NRC Handelsblad (newspaper) 15 January 2005 (Dick Wittenberg):A global action plan for combating poverty gives veiled but strong criticism of the development policy of the previous decades. Many are countries caught in the poverty trap. A proposed fundamental change.The United Nations has put together an ambitious, detailed action plan for development and for combating global poverty: reducing poverty and hunger by half; reducing child deaths and deaths of mothers during childbirth by more than a half; and education for all children in the world. In just ten years. We have the knowledge. We have the means. We just need to use them. This is the message from the report that was offered last January to Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations. If it were up to the UN, this report would form the basis of global development policy for the coming years. Aid is currently directed mainly towards keeping people alive, but this approach doesn’t alter or affect the basic problems, such as poverty, hunger and illness. Those affected are never given the opportunity to struggle out of the misery in which they find themselves. In the current approach, rich countries have to give humanitarian aid, year in year out, without this leading to any significant improvement in the circumstances of the population. This also means that the costs will just continue to rise: poverty leads to conflict, it forms a basis for terrorism, and leads to large floods of people seeking asylum. Seen from this perspective, choosing a development policy that is geared to global poverty prevention, starting from the eight so-called, Millennium Development Goals (embraced, in 2000, by all UN Member States!), promises a huge leap forward. According to the report, in the coming decade this new strategy would not only enable us to ensure that tens of millions of lives would be saved, but also that hundreds of millions of people could be enabled to escape from enduring poverty and hunger. The strategy will also lead to additional economic growth in poor countries. The danger of war and terrorism will decrease. And of course, the financial support needed in the longer-term will be reduced. This report has been drawn up by the Millennium Project, an independent advice organ under the leadership of the American economist Jeffrey Sachs, and established by Kofi Annan. The document is based on the findings of ten international task forces with, in total, 265 experts who have conducted research in different areas over a period of three years. According to the report, in most of the poorer countries there is nothing wrong in terms of the knowledge and instruments needed to achieve the development goals. Many countries, however, are caught in the ‘poverty trap’. They are too poor to carry out the investments needed in order to escape from poverty. The eight UN Millennium Development Goals
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