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Millennium
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The Millennium Development
Goals: A Critique from the South by
Samir Amin
In September 2000, at the United Nations Millennium
Summit, the 191 member countries in the United Nations
agreed to a set of eight Millennium Development Goals
for the world's poor nations. These goals, targeted
for fulfillment by 2015, have since become the fulcrum
for public policy discussions and actions concerning
economic and social development. Meetings and conferences
on the goals under the auspices of the United Nations
and the governing bodies of member countries have been
held regularly since 2001, most recently at the 2005
Millennium+5 Summit. The aim of these meetings and conferences
has been to reiterate the goals and to reaffirm the
commitment of countries to them, as well as to assess
the extent to which progress has been made toward their
fulfillment. Most of the Millennium Development Goals
may seem at first sight unobjectionable. Nevertheless,
they were not the result of an initiative from the South
itself, but were pushed primarily by the triad (the
United States, Europe, and Japan), and were co-sponsored
by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund,
and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
All of this has raised the question of whether they
are mainly ideological cover (or worse) for neoliberal
initiatives. Samir Amin's systematic and revealing critique
of the Millennium Development Goals is therefore of
the utmost significance. The goals themselves are appended
to this article.
The declaration adopted by the general assembly is available
at:
http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e.pdf
The Millennium Development
Goals: A Critique from the South by Samir
Amin
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were adopted
by acclamation in September 2000 by a resolution of
the United Nations General Assembly called "United
Nations Millennium Declaration." This procedural
innovation, called "consensus," stands in
stark contrast to UN tradition, which always required
that texts of this sort be carefully prepared and discussed
at great length in committees. This simply reflects
a change in the international balance of power. The
United States and its European and Japanese allies are
now able to exert hegemony over a domesticated UN. In
fact, Ted Gordon, well-known consultant for the CIA,
drafted the millennium goals!
The claim is made that the MDGs follow up on the conclusions
reached in the cycle of summits organized in the 1990s.
That's going a bit too far. The preparatory meetings
to these summits had tried something new by organizing
assemblies of so-called civil society representatives
parallel to the official conferences where only state
representatives were seated. Although things had been
organized to reserve the best places for the charitable
NGO's, which are beneficiaries of financial support
from large foundations and states, and largely to exclude
popular organizations fighting for social and democratic
progress (authentic popular organizations are always
poor by definition), the voices of the latter were sometimes
heard. In the official conferences themselves, the points
of view of the triad and of the South often diverged.
It is often forgotten that the triad's proposals were
rejected in Seattle not only in the streets, but also
by states from the South. It is also important to remember
that the reconstruction (or at least the first signs
of reconstruction) of a group (if not a front) of the
South took place at Doha. All of these divergences were
smoothed away by the supposed synthesis of the MDGs.
Instead of forming a genuine committee for the purpose
of discussing the document, a draft was prepared in
the backroom of some obscure agency. The only common
denominator is limited to the expression of the pious
hope of reducing poverty. In what follows, I will examine
how these goals are formulated and the conditions required
to reach them.
The Official Millennium 'Development' Goals
Eight sets of goals were defined for the next fifteen
years (2000-15). The accomplishment of each of the targets
that specifically define them is based on measurable
indicators, generally altogether acceptable in themselves.
Each of these goals is certainly commendable (who would
disapprove of reducing poverty or improving health?).
Nevertheless, their definition is often extremely vague.
Moreover, debates concerning the conditions required
to reach the goals are often dispensed with. It is assumed
without question that liberalism is perfectly compatible
with the achievement of the goals.
Goal 1: Reduce extreme poverty and hunger by half.
This is nothing but an empty incantation as long as
the policies that generate poverty are not analyzed
and denounced and alternatives proposed.
Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education.
UNESCO devoted itself to this goal beginning in 1960,
hoping to achieve it in ten years. Progress was made
during the two decades that followed, but ground has
been lost since. The almost obvious relationship between
this lost ground, the reduction in public expenditures,
and the privatization of education is not examined in
fact nor in theory.
Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women.
