INTERVIEW: 'WE CAN SAVE THE MDGs YET'
Glenys Kinnock, Member of the European Parliament, talks to David Cronin
BRUSSELS (IPS) - White banners were draped across public buildings in much of Europe during 2005 as an unlikely coalition of celebrities, church groups and trade unionists took part in the Make Poverty History campaign. The Group of Eight (G8) top industrialised countries and the European Union responded by promising to double their aid to Africa by 2010 at a summit in Gleneagles, Scotland.
Three years later, EU governments are not only failing to keep their promises, the amount of development aid many of them give to the poor has shrunk, according to statistics collated by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, a grouping of 30 rich nations). This decline comes at a sensitive mid-way point in efforts to attain the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. These eight objectives, agreed in 2000, contain a series of targets for addressing by 2015 the most extreme forms of hardship known to humanity.
Glenys Kinnock has been one of the most outspoken members of the European Parliament on development issues since she was first elected to the assembly in 1994. She spoke to IPS Brussels correspondent David Cronin.
IPS: Recently published data indicates that development aid is declining. Unless things dramatically improve, do you think the Millennium Development Goals are a lost cause?
GK: No, I don't believe the MDGs are a lost cause. What we need to see now is that the member states of the European Union fulfil the promises they made at Gleneagles. What we have seen last year, of course, is that they inflated their aid levels by including debt relief to Iraq and Nigeria. This year they don't have the opportunity to do that so you've seen that there are some countries that are a major concern: Portugal, especially since they hosted the EU-Africa summit (in December); France had made a very strong commitment when (President Jacques) Chirac was there.
I think we need to name and shame those countries who are not fulfilling what was a strong commitment because we are talking about life and death here. The maternal mortality rates are in some countries getting worse.
These objectives are for 2015. What we would need to see is that by 2010 we would have 75 million more people out of extreme poverty and that would put us on track to meet the halving of poverty objective. What we need to have is a really concrete plan in place before the United Nations meets in September: on education, 25 million more children in school by 2010; four million more children's lives saved between now and 2010; on environment, 75 million more people to have access to water. Those are important benchmarks and timescales. And that's what we need.
I'm not pessimistic. The trends are not so bad that you would say you should despair.
IPS: How much does the current food crisis complicate matters?
GK: Massively. (British Prime Minister) Gordon Brown has said that it is going to set back the MDGs agenda by as many as seven years. When you think about education and health, the needs are going to be much greater because people are not having enough food and there will be no money for education. So it will have huge implications, and governments will be put under enormous pressure to try and ensure there is food in their countries.
I was in the Seychelles recently doing some work on tuna fishing. And they are really very anxious about how they are going to manage. In the markets, they were saying that the fish, which is what everybody eats there, has doubled in price.
IPS: How much do you think the Western policy on biofuels is responsible for the food crisis? And do you think the EU should drop its target for increasing the proportion of biofuels used in transport?
GK: I think it (the Western policy) is clearly a flawed policy. When you consider how many acres of land in the U.S. and across Europe will be going to producing crops for biofuels, it is just simply unacceptable. I (END)
