UN poverty goals advance interests of rich at expense of poor, says report

MANY OF the policies adopted by the UN to end global poverty are “unrealistic and unattainable” because they advance the interests of the rich at the expense of the poor, according to a report by Leprosy Mission Ireland.

It analyses the “failures” of the millennium development goals, criticises the way target goals were selected and says they were determined by how they might look in the rich world, with “quick fixes” an important consideration.

It warns to richer countries not to take “knee-jerk” action by cutting aid, as “such action will reverse any progress made to date”.

Bishop Michael Burrows, chairman of the Bishops Appeal, the Church of Ireland’s overseas development agency, said “churches must be agents for change and must speak out when policies are not working”. They had to recognise “the difference the churches can make, especially in Africa, where effective local church leadership has long replaced the European missionaries”.

Leprosy Mission Ireland is an international development agency and its chief executive Ken Gibson said one of the main problems with the millennium goals “is the way in which headline issues such as HIV/Aids have imbalanced the development agenda and help to make poorer people worse off”.

While it was essential that HIV/ Aids were tackled on a global scale, “the focus on such a narrow health agenda has perpetuated the neglect of other diseases”. Those diseases “threaten to condemn one billion people to poverty, yet they remain unaddressed because they do not fit neatly under the targeted headline”.

The report says developing countries must be allowed to raise import tariffs to protect their agriculture sectors. It says tax havens must be abolished because “tax evasion represents far greater outflows from developing countries than they receive in overseas development aid”.

The report also calls for all debt for the least developed countries to be cancelled. It stresses IMF and World Bank lending needed to be refocused to back poverty reduction rather than tailoring developing countries’ economic policy to suit developed countries.

In the report, Bishop Burrows says the “Church’s role is not unblemished but is generally accepted as positive and powerful”.

When states like Congo, Ghana, Angola, Mozambique and Uganda collapsed, the nuns, priests and church workers “like the monasteries in Europe in the Dark Age . . . kept civilisation going”.