Mark Malloch Brown, Administrator of the UNDP, noted that the United States could not complain if the South Africans reneged on apartheid debt – for the US itself has recently called for the 100 per cent cancellation of all Iraqi debt.

Maputo — It is perfectly possible to achieve key “Millennium Development Goals”, such as eradicating extreme poverty, achieving universal education, and cutting child mortality by two thirds, all by the year 2015, the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Mark Malloch Brown, told a Maputo press conference on Wednesday night.

But, on current trends, he warned, these goals will not be achieved. In fact, in parts of the world the clock has been turned back: according to the figures in the UNDP’s annual Human Development Reports, 54 countries were poorer at the end of the 1990s than at the start of the decade.

This year’s Human Development Report was launched simultaneously in Maputo and Dublin because, the UNDP administrator said, “we need more successful performers like Mozambique, supported by more enlightened donors like Ireland, if we are to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015”.

Malloch Brown rejected the neo-liberal idea that “free markets” and “good governance” are all that is needed to set countries on the road to growth.

“These are important, but they are not enough, if a country is handicapped by other factors – such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic, or by its location as a small landlocked state, or by a deteriorating environment, such as the loss of its topsoil”, he said. “Such factors did not attract attention in the 1990s”.

The UNDP was proposing “a more complex set of development strategies”, and Malloch Brown was sure that “when developing countries tackle these issues, they will be supported by the donors”.

But the will of the developing world was not enough – the industrialised countries had to put in additional resources. Malloch Brown noted that such figures as former US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin had called for an additional 50 billion dollars a year in assistance to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

Furthermore, if those goals really were to be achieved by 2015, then investments must be made now, Malloch Brown insisted. “If we don’t do this, then for Africa it will take between one and two centuries to achieve the goals”, he said.

The 2003 Human Development Report contains some stark calculations as to when the Millennium Development Goals will be achieved if progress does not accelerate. If the world simply carries on at the current rate, then it will take sub-Saharan Africa until 2129 to achieve universal primary education, until 2147 to halve extreme poverty, and until 2165 to cut child mortality by two thirds.

Malloch Brown said that to achieve the goals, sub-Saharan Africa needs an average growth rate of 8 per cent a year. Very few African countries (of whom Mozambique is one) are achieving such growth rates.

For UNDP, it was crucial to increase investment in agriculture, in order to deal with rural poverty. But the reality in recent years has been a steady fall in the amount of overseas development assistance going to agriculture.

This is clearly linked to European and American subsidies to their own farmers, which have the effect of depressing world market prices for agricultural commodities. “Prices are so low that there’s no incentive to invest”, said Malloch Brown.

Most of the Millennium Development Goals have to be achieved by and in developing countries – they are: eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combatting HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, and ensuring environmental sustainability.

But there is an eighth goal – building a global partnership for development – which must essentially be undertaken by the industrialised countries. The targets under this goal include establishing a non-discriminatory trading system, providing access to affordable essential drugs, and dealing comprehensively with the debt problems of developing countries.

Malloch Brown admitted that the results of the HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) debt relief initiative have been disappointing. To date only eight countries have benefitted from HIPC relief, and the cuts in their debt stock “have not been as deep as expected”.

He noted that in some cases, the debt resulted from collusion between western institutions and corrupt dictatorships (the former Zaire of Mobutu Sese Seko springs to mind) – yet such countries have not qualified for HIPC treatment.

However, it can be argued that these debts are not legitimate at all. They are “odious debts” and should be purely and simply cancelled. The best example of “odious debt” on the continent are the loans made to the apartheid regime in South Africa.

When asked why the UNDP did not call for the outright scrapping of all apartheid-related debts, Malloch Brown noted that this is not the position of the South African government. The governments of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki have been careful not to annoy western creditors: they have kept up the payments on apartheid debts, in order to keep the doors to the western financial markets open.

Malloch Brown made it clear that the UNDP would support any move to have apartheid debt classified as “odious” – but such a move would have to come from the South African government itself. If Pretoria were to take up the odious debt issue, then “it can count on UNDP as an ally”, he said.

Malloch Brown noted that the United States could not complain if the South Africans reneged on apartheid debt – for the US itself has recently called for the 100 per cent cancellation of all Iraqi debt.

AIM, Mozambique, July 10, 2003