AS NEW Year's becomes a more and more distant memory, we're all reminded how hard it is to keep our resolutions. Resolve fades in the face of the minutiae of daily life as it becomes harder to visualize the sweeping goals we set for ourselves. Being 10 pounds thinner starts to feel impossible, so we give into another cookie; our quest for the 4.0 becomes unachievable, so we fire up the Playstation for this afternoon.
So when the developed world started slipping behind on its 2000 resolution to halve global poverty by 2015, it seemed hard to protest. We can all identify with broken promises, and honestly, isn't cutting the number of those that live in abject poverty in half in just 15 years sort of an impossible dream anyway?
But the injustice of the multi-billion dollar shortfall five years into the U.N. Millennium Summit's 15-year roadmap is that ending poverty across the world isn't that much of a stretch at all. In fact, if America and the rest of the developed world were to make it a priority, it's a goal we could achieve with considerably less effort than it takes to get out of bed and over to the AFC on a snowy morning.
A brief history: Five years ago, the United States and the other member countries of the United Nations gathered in New York to avow, in the words of the resulting resolution, "to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world's people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger and, by the same date, to halve the proportion of people who are unable to reach or to afford safe drinking water" as well as "to have, by then, halted, and begun to reverse, the spread of HIV/AIDS, the scourge of malaria and other major diseases that afflict humanity."
In order to do this, each of the included nations pledged to set aside 0.5 percent of their GNPs each year, a pledge renewed two years later by the countries at a summit in Monterrey, Mexico. That's just 50 cents out of every $100. Fifty cents to provide mosquito nets, to build roads and schools and to help end disease; in short, 50 cents per $100 to improve the condition of life and offer sustainable relief in the darkest corners of abject poverty across the globe, where an estimated one billion people live on less than a single dollar a day.
Yet last week the United Nations released the findings of a study by scientists and economists that out of 189 signatories of the undertaking, only five nations -- Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Luxembourg -- have lived up to that pledge, and our own country comes in at less than half that, or 0.15 percent of our GNP. Meanwhile, millions still suffer from crippling disease and poverty throughout the world. Consider the example of malaria, which on its own kills over 150,000 children every single month. That's roughly the same number of deaths resulting from the tsunami disasters in Southeast Asia, and it's happening every four weeks. It's a scale of death almost impossible to comprehend, which may explain why there has been little outrage as our own country has fallen far behind on our promise.
To be sure, simply throwing money at nations mired in poverty is far from a solution; the recent U.N. report does, in fact, acknowledge that international organizations like the IMF and World Bank have failed to produce a strategy to achieve the Millennium Summit goals. And even economists involved in the report itself note that too little emphasis is placed on the responsibilities of the poor nations themselves to create real systemic political and social change.
But the study also notes that there are some things that can be solved with money alone, citing in particular 17 examples of what it calls "Quick Wins," or highly effective initiatives like fighting mosquito-spread malaria with the mass distribution of bed netting treated with insecticides, expanding school meal programs or improving education itself by dismantling the barriers of school fees. And these solutions address a crisis that is not merely humanitarian. As members of the developed world, we all benefit from more participants in a global marketplace as well as from the actions of stable governments that arise when nations are able to surmount poverty and engage in real advancement. As a global superpower, it's time for America to lead the charge in getting back on track to achieve the goals of Millennium Declaration over the coming decade. Making serious strides toward ending global poverty in our lifetime may sound overwhelming, but it's a New Year's resolution we can -- and must -- keep.
Katie Cristol's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kcristol@cavalierdaily.com.
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