in additional aid, but
only provided $20 billion by 2010. Over the
past two years, the amount has continued to
decline by 7 percent. The international reces-
sion of 2008 had a lot to do with this, but the
recent decline is due as much to a turn to aus-
terity in the European Union and the USA.
Still the Scandinavian countries, Luxembourg
,and the Netherlands met and exceeded their
UN targets.
I n 2015 there will be another Summit of the
General Assembly to update the MDGs by
writing a post-2015 agenda.
There has already been much review, anal-
ysis, and discussion on what worked and
what didnt work. New ideas have come for-
ward, and new groups peripheral to the origi-
nal discussionthe NGOs and indigenous
peopleshave been heard as partners. The
least developed countries have been especially
active in forging proposals for a new agenda.
cmf@un September 2014 3
 cmf@un
Our Lady of Mt Carmel Parish
92 S. Lexington Ave.
White Plaines, NY 10606
USA
Post-2015: Forging an agenda for the future
T wo sets of conferences were held at the
UN building in New York over the past
six months to prepare for the negotiations to
create a post-2015 agenda.
Thematic Debates (Feb. Jun. 2014) were
initiated by the Office of the President of the
General Assembly to quicken the process
toward renewing or revising the MDGs.
The subjects ran from water and sanita-
tion to stability in communities for sustain-
able development. The most interesting was
this last. Issues from personal security for
boys and girls to peace education were dis-
cussed. It seemed to come out of the demands
being made on the UN to help rebuild failed
statescountries that had experienced UN
peace-keeping interventions.
East Timor was presented as such a suc-
cessful effort. Civil war followed upon the
countrys independence from Indonesia and
only ended with the aid of UN peace keepers.
But the country was left without stable insti-
tutions to assure law and order, and effectively
to use and distribute fairly the aid that poured
in. The UN recruited experts to work with
Timorese officials to develop transparent and
incorruptible legal and social institutions.
High-level Forum on Sustainable Devel-
opment: Five years ago a UN Summit was held
in Rio de Janeiro on sustainable development
(RIO+20). This June the Economic and Social
Council (ECOSOC) had a follow-up meeting
to prepare for the revision of the MDGs. Only
this had a slightly different focus.
The original 1992 Earth Summit in Rio
de Janeiro came in the context of the global
warming debate, while the MDGs came at
the time of the debt crisis for poor nations.
Many, especially in the scientific community,
4 cmf@un September 2014
(914) 948-5909
joycet@claretians.org
at Rio+20 thought the focus on the MDGs
was too narrowrelated to past wrongs and
immediate needs. The critics thought fight-
ing the poverty crisis must be joined with the
fighting the climate change crisis. They pre-
ferred to speak of Sustainable Developmental
Goals (SDGs).
The theme of the conference was fair-
ness across generationsto the old in
responding to the past wrongs and to the
grandchild in the future. There is a potential
conflict between the scientists who see cli-
mate change, loss of biodiversity, exploding
population growth and urbanization, and
the degradation of the sea and the forest as
the most urgent issues and the policymak-
ers who still have to feed 800 million hungry
stomachs, fight HIV/AIDS, educate millions
of out-of-school kids, and create a secure
and stable society for equitable development.
The point to the conference was to improve
the interface between scientists and policy-
makers. It was not a simple us versus them,
since there is much disagreement within both
groups, but a wide agreement that the two
must work together.
This was a very full conference, and
its conclusion, like those of the Thematic
Debates, will come in a report. It will reflect
current issuesthe 800 million hungry
nowand the futurethe 9 billion increas-
ingly packed into cities by 2050. Those who
support the shift to thinking about SDGs
insist the plight of the seas and the forest also
must be integrated into the Post 2015 agenda.
Their slogan is three and tworespond to
what over three generations has brought us to
our present crisis, yet plan for the needs of the
grandchildren in two generations.