The equality in question is reduced to access to education
and the empowerment is measured by the proportion of
wage-earning women. The neoconservative Christian fundamentalists
of the United States, Poland and elsewhere, the Muslims
of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and other countries, and the
fundamentalist Hindus agree on eliminating any reference
to the rights of women and the family. Without discussion,
declarations on this question are only empty talk.
Goals 4, 5, and 6: (Concerning health) reduce infant
mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-fourths;
stop the spread of pandemic diseases (AIDS, malaria,
tuberculosis).
The means implemented in these areas are assumed to
be completely compatible with extreme privatization
and total respect for the "intellectual property
rights" of the transnational corporations and,
curiously enough, are recommended in Goal 8 concerning
the supposed partnership between North and South!
Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability.
A general principle is asserted ("to integrate
the principles of sustainable development" into
national and global policies), but no definite content
is made explicit. Moreover, any mention of the refusal
of the United States to promote conditions necessary
for environmental protection (i.e., their rejection
of the Kyoto Protocol) is carefully avoided.
It is presupposed, then, that the rationality of capitalist
economic strategy is compatible with the requirements
of "sustainable development." That is obviously
not the case since capitalist strategy is founded on
the concept of the rapid discounting of economic time
(with the timespan governing investment decisions never
exceeding a few years at maximum), while the questions
raised here relate to the long term. The specific goals
are thus in fact reduced to nothing much: reduce by
half the population having no access to clean water,
improve living conditions in the slums-two ordinary
goals of simple public health.
The criteria for measuring the results (CO2 emissions,
change in the ozone layer) undoubtedly make it possible
to monitor the degradation of the environment, but certainly
not to curb it. Note the strange timidity of the writers
concerning biodiversity (there is no question of infringing
on the greater rights of the transnationals!): they
propose only "to observe" the evolution of
land areas protected from the destruction of biodiversity!
But above all not to stop it!
Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development.
The writers straightaway establish an equivalence between
this "partnership" and the principles of liberalism
by declaring that the objective is to establish an open,
multilateral commercial and financial system! The partnership
thus becomes synonymous with submission to the demands
of the imperialist powers. Progress in access to the
market is measured by the share of exports in the GDP
(an increase in this ratio is thus synonymous with progress
regardless of the social price!), progress in the conditions
of nondiscrimination by the reduction in subsidies.
To carry out this "liberal partnership" would
require, in the end, nothing more than the fight against
poverty (the only "social" goal allowed).
To this is added, like hair in soup, "good governance,"
a phrase favored by the U.S. establishment that is never
defined and is taken up uncritically by the Europeans
and the institutions of the global system (UN, World
Bank, etc.).
Many targets are added to this completely contradictory
text, which fill in its gaps and offer recommendations.
I am singling out five of them for further examination:
Enhanced debt relief for heavily indebted poor countries.
In fact, the program implemented in this regard for
the heavily indebted poor countries imposes a genuinely
colonial tutelage on them. That the governments of the
countries in question have internalized the abandonment
of their sovereignty changes nothing. Indeed, in the
past, heads of state had sometimes abdicated in the
face of colonization. But such abdication had never
been accepted as legitimate by the peoples involved.
Deal comprehensively with developing countries' debt
problems through national and international measures
to make debt sustainable in the long term.
This exhortation is not accompanied by any further information
concerning what is to follow (international negotiations?
within what framework?) or the principles on which such
a measure should be founded. However, certain reasonable
things can be said on the subject, such as the necessity
for an audit that makes it possible to classify the
debts (immoral, illegal, acceptable...) and an elaboration
of legislation that makes it possible to define for
the future the legal conditions of debts and the creation
of courts charged with deciding the law in this area.
It is perfectly obvious that all of this is ignored
by the writers of the MDGs!
In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide
access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries.
The significance of the generous intention to provide
access to drugs is immediately nullified by the specification
that this would be "in cooperation with the pharmaceutical
industry," precisely those who prohibit anyone
from calling their abusive monopoly into question!
In cooperation with the private sector, make available
the benefits of new technologies-especially information
and communications technologies.
Here again an intention is subjected to a condition
that empties it of any meaning-"in cooperation
with the private sector"!
