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World We Want Poverty Rally June 2010, New York

Activists Demand `The World We Want’

 Hundreds of Prominent and grassroots anti-poverty campaigners from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America and North America marched to Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza outside the United Nations today to demand urgent and concrete actions to reach and exceed the Millennium Development Goals.

The activists are in New York to participate in ground-breaking hearings at the United Nations, where for the first time civil society, private sector and government delegates are meeting together on the floor of the General Assembly. The interactive meetings are being held ahead of a high-profile summit at the UN in September, where global leaders are expected to take measures to accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals.

“Governments seem to be suffering from a collective infliction – memory loss,” says Lysa John, Campaign Director of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP). “They agreed on a framework and concrete targets to dramatically reduce extreme poverty by 2015. But with less than five years to go, we are way off track. We urgently need legally binding mechanisms to ensure that governments keep their promises alongside a global breakthrough plan to end extreme poverty.”

Ms. John joined international campaigners outside the UN in signing a giant letter of demands, addressed to the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. The letter, which was also signed by more than 120 civil society groups across the globe, calls for greater accountability, measures to increase gender equality and reduce social exclusion and concrete urgent steps to achieve MDG8, a global partnership for development focused on justice, sustainability and fair trade.

Anti-poverty campaigners are also demanding an increased focus on social exclusion and discrimination as well as legally binding accountability mechanisms.

“We are calling for the World We Want 2015 because we are not happy with the World we live in today,” says Gemma Adaba of the International Trade Union Confederation, “a world where children are denied the opportunity to go to school and neoliberal polices dictate that education is a service that must be paid for. The World We Want is a world where there is education for all, health, water, decent work, universal social protection floor and dignity for all.”

“We need Governments to be accountable to the citizens of the world and fulfill the internationally agreed commitments they have made,” adds Mr. Irungu Houghton, Oxfam’s Pan-African policy advisor. “Poverty has reached emergency proportions. Urgent action is needed. We cannot afford a business-as-usual approach.”

Leaders from 189 countries signed The Millennium Declaration in 2000, setting out eight clear cut time-bound commitments to end poverty. While some progress and significant achievements have been made, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are not on track to be achieved by the 2015 deadline, due in part to the feminization of poverty, the ever more apparent affects of climate change and the global financial and food crises. In 2009 alone, an estimated 90 million people – mostly women and girls – were pushed into poverty.

An example of extreme poverty: Slums built on swamp land near a garbage dump in East Cipinang, Jakarta Indonesia.

We’re calling for a breakthrough plan to tackle climate change

The world’s top policy makers got a powerful message from advocates for the world’s poorest people.  Promises are not enough.  The G8 is $18 billion short on its commitments to alleviate poverty in developing countries, according to the OECD.  The impact of climate change is worsening the lives of millions in Africa and Asia.   Canada needs to hold member countries to account at this June’s G8 Summit in Muskoka.

The G8 “Sherpas”  – the senior civil servants who chart the course for their political leaders – are in Vancouver to finalize the Summit agenda.  They held a “Civil G8 Dialogue” with 60 global advocates from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Canada and the US.  There was no disagreement that the G8 is behind on meeting its own commitments and achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals which come due in 2015.

“The good news is, we could show them real strides education and combating diseases like TB and malaria ,” said Gerry Barr, Chair of Make Poverty History and CEO of the Canadian Council for International Cooperation.   “But all that’s sliding back from the effects of climate change, the economic crisis and especially the failure of some G8 countries to pay what they’ve promised.”

“We tried to impress all of them with the need to get behind the Canadian initiative on Maternal and Child Health with new money for urgently needed initiatives,” said Dr. Dorothy Shaw of the Partnership on Maternal, Newborn and Child Health .  We’ve just seen promising new statistics showing that when the right combination of interventions is implemented, the maternal death rate goes down.”

The prestigious medical journal Lancet this week published a survey showing a drop in maternal mortality, especially in China and India where economic growth is rising and both governments and donors have invested more in maternal programs.

But the delegates pressing the G8 teams for an action plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help hard-hit countries adapt, had no indication their message was heard.

“We’re calling for a breakthrough plan to tackle climate change,” said Zoë Caron, of WWF-Canada.  The choice is clear for the G8 this June:  lead us forward in this transformation to a clean green economy.”  But Canada appears reluctant to take serious initiatives of its own and has decided for the first time in recent G8 history, not to host an environment ministers meeting.

AIDS campaigners outlined to the Sherpas, how progress on access to treatment is helping more than 4 million people with the HIV-virus.  “Compared to ten years ago, it’s good news, but it still falls fall well short of the G8’s own targets for universal access. “  Masaki Inaba, from GCAP Japan, says the world “needs a further scale-up if we are to meet this critical need.  We urge donor countries not to use the economic crisis as an excuse for not replenishing the resources needed.”

The G8 has promised to make better tracking of delivery on its commitments a priority.  Making rich countries accountable is welcome news to South African GCAP delegate Glenn Farred.  “But a report card on how the G8 is doing, is not enough.  We told them we need to see a plan to ensure delivery on those promises and mechanisms to ensure that recipient countries are accountable for funding they receive.”

Considerable progress has been made in reducing hunger and boosting food security in recent decades, yet more people are hungry today than were even alive a century ago, according to a newly released issues paper that represents the first major output of Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet project.

The paper, “Agricultural Innovation for Food Security and Poverty Reduction in the 21st Century: Issues for Africa and the World” is a guidance document for the forthcoming 2011 edition of Worldwatch’s flagship report, State of the World. Authored by project collaborator Ecoagriculture Partners, the paper identifies three challenges that are central to the global conversation on hunger reduction and that need to be addressed:

• Unify the food security, climate change, and ecosystem protection agendas
• Rise above conflicting perspectives on the causes and solutions to hunger
• Empower farmers and communities to feed themselves

“Historically, there has been a major disconnect between policymakers focused on hunger reduction and the newer voices mobilizing around ecosystem conservation and climate mitigation and adaptation,” says issues paper co-author Sara Scherr, President and CEO of Ecoagriculture Partners. “Yet in the midst of all this conflict, a rapidly growing set of individuals and institutions has been exploring innovations for reconciling these objectives—for developing landscape mosaics that overcome these challenges simultaneously.”

Technical and institutional innovations to boost smallholder productivity, gain market access, and restore natural resources are transforming agriculture in ways that can ensure food security, mitigate climate change, and conserve critical ecosystem services, including watershed protection, pollination, and pest and disease control. Such innovations are often hidden, however, as entrepreneurial farmers get overlooked by national and international government leaders and funders.

“Success” stories that have been identified, meanwhile, are too often not scaled up (or out) sufficiently to eliminate hunger and food insecurity. “Scaling up” has too often been approached by increasing the number of people involved, rather than by mobilizing similar successful, smaller-scale initiatives more broadly.

“Despite these obstacles, agricultural innovation is taking place in the fields of Uganda, Ghana, Kenya, and elsewhere across Africa to overcome the blight of global hunger,” says Nourishing the Planet co-director Danielle Nierenberg. “In order to feed the 1.02 billion people who go to bed hungry each night, change-makers must overcome the policy challenges that have plagued this issue for generations and embrace the innovations that have proven most effective to date.”