[stop-imf] UNDP Criticizes IMF/Bank; Calls for "Guerrilla Assault"

[Robert Weissman]

The UNDP's Human Development report contains extensive discussion on the
harmful impact of education and healthcare user fees, and strong
criticism of water privatization efforts, among many other things.

The full report is on line at www.undp.org/hdr2003

July 08, 2003 at 6:13:17 PDT
Programs to Help Poor Nations Criticized
By NAOMI KOPPEL
ASSOCIATED PRESS

GENEVA (AP) - International programs to help poor nations develop and
industrialize are failing in many countries and need radical changes if the
world is to meet its targets for reducing poverty, a major United Nations
report said Tuesday.

Instead of forcing developing countries to cut back on public spending, the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank should be pressing rich
countries to provide more help, the 367-page Human Development Report 2003
said.

Despite a widespread assumption that all countries are slowly getting
richer, the report says that 54 are poorer now than they were in 1990,
while life expectancy fell in 34 countries - primarily because of the
HIV/AIDS epidemic - and 21 countries are hungrier than they were in 1990.

"For many countries, the 1990s were a decade of despair," said the report,
produced by the U.N. Development Program.

It said at the current rate the world will fail to meet most of the
"Millennium Development Goals" agreed upon by the countries of the world in
2000. They call for poverty to be reduced by half by 2015 and for big steps
forward in education, sanitation and health.

UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch-Brown said a "guerrilla assault" is needed
on the so-called "Washington Consensus" that sets out the general policies
used by the IMF and the World Bank - including an emphasis on careful
control of public spending, tax reform, trade liberalization and
privatization.

"The IMF and the World Bank should no longer set these kinds of ceilings"
on spending, he said.

"These measures were introduced at a time when finances were leaking red
ink all over the place and there was an urgent need to stabilize. The
strategy had its time and place. The Washington Consensus did some good
things, but people stuck with it too long - and it wasn't enough."

The report cited the case of Malawi, which has produced a strategy for
reducing poverty based on IMF and World Bank guidelines. But the plan would
not achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

"Malawi requires far more donor assistance - as do many other countries in
similar circumstances," the report said.

"Rather than being told to lower their sights, they should be aided in
achieving the goals, with the IMF and World Bank helping to mobilize the
needed additional assistance."

The study says a total reliance on market forces and increased trade to
achieve development will not succeed.

"Public interventions are necessary to set the preconditions for market-led
economic growth," said Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, chief author of the report.

The IMF had no immediate comment on the U.N. report.

The study also includes UNDP's annual Human Development Index, which ranks
175 countries based on income per person, life expectancy, literacy and
school enrollment.

For the third year in a row, Norway topped the list, which is based on 2001
data. Two other Scandinavian countries - Iceland and Sweden - followed. The
United States dropped one place to seventh but for the first time overtook
Canada - which was top of the list in 2000.

The bottom 25 places on the list were all held by countries in sub-Saharan
Africa, with Sierra Leone in last position. #

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Boom Bubble of 1990s Leaves 50 Nations Poorer -UN
Tue July 8, 2003 11:36 AM ET
By Evelyn Leopold


UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The boom of the 1990s left some 50 nations worse
off than they were 10 years earlier, jeopardizing pledges by world leaders
to cut poverty in half by 2015, a major U.N. report said.

Foreign aid declined in the 1990s, debt increased for poor nations, AIDS
statistics soared and prices dropped for crucial commodities, the main
exports from poor nations, according to the annual U.N. Human Development
Report, released on Tuesday.

"In the so-called great decade, a very significant hard core of countries
ended further behind with more poor people," said Mark Malloch Brown,
administrator of the U.N. Development Program, which produced the report.

This year's survey documented the progress of 175 countries toward eight
U.N. Millennium development goals agreed to by world leaders three years
ago, ranging from reducing extreme poverty to halting the spread of AIDS by
2015.

Fifty-four countries, almost half of them in Africa, are poorer now than in
1990, and some will not meet the goals for 50 years.