More generous official development assistance for
countries committed to poverty reduction.
Is there a better comedy than this proposal, endlessly
repeated for the last fifty years by those who are responsible
for implementing it and yet never do it?
The Real Goals of Dominant Capital
A critical examination of the formulation of the goals
as well as the definition of the means that would be
required to implement them can only lead to the conclusion
that the MDGs cannot be taken seriously. A litany of
pious hopes commits no one. And when the expression
of these pious hopes is accompanied by conditions that
essentially eliminate the possibility of their becoming
reality, the question must be asked: are not the authors
of the document actually pursuing other priorities that
have nothing to do with "poverty reduction"
and all the rest? In this case, should the exercise
not be described as pure hypocrisy, as pulling the wool
over the eyes of those who are being forced to accept
the dictates of liberalism in the service of the quite
particular and exclusive interests of dominant globalized
capital?
Besides, the MDGs cannot truly be taken seriously by
their promoters in the imperialist triad, which implements
them only when it is convenient and ignores them otherwise,
nor by states in the South that, not wanting to take
any risks at the present time, refrain from formally
rejecting the proposals. In another time, a text of
this type would not have been adopted and the states
of the South would have, at least, imposed a compromise.
The MDGs are part of a series of discourses that are
intended to legitimize the policies and practices implemented
by dominant capital and those who support it, i.e.,
in the first place the governments of the triad countries,
and secondarily governments in the South. The real goals,
openly recognized as such, are:
1. Extreme privatization, aimed at opening new fields
for the expansion of capital.
Such privatization calls into question the existence
of national state property, which should be liquidated
on open markets, by foreign capital among others. Beyond
that, privatization aims at eliminating public services,
particularly in education and health. Here, the ideas
developed in the MDGs concerning the elimination of
illiteracy and the improvement of health lose all credibility.
The privatization of property and access to important
natural resources, in particular petroleum and water,
facilitates the pillage of these resources for the wastefulness
of the triad, reducing the discourse of sustainable
development to pure, empty rhetoric.
2. The generalization of the private appropriation
of agricultural land.
Just as with agricultural and food products, land, too,
must be subjected to the general law of the market.
This general offensive aims at nothing less than extending
the policy of "enclosures" (referring to the
"enclosures" implemented in England in the
sixteenth-eighteenth centuries and then extended to
the rest of Europe in the nineteenth) to the entire
world. Its success would lead to the destruction of
the peasant societies that make up nearly half of humanity.
This destruction, now underway (and liberalism would
like to see the tempo accelerated), is already the major
cause of pauperization in the third world, which results
in emigration from the countryside to the urban slums.
But that is of little importance, since the minority
of so-called modernized rural producers who will survive
the massacre, and be subjected to the demands of agribusiness,
will produce the superprofits that the latter aspires
to capture. Nothing else matters.
3. Commercial "opening" within a context
of maximum deregulation.
This is a way of lifting all obstacles to the expansion
of a trade that is as unequal as it can possibly be
in conditions characterized by a polarized world development
and a growing concentration of power in the hands of
the transnationals that control the trade in raw materials
and agricultural products. The example of coffee illustrates
the disastrous social effects of this systematic choice.
Twenty years ago, all coffee producers were paid nine
billion dollars and all the consumers paid out twenty
billion for this same coffee. Today these two figures
are respectively six and thirty billion. The gap between
them is the gigantic profit margin captured by a handful
of oligopolistic intermediaries. It goes without saying
that in these conditions campaigns in favor of so-called
fair trade, even when their promoters are moved by the
most impeccable moral intentions, are not up to the
challenge. The correction of these deteriorating terms
of trade for the producers can only be obtained by the
political intervention of government authorities-both
national legislation and international negotiations
and legislation.
4. The equally uncontrolled opening up of capital
movement.
