Progress on attaining the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which seek to tackle poverty, hunger and other social ills by 2015, remains slow but countries are realizing the importance of the life-and-death targets and increasingly know what needs to be done to attain them, the UN adviser on the project said today, sounding a note of optimism.
However Jeffrey Sachs, the Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on the MDGs, said he was under no illusion that while talk about the goals by donor countries or organizations was welcome, it means little unless concrete action is taken to back up their words.
The MDGs were agreed by world leaders at the UN’s Millennium Summit in 2000. They cover eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability and fostering a global partnership for development.
Unless the world makes fundamental changes to its approach to epidemics such as poverty, hunger, and disease, the world will not achieve the Millennium Development Goals. When analyzed under recognition of growing threats such as the depleting oil supply and increasing global militarization & violence, the slow progress on the MD Goals implies a more grim future. Hopefully, the world will soon make radical changes to its behavior towards its socioeconomic problems, and greatly accelerate progress on the MDGs.
What do you think?
I think is important to remind goverments around the world : 1. Why? 2.Why? and 3. Why? is important to erradicate extreme poverty and stop going on a selfish war among countries that only left loosers, illness and poor people. Is time to think like a home. To forget “my” land, in order to think about “our” Earth. A lot of the goals for the next seven years are impossible to achieve if us ( citizens ) haven’t got clear WHY? are we working for. And WHICH? is the goal.
And something interesting I read about yesterday night, ‘ When we have got a problem we must subdivide the problems in how many pieces we need in order to solve THAT big problem’.
Reading again this. My reply is just only a Listen and Look tip : We must work with little goals, in order to get the big one. My hands if you need a friend.
With Love and Compassion.
Gabriela.
Guayaquil – Ecuador.
Scott wrote:
> Slow Progress On World Development Goals
> http://millionsofmouths.com/blog/nfblog/?p=123
> It looks to me like the UN has no intention of actually using their
> power to help the world.
I nominate the above sentence for Euphemism of the Year.
While the Millennium report of that body condemned the increasing global militarization & violence, the United Nations itself is responsible for many of the policies and wars that are part and parcel of that “global militarization & violence.” (Curiously absent from the report is any condemnation of the government that (with its allies) is responsible for most, if not all, of that “global militarization & violence.” By the United Nations own statistics, the United States accounts for almost half of the ENTIRE WORLD’s armaments (i.e.. 47% of global arms spending).
While virtual everyone was proclaiming that the United Nations
predecessor provided an international body and a “neutral” meeting
grounds, a “League of Nations” where nations could discuss and work out
their differences, Marxists, especially V.I. Lenin (leader of the
Russian Revolution) had an opposite opinion. Lenin hit the nail on the
head when he declared the United Nations predecessor as a “den of
thieves” in which the imperialist nations (INCLUDING THE UNITED STATES)
would meet to argue how to divide up the booty of the colonial and
neocolonial world among themselves.
>From its very inception, the United Nations was formed with the same
propaganda and the same purpose as its predecessor.
The war against the people of Korea (which is officially still not
over, but merely in status of a “ceasefire” agreement which has been in
effect for more than a half-century) was waged under United Nations
(U.N.) auspices.
Likewise, Round 1 of the war of the United States government and its
allies against the people of Iraq (i.e., the so-called Gulf War of
1990-91) was waged under U.N. auspices.
U.N. “investigators” looking for “weapons of mass destruction” (that
they darned well knew never existed, but were treated as real in order
to whip up pro-war sentiment) ) did the reconnaissance work and for the
United States for its blitzkrieg against Iraq in Round 2 of the war of
the United States government and its allies against the people of Iraq
(i.e., the “victory” which has led to the subsequent deaths of more
3,000 U.S. G.I.s and an uncounted much, much larger number of Iraqis).
U.N. troops help suppress the poor in Haiti, especially in Cite de
Soleil, under the guise of “protecting [their] safety.” When Israeli
troops (and right-wing forces allied with Israel) invaded 2 United
Nations run refugee camps at Sabra and Shatilla, not only wasn’t the
United Nations around to pretend to defend the safety of the refugees
under its charge, it didn’t even protect the lives of the residents.
the United Nations never bothered to even slap the wrist of Israel for
that reactionary regime’s role in those massacres .
Any United Nations decision which goes against the interests of the
imperialist countries (especially the U.S.A.) is one that the United
Nations (deliberately) does not attempt to enforce. For example, the
World Court decision to fine the United States government for its role
in the bombing of the Nicaraguan port of Corinto (during the time the
Sandinistas where leading that country’s government) was made before
some who are reading this where even born and yet the United Nations
has not collected (nor actually attempted to collect) a penny of the
decision decided by the United Nations’ own court. For more than a
dozen years in a row, most recently by an overwhelming U.N. General
Assembly vote of 184-4 of November 8, 2006, the United Nations has
voted to condemn the United States government “embargo” against Cuba.
The United Nations has one standard for enforcing the “will of
international opinion” in waging a war for oil interests in the Middle
East and quite another standard for stopping a policy which was opposed
by every country except the U.S. and its 3 lackeys. (Israel and 2
nominally independent neo-colonies of the U.S. in the Pacific were the
only votes joining Washington’s dissenting vote in that 184-4
landslide.) Contrast that to current headlines of the mobilization of
all the king’s men for the (U.S.-written and U.S.-pushed) Security
Council decision against Iran and its sovereign rights.
Contrast the “U.N. [which] has no intention of actually using their
power to help the world” with the revolutionary leadership and people
of a tiny island country of about 11.3 people — socialist Cuba! —
which for some time has had more doctors helping people abroad than the
entire (United Nations body) World Health Organization. (Cuban doctors
volunteer in more than 5 dozen “Third World” countries; there are
presently 20,000 Cuban doctors serving the poor and rural areas of
Venezuela.)
— Barry Schier