In Dublin, Irish rock star Bono, frontman for U2, vowed to lead a civil
disobedience campaign to spur rich nations to increase aid and forgive the
debt of impoverished countries.

"This issue is the defining issue of our time," he said during an
introduction of the report. "We are about to get noisy, we are about to
bang a lot of dustbin lids."

For Arab states and Latin America and the Caribbean, reaching the goals by
2015 is possible. But the report said it would take 20 sub-Saharan African
nations until 2129 to achieve universal primary education, until 2147 to
halve extreme poverty and until 2165 to cut child mortality by two-thirds.

The report added the goal of cutting world poverty in half by 2015 may be
met because of economic growth in China and India.


DOUBLING OF FOREIGN AID URGED

The report again called for foreign aid to be doubled to $100 billion
annually. Of the current $50 billion to $55 billion, only a fraction was
spent on implementing Millennium goals, it said.

"Every European cow is getting a $3 a day subsidy whereas 40 percent of
Africans live on less than $1 a day," Malloch Brown said. In the United
States, cotton farmers received subsidies of $10.7 million a day, three
times higher than U.S. aid to sub-Saharan Africa, he said.

The report argued for a broader view of how to lift the least developed
nations out of extreme poverty rather than the "Washington consensus" of
the World Bank and International Monetary Fund that included budget
discipline, deregulation and the liberalization of trade and finance.

It contended a single set of policies for all countries could do more harm
than good.

"The IMF and the World Bank should no longer set these kind of ceilings,"
Malloch Brown said.

The report asked poor nations to map out reasonable plans to reach the
eight Millennium goals and show what funds and programs would be needed to
obtain them.

"You can't spend money you don't have. But in any spending plan you need to
clearly demonstrate what you need from the donor community to meet the
Millennium goals," Malloch Brown said.

Since 1990, East Asia and the Pacific, led by China, had nearly halved
extreme income poverty, the report said.

Poverty soared over the past decade in central Asia after the breakup of
the Soviet Union, as well as in Algeria, Mongolia, Nigeria, Venezuela and
Zimbabwe.

The report included a Human Development Index that rated countries
according to education, life expectancy and per capita income. Norway, for
the third consecutive year, ranked on top, the United States was in seventh
place and Sierra Leone again was in last place among 175 rankings.#

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The lost decade
They were promised a brighter future, but in the 1990s the world's poor
fell further behind

Larry Elliott, economics editor
Wednesday July 9, 2003
The Guardian (UK)


The widening gulf between the global haves and have-nots was starkly
revealed last night when the United Nations announced that while the United
States was booming in the 1990s more than 50 countries suffered falling
living standards.

The UN's annual human development report charted increasing poverty for
more than a quarter of the world's countries, where a lethal combination of
famine, HIV/Aids, conflict and failed economic policies have turned the
clock back.

Highlighting the setbacks endured by sub-Saharan Africa and the nations
that emerged from the break-up of the Soviet Union at the end of the cold
war, the UN called for urgent action to meet its millennium development
goals for 2015. These include a halving of the number of people living on
less than a dollar a day, a two-thirds drop in mortality for the under
fives, universal primary education and a halving of those without access to
safe drinking water and improved sanitation.

The report said the 1990s had seen a drop from 30% to 23% in the number of
people globally living on less than a dollar a day, but the improvement had
largely been the result of the progress in China and India, the world's two
most populous countries.

Despite some sporadic successes such as Ghana and Senegal, there was little
hope of Africa meeting the UN's 2015 development goals; on current trends
it would be 2147 before the poorest countries in the poorest continent
halved poverty and 2165 before child mortality was cut by two thirds.
Thirty of the 34 countries classified by the UN as "low human development"
are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Taking issue with those who have argued that the "tough love" policies of
the past two decades have spawned the growth of a new global middle class,
the report says the world became ever more divided between the super-rich
and the desperately poor.

The richest 1% of the world's population (around 60 million) now receive as
much income as the poorest 57%, while the income of the richest 25 million
Americans is the equivalent of that of almost 2 billion of the world's
poorest people. In 1820, western Europe's per capita income was three times
that of Africa's; by the 1990s it was more than 13 times as high.

