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Thursday, November 24, 2005
RP, other nations vow to fight poverty, AIDS
By Aurelia l. Castro
Sun.Star Staff Reporter
THE Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) would lift more than 500 million people in the world out of poverty, save more than 300 million people from death caused by hunger and send hundreds of million of women and girls to school by 2015.
But that’s if the 190 member-states of the United Nations (UN), including the Philippines, will be able to implement the MDGs that aim to address the “alarming state of deprivation in the world,” said Ramesh Jain, UN Food and Agriculture Organization country representative during the Visayas Business and the Millennium Development Goals Forum at the Casino Español de Cebu yesterday.
Reduce poverty
MDGs, a global movement that aims to reduce poverty and human deprivation by 2015, identified education, environment, health and poverty among areas where business can help.
Its implementing agencies in the country are the United Nations Development Program, the National Economic and Development Authority and the Philippine Business for Social Progress (PBSP).
“The world has been confronted with various challenges running across development and poverty issues,” he said.
Jain reported 1.2 billion people, or one in every five people in the world, live on less than $1 a day. “South and East Asia contain the largest number of people in terms of income poverty,” he said.
He said the 115 million children who do not get basic education, the six million others who die each year before reaching their fifth birthday and the other 30,000 children who die every day of preventable diseases, indicate world poverty.
AIDS
He pointed out that there are 42 million people living with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) all over the world.
He said more than one billion people in developing countries lack access to safe water while two and a half billion of the world’s population lack access to improved sanitation.
Given this scenario, he said state and government leaders pledged to “establish just and lasting peace all over the world, uphold fundamental values, advance and protect human rights, democracy and good governance,” among others.
He said the MDGs are a result of the states’ commitment to address these concerns.
The MDGs aim to: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop global partnerships for development.
Low
Jain said, though, that since MDG was adopted five years ago, global figures show that “the probability of meeting most of these targets by 2015 is low.”
“If current trends continue, the MDG target for reducing child mortality will be missed (by) a huge margin equivalent to 4.4 million avoidable deaths by 2015,” he said.
The MDG target of universal primary education would also not be achieved with 47 million children in developing countries still out of school in 2015, he added.
“To address this, the millennium project’s report to the UN secretary general called for a massive increase in aid to poor countries from the $20 billion a year to at least $135 billion this year and to $195 billion by 2015,” he said.
He added that high-income countries should raise official aid from 0.25 percent of their GDP (gross domestic product) to 0.44 in 2006 and 0.54 by 2015.
“They should open their markets to exports from developing countries and invest more in very poor countries though electricity supplies and roads,” he said.
(November 24, 2005 issue)
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