The Millenium Development Goals, 10 years later

The deadline to reach the MDGs is just five years away, but efforts to help the world's poorest countries are flagging.

World leaders are meeting in New York today to reboot the campaign to achieve the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals. The deadline to reach the lofty targets on reduced maternal and child mortality, AIDS deaths, and poverty is 2015, and it already looks like they’ll be missed by a considerable margin.

In his quest to land Canada a spot on the U.N. Security Council, Stephen Harper is expected to be vocal this week, but “robust speeches don’t fill empty bellies,” says a Toronto Star editorial. Considering our vast wealth, “Canada is anything but a generous donor. This year we will spend just 0.33 per cent of our wealth” on aid and Harper plans to freeze aid at that level next year. “To merit a Security Council seat, Canada ought to bring real dynamism to these life-and-death files. Freezing an aid budget that was modest to begin with falls short,” say the Star’s editors.

However, Harper’s maternal and child health initiative will be “front and centre” in whatever consensus leaders reach, according to Globe and Mail blogger Norman Spector, because progress towards reducing maternal deaths has been slower than on other issues and it needs the most attention. Canada won’t get any credit for the idea though, says Spector, because “’Worthwhile Canadian Initiative’ is … the world’s most boring headline.”

A Globe editorial argues it’s time to abandon the MDGs for a more focused approach. “Sometimes thinking smaller gets better results,” say the editors, pointing to successful campaigns to eradicate polio and land mines which were “very specific, and relied on leadership from individual states and active citizens before taking hold worldwide.”

In the Georgia Straight, Gwynne Dyer says it’s not time to hit the panic button yet and that Western response to poverty “hasn’t been bad at all.” Between the 1960s and 1980s, “most aid to developing countries was driven by the competition for global influence in the Cold War.” In the 1990s, “the flow of aid virtually dried up.” The MDGs won’t be reached, says Dyer, but they have succeeded in refocusing the world’s attention on the poor.