War Creates Poverty than Peace
The renowned Vietnam War veteran General Vo Nguyen Giap has recently called for a novel kind of war on poverty. Can the warmongers accept this realistic call? While the decisive argument for the war is maintaining peace, thereby sustaining livelihoods, the truth is somewhat different. The countries' pledges to reduce poverty by half have gone awry as financial assistance is diverted to war. The amount of aid developed countries give poorer nations has fallen by half since the 1960s, risking the lives of millions of children.
The Oxfam report “Paying the Price” reveals that 10.5 million children under the age of 5 died in developing countries in 2002. It says that the figure would have been 8.4 million if the world had been on track to meet the UN targets. It says that the gap would more than double by 2015. In 2002, the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) accepted the world leaders' pledge to reduce the number of poor people worldwide to exactly half by 2015, which was also a reiteration of the Monterrey Declaration of Poverty and Development.
As a proportion of rich countries’ income, aid has fallen from an average of 0.48 per cent in 1960-65 to 0.24 per cent in 2003. The UN has set a target of allocating 0.7 per cent of national income to official developmental assistance. The demand has been made for more aid to help meet the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which include cutting poverty in half, reducing child mortality and improving education by 2015. It is estimated that 45 million more children would die in developing countries by 2015 if the world failed to meet the UN's goals.
The aid for poverty reduction has been disrupted as security (war on terror!) concerns overshadowed the issues. In 2002, a third of the increase in aid flows from rich to poor countries came from allocations to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Flows of US aid to Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey and Afghanistan in the past three years are equal to aid to the rest of the world combined. The US government spends $US 450 billion on military but $US 13 billion on development assistance. This is $US 57 billion less than the US committed to achieving the MDGs. Jeff Sachs, Director of the Millennium Project, said during a presentation at the World Bank in March this year that if the momentum is continued, extreme poverty could be eliminated from the planet by 2025 with the help of the US and Europe. Sachs blamed the US for not providing development resources and forcing poor countries to make structural adjustments. The US gave just 0.14 per cent of gross national income in aid, one-tenth of what it spent on invading Iraq. US aid is believed not to hit the target needed to halve world poverty until 2040!
Similarly, about 30 per cent of aid given by the G-8 (minus Russia) countries was tied to an obligation to buy goods and services from the donor country. Italy and the US were the worst offenders in this. Only six of the 22 big donors give aid that is completely untied to purchases from domestic companies - an objective set by the members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2001. The official estimation says 70 per cent of US aid and 35 per cent of Canadian aid was tied.
In its 10th annual report titled "The State of the World's Children 2005", UNICEF says that more than one billion children suffer from poverty, violent conflict and the scourge of AIDS. It also says that children in rich countries were victims of rising poverty rates. It says that in 11 of 15 industrialized nations, the proportion of children living in low-income households over the last decade has risen.
However, preliminary data from the OECD, released in early 2005, shows that $23.5 billion of ODA flowed to the poorest countries last year, a 31 per cent rise in nominal terms compared to 2002. Anwarul Chowdhury, Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States called the figures an encouraging sign of progress in the global fight to alleviate poverty. Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg, Sweden, the Netherlands and Ireland met the target last year. At the same time, in absolute terms, the US, France, Germany and the UK contributed 70 per cent of the total ODA. Mr Chowdhury said the jump indicated donor countries had taken a major step towards honouring pledges they made at a UN conference in Brussels in 2001 to "expeditiously" meet the target of giving equivalent to 0.2 per cent of their gross national product as an aid to the world's 50 or so least developed nations.
In another report, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) writes that the world is losing the battle against hunger, with the number of malnourished people in developing countries growing to more than 800 million people and rising. Although the number of hungry people in developing countries fell in the early 1990s, the report says the trend was reversed. By 2000-02, the figure stood at 815 million, just nine million below the estimate of a decade earlier. The global total in 2000-02 stood at 852 million. The number of hungry people in sub-Saharan Africa continues to rise.
Are the developing countries continuing the attitude of mendicants to war-mongering states like the US for aid to reduce their poverty statistics? Or should they empower themselves to resolve the issue of poverty by forging a coalition within the poor developing countries? For the so-called self-proclaimed defender of the Earth, the focus must be on implementing the pledges with prioritisation on development, not war. Let the world leaders decide the fate of hungry millions!