It is not normal for members of the United Nations to let any issue pass without conspicuous debate over pretended disagreements. However, when the 10-year review meeting of the millennium development goals (MDGs) took place recently in New York, there was little disagreement on reiterating the global goals of eliminating poverty and hunger, among other laudable objectives.
Indeed, while the goals themselves were set at an international conference under the auspices of the UN, their implementation generally falls in the grey area of divided responsibility. Is it the duty of the UN as a whole to provide the resources required for achieving the goals by 2015, or, as developed-country delegated observe, is it the responsibility of the country concerned? As Esther Duflo, a development expert at MIT, observed, “If we miss the goals, who is going to punish us? Nobody is going to come from Mars and say, ‘you didn’t reach the goals, so we will invade.’” In short, there is no accountability when we talk only of elimination or eradication.
Developing countries generally criticise the richer countries for not providing adequate resources to achieve the goals, which are subscribed to by all nations. The debate over the inability or unwillingness of developed countries to reach the UN target of spending 0.7 per cent of their gross domestic product on developing countries gets revived, with nobody taking the onus of failure to achieve the targets. They have all reiterated that eliminating poverty, eradicating hunger, educating children and combating disease are dear to their hearts.
However, none of the participating nations asks whether the rhetoric that accompanied the setting of the unrealistic goals under the millennium development exercise reflected reality.
It is politically correct both within a nation and in global gatherings to talk of eliminating poverty, eradicating hunger, banning nuclear weapons, getting rid of terrorism, putting an end to misuse of narcotic drugs, ending trafficking in women or eliminating child abuse, and then to announce some artificial deadline to achieve these goals.
However, if the international community or national authorities have to make any progress in dealing with manmade evils, they cannot achieve success by talking of elimination or eradication of these evils. It is difficult not to conclude that every time we set the goal of eliminating a particular evil, we end up contributing to its increased prevalence.
Take the case of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. Every world leader of any consequence has proposed elimination of nuclear weapons to achieve the goal of non-proliferation. What we have ended up with today is an increase in the number of nuclear-weapon countries from five in the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty to nine acknowledged nuclear weapon powers, and from a few nuclear weapons to several thousand.
More From This Section
Similarly, despite the universal goal of total eradication of drug abuse, the illicit drug industry is today worth hundreds of billions of dollars, while the use of narcotics has spread among millions of people in almost all countries.
Eradication of poverty is another goal promoted by most respected world leaders. They have even cautioned the world against the evils of keeping people below the poverty line and the hazardous consequences of poverty on issues as diverse as terrorism and global climate change. But the reality is that as the population of the world has inevitably grown, more people have gone under the poverty line or remained poor than have become rich.
The question we have to ask ourselves is whether our societies would have succeeded in providing solutions to these evils if the goals of world leaders were not as unrealistic as elimination or eradication of these evils, or if they had accepted that these evils are here to stay and the best we can do is to control them.
Mercifully, no leader talks about eliminating earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis, cyclones and volcanic eruptions, simply because these are acts of God. The authorities focus on providing relief to those affected — and the people benefit.
Similarly, if governments were to focus not on elimination or eradication of manmade evils, but on limiting the impact of these evils on people, perhaps we would have had more success in limiting the damage done by these evils. If we were to accept that terrorism has come to stay, then we could discuss at the global level ways to reduce its impact on our population, rather than see it continuing to grow despite the war on terror.
The illicit production, distribution and use of drugs could perhaps be controlled and reduced if the target adopted was not total eradication of production and consumption of illicit drugs, but controlled production and use, education of users and providing farmers with an alternative means of livelihood.
Eradication of poverty is a noble objective. In practice, it means that every human being gets the basic necessities of life and is able to enjoy the fruits of development. Indeed, we would not have witnessed the tremendous growth in poverty that we have seen over the last few decades if we had concentrated on providing basic necessities, instead of defining the poverty line and showing how many are above or below it.
Eradicating, eliminating and banning are essentially negative concepts. Would it not be better we defined development goals not in negative terms such as ‘elimination’ or ‘eradication’, but through positive targets such as providing minimum requirements of food, shelter and clothing, or providing security without nuclear weapons, or regulating and controlling illicit drugs or trafficking in women and children?
The author is former permanent representative of India to the UN