The fallacious pretext advanced is that deregulation
would make it possible to attract foreign capital. Yet
it is well known that China, which attracts more of
this capital than other countries, has maintained a
tighter control over foreign enterprises. Elsewhere,
direct foreign investments are targeted at little more
than pillaging natural resources. In fact, the IMF imposed
the opening of "capital accounts" in order
to facilitate the indebtedness of the United States,
allow speculative capital to engage in pillaging raids,
and subject the currencies of the South to systematic
undervaluation. This undervaluation, in turn, makes
it possible for local assets in these countries to be
purchased for next to nothing, to the evident advantage
of the transnational corporations.
5. States are forbidden in principle from interfering
in economic affairs.
Internally, the state is reduced to narrow police functions.
Internationally, it is reduced to guaranteeing debt
service, as the first (and almost exclusive!) priority
in public expenditures. The debt is hardly anything
more than a particularly primitive form of exploitation
and pillage.
This model is presented as being without an alternative
because it is imposed by the "objective" requirements
of globalization, which negate the power of national
states. In reality, the causal relation is just the
reverse: this particular form (among other possible
ones) of globalization is allotted the objective of
destroying the ability of nations and states to resist
the expansion of transnational capital.
That is why all these principles, openly adopted by
the writers of the MDGs, can only produce what I have
elsewhere described as apartheid on a world scale, reproducing
and deepening global polarization. As a counterpoint,
the restoration of a margin of autonomy for states and
the recognition of the legitimacy of state intervention
(the definition even of democracy) within a multipolar
perspective are the inescapable conditions required
to attain the social objectives proclaimed by the MDGs.
In fact, then, the social goals proclaimed by the MDGs
do not constitute the real goals of the whole exercise.
Their supposedly democratic packaging must, in turn,
be subject to a legitimate doubt. No democracy can possibly
take root if it does not support social progress, but,
instead, is associated with social regression. This
is undoubtedly the reason why the vapid term "governance"
is served up as an accompaniment to the empty rhetoric
of the MDGs.
The writers of the document appear to have paid no attention
to the facts. In the course of three decades following
the Second World War, the highest rate of growth known
in history took place, along with full employment and
notable upward social movement and, if not always a
reduction in inequality, the stabilization of structures
aimed at more equitable income distribution. But it
appears that because the systems in existence at that
time regulated markets, these procedures were "irrational"
and their results "bad." In the course of
the following three decades, accompanying the welcome
deregulation, there has been a collapse of growth, a
breathtaking increase in unemployment, precariousness,
and other manifestations of pauperization, and mounting
inequalities. Yet it appears that this system is nevertheless
better and more rational. That is undoubtedly because
in the preceding systems the rate of return for capital
was in the range of 4 to 8 percent and since then it
has doubled, moving to between 8 and 16 percent.
The New Doctrinaire Liberalism
The central question concerns the concept of development
maintained, explicitly or implicitly, in the Millennium
Development Goals. It can be formulated in this way:
In the successive globalized economic and political
systems of modern times, who was forced to adjust to
whom? The subjects in question can be class or social
groups, regions or nations.
In capitalist logic founded on private property, it
is capital (the firm) that commands and employs labor.
Workers do not have direct access to the means of production,
which are not used to their liking. In its global expansion,
capitalism is polarizing, that is, it is founded on
asymmetrical adjustment. The peripheries are shaped
to serve the model of accumulation in the dominant centers.
The ideology of capitalism ignores the concept of substantive
development, for it recognizes only expanding markets.
It is significant that the term "development"
appeared only after the Second World War (during the
colonial period, the exploitation of the colonies was
cynically spoken of), supported by the governments of
the Asian and African states that arose from national
liberation movements. In this sense, the 1955 conference
of Asian and African states at Bandung was the birth
place of the project of developing the new third world.
It was a multidimensional project of modernization:
of the economy (through industrialization), the society,
and the state. This modernization project appears within
a type of globalization and is not at all an invitation
to economic and cultural autarky. But it does imply
that in this process the North would adjust to the requirements
for the development of the South, development conceptualized
as a "catching up." Globalization in this
context is then recognized as having to be the result-beyond
the conflicts-of negotiations between partners who recognize
the divergence of their interests. In Latin America,
desarrollismo proposes an analogous model of development.