In Norway, top of the UN's league table for human development, life
expectancy at birth is 78.7 years, there is 100% literacy and annual income
is just under $30,000 (about =A318,200). At the other end of the scale, a
newborn child in Sierra Leone will be lucky to reach its 35th birthday, has
a two in three chance of growing up illiterate and would have an income of
$470 a year.

Overall human development, measured by the UN as an amalgam of income, life
expectancy and literacy, fell in 21 countries during the 1990s. By
contrast, only four countries suffered falling human development in the
1980s.

"Though average incomes have risen and fallen over time, human development
has historically shown sustained improvement, especially when measured by
the human development index. But the 1990s saw unprecedented stagnation,
with the HDI falling in 21 countries.

"Much of the decline in the 1990s can be traced to the spread of HIV/AIDS,
which lowered life expectancies, and to a collapse in incomes, particularly
in the commonwealth of independent states."

The UN said the events of September 11 had created a "genuine consensus"
that poverty was the world's problem, but urged the west to abandon the
one-size-fits-all liberalisation agenda foisted on poor nations.

Mark Malloch-Brown, administrator of the UN development programme, said
many countries in Africa and Latin America held up as examples of how to
kick-start development were among the stragglers in the global economy.

"The poster children of the 1990s are among those who didn't do terribly
well. There are structural restraints on development. Market reforms are
not enough. You can't just liberalise; you need an interventionist
strategy."

The report added that: "Over the past 20 years too much development
thinking and practice have confused market-based economic growth with
laissez faire."

The west needed to tear down trade barriers, dismantle its lavish subsidy
regimes, provide deeper debt relief and double aid from $50bn to $100bn a
year. This would provide the resources for investment in the building
blocks of development - health, education, clean water and rural roads.

"Poor countries cannot afford to wait until they are wealthy before they
invest in their people", said Jeffrey Sachs, special adviser to Kofi Annan
on the UN millennium development goals.

Economic growth alone would not rescue the world from poverty, the report
said. "Without addressing issues like malnutrition and illiteracy that are
both causes and symptoms of poverty, the goals will not be met. The
statistics today are shaming: more than 13 million children have died
through diarrhoeal disease in the past decade. Each year, over half a
million women, one for every minute of the day, die in pregnancy and
childbirth. More than 800 million suffer from malnutrition."

It added: "For many countries the 1990s were a decade of despair. Some 54
countries are poorer now than in 1990. In 21, a larger proportion is going
hungry. In 14, more children are dying before age five. In 12, primary
school enrolments are shrinking. In 34, life expectancy has fallen. Such
reversals in survival were previously rare."

Matthew Lockwood, head of UK Advocacy Team, ActionAid, said: "The shocking
truth is that the poor are getting poorer.

"Leaders, in rich and poor countries alike, are not taking poverty
seriously enough. You don't solve this problem by making the leaders of
poor countries accountable to their rich-country counterparts. They need to
be accountable to their own citizens. Poor people must have a voice." #


Where living standards fell between 1990 and 2001

Angola
Armenia
Azerbaijan
Belarus
Brunei Darussalam
Bulgaria
Burundi
Cameroon
Central African Republic
Chad
Comoros
Congo
Congo, Dem. Rep. of the
Djibouti
Ecuador
Gabon
Georgia
Guinea-Bissau
Haiti
Jamaica
Kazakhstan
Kenya
Kuwait
Kyrgyzstan
Latvia
Lithuania
Macedonia, TFYR
Madagascar
Marshall Islands
Micronesia, Fed. Sts.
Moldova, Rep. of
Mongolia
Nicaragua
Niger
Nigeria
Occupied Palestinian Territory
Paraguay
Romania
Russian Federation
Rwanda
Sao Tome and Principe
Saudi Arabia
Sierra Leone
Solomon Islands
Tajikistan
Togo
Turkmenistan
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
Uzbekistan
Vanuatu
Venezuela
Zambia
Zimbabwe ##