The Sunday Mail
OVER its 70-year lifespan, the United Nations has developed a reputation for using awkward language. It was true to form when it named its new anti-poverty targets – set to be launched this weekend – the sustainable development goals (SDGs). The name is not catchy but the aim is noble. The plan is a blueprint for creating a much better world. It comprises 17 goals, broken down into 169 smaller targets. Each UN member should aim, voluntarily, to achieve them by 2030.
They are ambitious with some high-end estimates suggesting they will cost between $3.5 trillion and $5 trillion a year.
On their own, the first two goals call for ending hunger and poverty “in all its forms everywhere” within 15 years. By the deadline, nobody on the planet should be living on less than $1.25 per day, the UN’s threshold poverty figure.
A wordy document was agreed last month after three years of haggling. It lays out other targets for reducing income gaps, equal rights for women, improving schools and hospitals, clean energy schemes and halting climate change.
“It has been the most inclusive global agenda-setting conversation ever to take place,” John McArthur, a former UN official who is now a Brookings Institution analyst, told Al Jazeera.
“It is about identifying a set of north stars so that everyone can go in the same direction.”
Even when targets are reached, doubters question whether this had anything to do with the UN. By one analysis, much of the world’s poverty reduction was achieved as a by-product of rapid growth in the populous emerging markets of China and India. Conversely, when targets are not met, gains may still be palpable. The MDG goal of ensuring that all children everywhere can attend primary school will not be reached.
Nevertheless, school enrolment rates in poor countries did rise from 83 percent in 2000 to 91 percent in 2015.UN officials say that league tables act as both carrot and stick for ministers of health, education and other bigwigs, who are mindful of gains made in neighbouring countries.
For Tony Pippa, Washington’s coordinator on the post-2015 development agenda, targets “get everyone on the same page”. The same goes for the SDGs, he said, but new goals on climate change and sustainability vastly broaden their scope.“It is a political commitment that world leaders are making to end poverty and its related indignities, while at the same time sustaining and maintaining the Earth’s ecosystems and resources,” he told Al Jazeera.
But with a bigger remit comes a bigger price tag.
McArthur offers a “rough, rough estimate” for achieving the development goals at $1-2 trillion per year, which he described as a manageable chunk of the $80 trillion global economy. Aid commitments from rich countries only amount to about $350 billion annually.
The rest of the money is supposed to come from government revenues, private finance, charities, lending institutions and remittances from migrant workers in rich countries to relatives back home in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America .Amina Mohammed, the UN adviser on post-2015 development planning, said nobody “can put a figure on how much they will cost”, but insisted there is enough spare cash sloshing around.
“It will take a couple of years … to really get our teeth into what it means,” she told Al Jazeera. Money is the main concern for Takumo Yamada, an analyst on the targets with the charity Oxfam. For him, the anti-poverty drive is too soft on firms that pollute the environment and dodge taxes when extracting raw materials from the developing world.
At a conference on funding the global goals in Ethiopia in July, rich countries blocked a push by poor nations for a global tax body that would make it easier for them to get their hands on the revenues of agricultural, extractive and other firms that operate within their borders.
“It’s a simple question of maths that you cannot provide the kind of public financing necessary to reach zero hunger, tackle climate change, or achieve other SDGs without addressing these tax-dodging problems,” Yamada told Al Jazeera.He is not the only doubter. Farah Mesmar, a policy officer for ActionAid, another charity, said presidents can sign up to the global goals without being legally obliged to do anything. With so many targets on the table, the risk of censure is lower.
“It’s about looking good and showing off in front of other governments, to put it bluntly,” Mesmar told Al Jazeera. – Al Jazeera
