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Are the UN millennium development goals on track?

6 July 2010

The first UN millennium development goal “” halving the percentage of the world’s hungry people by 2015 “” is slipping further and further away.

With the number of the world’s hungry having reached 1,02bn at last count in 2009, a commitment to meeting the goal then would have required a reduction of 73m undernourished people each year until 2015. And even if that were done, 600m people would remain hungry in the developing world.

The Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (Ifpri) and the UN Conference on Trade & Development (Unctad) recently issued reports on the crisis.

“œIf past trends continue, global food security will deteriorate even further, and progress towards reaching the millennium development goal will be off track by a wide margin,” warns Ifpri.

Concentrating on food security in Africa, Unctad says: “œSub-Saharan Africa is the developing region most likely to miss the first development goal.”

Developed countries have not kept to their pledges of assistance, mainly because of the financial crisis that first hit in 2008, they say. But, says Unctad, developing countries by then “œalready had investment deficits in agriculture and the supporting infrastructure”.

Unctad warns that “œa single overarching message to solve the food security problem should be distrusted. The solutions lie in hundreds of fronts and will be slow and technocratic rather than quick and spectacular.”

But a part of the solution, it says, lies in placing small-scale farmers at the centre of agricultural policy.

Unctad also encourages an “œenabling environment for agricultural innovation” to promote sustainable development. In this regard it encourages global and regional networks. These should be between farmers, academics, scientists, policy makers, extension services and governments, and between farming and non farming economic systems. The networks should be focused on maximising investment in agriculture and establish ing “œknowledge systems” rather than merely on technology transfer, which is often ineffective.

Read more at the Financial Mail.