Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Eradicate global poverty . . . or buy more guns?
Global poverty can be cut in half by 2015 and eliminated by 2025 if the world's richest countries including the United States, Japan and Germany more than double aid to the poorest countries, hundreds of development experts concluded in a report Monday.
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In 1970, the world's nations agreed to provide 0.7 percent of their gross national income for development assistance, and that figure was reaffirmed by the U.N. conference on financing development in Monterey, Mexico, in 2002.
So far, only five countries have met or surpassed the target — Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Six others have made commitments to reach the target by 2015 — Belgium, Finland, France, Ireland, Spain and Britain.
But 11 of the 22 richest donors according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are far from the target and have not set timetables to reach it — including the United States, Japan and Germany.
If all 22 rich countries come up with the money, more than 500 million people can escape poverty and tens of millions can avoid certain death in the next decade, the report said.
If the countries kept up the 0.7 percent level of aid-giving for another decade, it said, "by 2025 extreme poverty can be substantially eliminated" for the remaining 500 million people surviving on a dollar a day.
UPDATE: The US spends about 0.15 percent of its Gross Domestic Product on development aid. In 2003, the US spent 3.7 percent of its GDP on the military. Some may say that the figures should be reversed, but those people don't seem to understand that we've got a never-ending war on! (Not that eradicating poverty might go a long way to reducing the terrorist threat around the world or anything...)
posted by chris at 1:13 PM
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