Salon.com > Larry Elliott

Broken promises

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 14:16:00 +0000

The world is heading for a "heavily signposted human development disaster" of needless child deaths, illiteracy and abject poverty unless urgent steps are taken to boost aid, open up Western markets and end conflict, the United Nations warned Wednesday.

In advance of next week's summit in New York to assess how much has been achieved toward meeting the millennium development goals agreed on five years ago, the report shows that the U.N. member states' progress has been "depressingly slow" and that the "promise to the world's poor is being broken." The organization's annual Human Development Report concludes: "This year marks a crossroads." One option is a "decade for development," the other is "business as usual."

It continues: "This is a choice that will result in the current generation of political leaders going down in history as the leaders that let the MDGs [millennium goals] fail on their watch.

"Instead of delivering action, the U.N. summit could deliver another round of high-sounding declarations, with rich countries offering more words and no action."

Mixed reviews

Fri, 01 Jul 2005 16:34:00 +0000

Downing Street hailed a promise by George W. Bush to double aid to Africa Thursday, saying it helped Tony Blair's big goal of boosting aid to Africa by $25 billion by 2010.

But Bush's offer, centering initially on a $1.2 billion injection to cut malaria deaths in half by 2010, was greeted skeptically by aid agencies, some of which claimed the bulk of the money was coming from already earmarked U.S. funds and was anyway likely to be rejected by the Republican Congress.

The British agencies, including ActionAid, also claimed the boost in cash would not come for five years -- behind the timetable set by the Commission for Africa. No. 10 experts accepted that the "precise timetable for the upward curve in spending" was not yet clear.

However, they insisted that Bush had moved and, if he stuck to his promises, would provide 20 percent of the world's aid going to sub-Sahara Africa by 2010, as well as 60 percent of the food aid.

Blair was informed of the Bush move Thursday morning, and his aides said the announcement, in conjunction with the previously announced debt relief package, "creates real momentum for a successful outcome."

Broken promises

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 15:46:00 +0000

Three million children will die in the poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa as a result of the failure of the global community to meet its promise of slashing the death rates of children under age 5 by 2015, the United Nations is to reveal Wednesday. With Tony Blair Tuesday struggling to persuade George W. Bush to back Britain's ambitious plans for Africa, the U.N. Development Program said the human cost to Africa in child deaths would be the equivalent of twice the combined under-5 population of New York, London and Tokyo.

A study by the UNDP -- timed to put pressure on G8 leaders ahead of their summit at Gleneagles, Scotland, next month -- showed that based on current trends, the global community will miss by a wide margin the targets it set for poverty, infant mortality and education in the millennium development goals agreed to by the U.N. in 2000.

"These numbers should serve as a wake-up call for G8 leaders," said Kevin Watkins, the director of the U.N.'s Human Development Report office. "Africa cannot afford to see the world's richest countries sleepwalk their way to a heavily signposted -- and easily avoidable -- human development disaster."

Unilateralism in a different guise

Mon, 22 Nov 2004 15:01:00 +0000

George W. Bush's foreign policy is simple: Don't mess with America. The same, it appears, applies to economic policy as well. On Friday, the dollar fell sharply against the euro. That was unsurprising, since the downward lurch followed comments from Alan Greenspan that -- by his own cryptic standards -- were unambiguous.

"It seems persuasive that, given the size of the U.S. current account deficit, a diminished appetite for adding to dollar balances must occur at some point," Greenspan said. This was hardly a novel statement for the Federal Reserve chairman, but the timing was interesting. It came on the eve of a meeting of the G-20 -- a conclave of developed and developing nations -- in Berlin at which the recent fall in the dollar was a hot topic.

Moreover, it came three days after John Snow, U.S. Treasury secretary, poured cold water on the idea that the world's central banks might get together to arrest the dollar's fall. The history of "efforts to impose nonmarket valuations on currencies is at best unrewarding and checkered", he said in London.

Ohio’s referendum on welfare

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 14:14:00 +0000

Theressia Gresham's unemployment checks stopped arriving two months ago. Gresham, who lives in Cleveland, lost her job as a forklift driver at the beginning of the year and has been unable to find work since. The U.S. government pays just 26 weeks of benefits before cutting workers loose to fend for themselves. The Bush administration, convinced that the economy is on the rebound, recently ended a program extending the payments a further 13 weeks. She can't afford to be ill because she has no healthcare insurance, although she has developed high blood pressure and diabetes since being unemployed.

Gresham, 42, who has worked all her life, now spends her days at the United Labor Agency, a federally funded organization that helps people get back to work, sending out job applications, researching on the Internet and hoping. America's flexible labor market is much admired by the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, but the downside to the dynamism is that for those who fall on hard times life is cruel. There are 93,000 people in Ohio who are now living without unemployment benefits, and Gresham is one of them.