McLeod Group Blog, July 28, 2015
It’s pretty much official: The UN’s hugely ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), not yet formally launched, aren’t going to be worth much more than the paper they are being written on. If proof is needed, just read the 39-page report of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, held in Addis Ababa in July.
There, the world’s development ministers, a few heads of state, the aid community and what the UN likes to call ‘high representatives’ gathered to discuss where the money will come from to finance the ambitious set of goals and targets that will replace the Millennium Development Goals. The ‘outcome document’ provides the long answer—39 pages long: the governments of developing countries themselves, the private sector and donors. The shorter answer is: fuhgeddaboudit.
In the longer answer, developing countries agreed to crack down on corruption, coordinate taxation, straighten up their development banks and create positive climates for international investment. Everyone promised to do everything possible to encourage sustainable, environmentally sound, gender-sensitive foreign investment. And donors agreed to all manner of innovative financing, the encouragement of south-south cooperation, multi-stakeholder partnerships and respect for biodiversity and the earth’s ecosystems. Donor countries again made commitments to reach the aid target of 0.7% of their gross national income, a target so old and so shamelessly ignored by most of them that by 2015, ‘commitments’ like these are little more than cringe-making. (Canada is currently at 0.24% and dropping.) There are even three pages on the importance of trade and how international trade negotiations ‘need more effort.’
The to-do list requires almost nothing concrete of anybody. Civil society organizations at the conference called the outcome ‘deeply inadequate.’ The upshot? The estimated $2-3 trillion required to fund the SDGs are not likely to appear anytime soon. Sadly, the meeting recalls many other noble ‘commitments’ and targets. ‘Health for all by the year 2000’, for example, solemnly agreed by the UN General Assembly in 1981, barely got beyond the starting gate.
The Economist has called the SDGs ‘the stupid development goals’ because there are far too many of them and most are unrealistic. It may have something there. The problem is that being critical of the ballooning SDGs as they evolved over the past couple of years is like being critical of babies. And it still isn’t fashionable. The MDGs called for free universal primary education, a goal that after 15 years isn’t anywhere near being achieved. The SDGs call for it again, but have added secondary education and half a dozen other fantasy educational targets, almost tragic in their lack of realism.
The Economist says that we should simply focus on eliminating extreme poverty—SDG #1. That, it says, is doable, not least because we have already cut poverty in half over the past 20 years. There are fewer than a billion people living in absolute poverty today.
It would be nice if that were true, but the achievement, if you can call it that, has been reached largely by revising data, fudging numbers and changing definitions. There is no contemporaneous 1995 data placing the number of poor people at two billion. The number, in fact, has been static at about a billion since the World Bank’s first World Development Report on the subject in 1980. It is true that this number represents a lower percentage of the world’s growing population, and that’s good. But a billion is a billion no matter how you cut the cake.
Canada cannot solve this problem on its own, but we can play a much more meaningful part in helping to solve it. The McLeod Group has prepared 17 election policy briefs (available here) on possible ways forward for the next government. We think they deserve to be taken seriously.