Saturday, July 7, 2007

UNreliable

"Sadly, the UN family is better at making goals than meeting them. In 1977 in Mar del Plata, Argentina, the world urged itself to provide safe water and sanitation for all by the end of the 1980s. In 1990 the UN renewed the call, extending the deadline to the end of the century. In 1978 in what is now Almaty, Kazakhstan, governments promised “health for all” by 2000. In 1990 in Jomtien, Thailand, they called for universal primary schooling by 2000, a goal pushed back to 2015 ten years later. Kevin Watkins, the lead author of the UN's yearly Human Development Report, worries that the pledges the UN mints so readily may become a “debased currency”. In the summer of 2005, at the height of a campaign to “make poverty history”, only 3% of Britons thought the world would meet the 2015 goal of halving poverty, defined as the proportion of people who live on less than the equivalent of a dollar a day."

...and the author of the economist article goes on to tell us that all is well and uses Mali's example to show that if you're a good boy/girl, then money will pour in. This looks like it has been concocted from donor reports.

1 comment:

Bedouina said...

I just saw a documentary in San Francisco by some Lebanese students about the Palestinian situation in Lebanon. THey kept putting up excerpts from the Universal declaration of Human Rights, which Lebanese laws re: refugees clearly violate.

As "The Dove" I am supposed to keep looking for signs of hope. However I feel very disheartened - my own US government flouts international law with impunity, and is rolling back rights given to us in the US Constitution. The rest of the world's powerful feel they can follow suit.