At each of these steps, capitalist globalization rests
on transnational social alliances, without which the
models of accumulation in the dominant centers and dominated
peripheries could not be reproduced. The "colonial"
model, challenged after the Second World War, involved
the management of the societies of the peripheries by
local comprador classes of a given type (merchant intermediaries,
large landowners). The new model resulting from decolonization
involved social reforms that deprive the older comprador
classes of their power and substitute hegemonic blocs
of a new type (national populist). This model is the
basis of the successes (not the failures!) of the economic
and social transformation of the third world in the
1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. But it was always fought-with
violence-by the powers of the imperialist triad.
The turnaround in the political conjuncture beginning
in the 1980s brought us back to former times, before
development, which has, in effect, been shown the door.
It is significant that the new language of the dominant
economics even abandons this term and substitutes "structural
adjustment," i.e., adjustment of the societies
and economies of the South to the requirements of the
pursuit of accumulation in the North. Simultaneously,
this turnaround in the balance of power to the benefit
of capital appears everywhere-in the North as well as
the South-as a strengthening of the subjection of labor
to capital. The new doctrinaire liberalism acknowledges
only expanding markets, not the deliberate political
transformation of social and economic structures.
Although imposed on the societies of the South with
extreme brutality, the new model (neocolonial some say,
but the term is poor-it is really a question of "paleo-colonial"
thought) had to be clothed in a discourse that gives
it the appearance of legitimacy. It was necessary to
reintroduce the word "development" (as in
the Millennium Development Goals) but empty it of all
meaning. This was done by reducing it to the fight against
poverty and for good governance.
A series of documents prepared this revision in the
meaning of words. The agencies set up to manage the
rest of the world (85 percent of the earth's population,
the dominated peripheries) by collective imperialism
(the triad) here fulfilled the functions expected of
them. The World Bank (which I call the Ministry of Propaganda
for the G7) produced, in this spirit, distressing documents
called Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP). The
IMF (the triad's collective colonial monetary authority)
imposed the priority of debt service, the debt itself
being the means of imposing structural adjustment. The
WTO, far from being an institution responsible for managing
world trade, is devoted to the objective of shaping
the productive systems of the peripheries to the needs
of the commercial expansion of the North, that is, to
operate like a collective ministry of colonies. The
European Union -lined up with the general offensive
of the imperialist triad-integrates the relations between
the EU and the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group
of States (ACP) within this same context, pursued literally
in the convention for the development of the ACP.
It could be asked why the governments of the countries
of the South have subscribed to all of these commandments
drafted in the imperialist centers. The response, in
general terms, is that we should look to the social
hegemonic blocs mentioned above that make possible the
reproduction of asymmetric globalization. There is a
new comprador class in the countries of the periphery
that actually derives its existence from the new model
of globalized liberalism. This comprador class participates
in the new government arrangements that followed the
erosion of the national populist models inspired by
Bandung.
To be more precise, it is possible to distinguish among
the reasons that led the South to "rally to liberalism."
There are those that are probably unique to so-called
emerging countries (China in the first place). In these
countries, the current governments live on illusions:
they think about "catching up" (through strong
growth) while they are constructed as the industrialized
peripheries of tomorrow, and dominated by the new monopolies
on the basis of which the imperialist centers reproduce
their domination (monopolies of technology, access to
the planet's natural resources, and weapons of mass
destruction). They think of building a "strong
and independent nation," but in that connection
must ignore that the United States prepares "preventative
wars" against them that will not allow them this
opportunity. History will undoubtedly be given the responsibility
to dissipate these illusions.
Here I will place more emphasis on the rationales offered
with respect to the most vulnerable peripheral regions,
Africa in particular. The discourse developed in this
regard by dominant thought is well known: Africa is
marginalized in the new globalization. This is by its
own fault, having sunk into an excessive nationalism
during the Bandung period. It can only get out of this
difficult situation if it accepts being "more integrated"
into globalization by a totally uncontrolled opening
that will allow foreign capital to "develop"
it. The miseries associated with this option, for which
there is no alternative, will only be "transitory"
and can be attenuated by programs that "fight against
poverty." This option will require, moreover, democratic
political management called "good governance."
