A LOOK AT THE MILLENIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS

PROGRESS, PITFALLS AND PROSPECTS.

COVER STORY: MILLENNIUM DEVE LOPMENT GOALS

The MDG Promise: Sweeping Neoliberal Dirt Under The Rug

With five years left before 2015, world leaders are meeting in New York this September to take stock of the progress and gaps in achieving the Millennium Development Goals. But, however laudable, the MDG effort is poised for failure—above all, for skirting the structural issues at the root of global poverty.

In September 2000, leaders of 189 countries that were assembled for the United Nations (UN) Millennium Summit in New York signed on to the Millennium Declaration. In it, member-states reaffirm their commitment to realizing the goals agreed upon in various UN summits and conferences over the 1990s. Commitments were made in the areas of the environment, human rights, peace, and strengthening the UN. The best-known commitments, though, are those for development and poverty reduction, which contained goals explicitly setting 2015 as the deadline year.

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Food & climate: Of Sovereignty and Development.

Cover Story.

Proposed Global Land Guidelines:

Peddling “Acceptable” Land Grabbing

Food insecurity remains an immense problem troubling many countries despite increased global food production. This is essentially because food still does not reach those who need it most, the poor who lack the capacity to buy it. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that over a billion people in the world suffer hunger and millions have already died from the lack of food. Rising food prices underscored this crisis in 2008 and since then the solution being pushed has been increased investments for agricultural production and raising productivity in underdeveloped countries, mainly to expand crops export.

This primer traces the roots of the climate crisis as well as other social crises to the dominant economic paradigm and the prevailing socio-economic system in the world today -- a system that has proven capable of generating unprecedented wealth for some at the same time impoverishing the majority of the people and devastating the planet. It shows the limits and adverse implications of profit-oriented technological fixes and market-based solutions being promoted by corporate and elite interests who are determined to maintain the status quo.  It points to the need for a radical change in the distribution of wealth and power within societies and between countries in order to arrest climate change and shift towards sustainable human development.  The primer concludes by identifying urgent tasks for social movements fighting for a just and sustainable future.

The UNFCCC and Climate Politics after COP 15

This policy brief reviews the dismal (albeit unofficial) results of the 2009 climate summit contained in the Copenhagen Accord, and raises questions about the Accord’s implications to the multilateral climate process going forward. The paper finds that the unequal, growth-/profit-centered economic model—and the intractable commitment by major polluting economies and their elites thereto—as the main ecological and political obstacle to securing strong and just action towards climate stability. To address this, it proposes that, instead of being abandoned, the international climate effort under the UNFCCC must be upheld and broadened to include a transition to an alternative model of development based both on equity and sustainability.

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In a statement, the Peoples' Movement on Climate Change decried manipulation by Northern countries of the COP15 process. PMCC decries the non-binding Copenhagen Accord released in this UN climate change meeting last December as a "hollow, unjust, and potentially disastrous agreement." It calls on "peoples, communities, and social movements to take our struggles forward, in their local contexts and internationally, and mobilize along the following platform for action set out in the Peoples’ Protocol [on Climate Change]."

Click this link to read the statement in full.

Mr. Tony Tujan, Jr., IBON International Director, was recently interviewed by Redaktion E+Z/D+C on the challenges facing the international community after the failed UN climate summit (COP 15).

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK (10 December 2009) – On Human Rights Day, the Peoples' Movement on Climate Change (PMCC) demand negotiators in the UN Climate Change Conference to make human rights the center of their negotiations for a global climate deal.

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