This discourse abounds in contradictions and inadequacies.
Africa is no less integrated into globalization than
other regions, but it was and is differently integrated.
The forms of the new proposed integration, based on
agro-mineral specialization, are not new but are, on
the contrary, a return to the old (paleo-colonial).
These forms can only accentuate the pauperization and
exclusion of huge masses of the population, in particular
the peasants. But simultaneously and independently,
they facilitate the pillage of the continent's natural
resources (petroleum, minerals, and wood), which is
probably the principal objective of large transnational
capital in Africa. Foreign direct investments will come
to Africa for nothing else.
The responsibility of the current government teams-and
behind them the new comprador classes-should not be
excused. But that does not absolve the dominant forces
in the imperialist centers of the global system from
responsibility either.
The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD)
is undoubtedly part of the new liberal thinking, but
not with any great conviction it seems. It should be
remembered that originally behind this initiative was
the justified refusal of the racist "afro-pessimist"
discourse and the proclamation by Thabo Mbeki in 1998
that "Africans should and can appropriate modernity,"
a way of indicating the renaissance of Africa that he
called for. But Mbeki rushed into the same discourse
of specifying that that appropriation should be done
"in cooperation with the developed countries,"
ignoring, or pretending to ignore, that that has never
been the case up to now. NEPAD even includes in its
title the term "partnership," commonly used
for a long time by the European Union and adopted, in
turn, by the Millennium discourse of the United Nations.
In its content, NEPAD's founding document, New Partnership
for Africa's Development (NEPAD) is not, in fact, very
coherent.* It
identifies the bottlenecks that block development in
Africa, which it identifies in all aspects of reality
(infrastructure and energy, education and health, family
agriculture and environment, and modern technologies,
notably computer technology), giving the impression
that it takes into consideration the hostile practices
of world trade. But at the same time, the document lines
up with dominant liberal thought: it abandons the centrality
of industry that the Lagos Plan had, in its time and
with good reason, taken as the axis of development for
this least industrialized of the earth's continents.
It adheres to an agro-mineral model of growth (paleo-colonial),
and it adopts the discourse on the reduction of poverty.
Unquestionably even more serious, the NEPAD document
lines up with liberal thought on the discourse of "good
governance." This is a concept that is useful as
a way to dissociate democratic progress from social
progress, to deny their equal importance and inextricable
connection with one another, and to reduce democracy
to good management subjected to the demands of private
capital, an "apolitical" management by an
anodyne civil society, inspired by the mediocre ideology
of the United States. This discourse comes at the very
moment when the interruption in the construction of
the state (begun in the Bandung period) imposed by structural
adjustment has created, not conditions for a democratic
advance but, instead, conditions for the shift towards
the primacy of ethnic and religious identities (para-ethnic
and para-religious, in fact) that are manipulated by
local mafias, benefit external supporters, and often
degenerate into atrocious "civil wars" (in
fact conflicts between warlords). As Bernard Founou-Tchuigoua
argues, it is less a question of a North-South partnership
(here EU/ACP) than a new phase in asymmetrical structural
adjustment.
The NEPAD document's exposition, its hesitations or
anodyne character, acquires its meaning in this context.
For example, the wish to alleviate the debt is expressed,
but this is done precisely because the debt has fulfilled
its function of imposing structural adjustment. NEPAD
also proposes an "integrated" (Pan-African)
development, just like the EU, giving its preference
to arrangements with regional African groups. But, in
the end, this document remains, as far as its proposals
on trade, capital transfers, technology, and patents
are concerned, aligned with liberal dogmas.
I will say in conclusion that a system of this type
hardly has any future. Neither the MDGs nor NEPAD will
make it possible to attenuate the seriousness of the
problems and curb the resulting processes of political
and social involution. The legitimacy of governments
has disappeared. Thus conditions are ripe for the emergence
of other social hegemonies that make possible a revival
of development conceived as it should be: the indissociable
combination of social progress, democratic advancement,
and the affirmation of national independence within
a negotiated multipolar globalization. The possibility
of these new social hegemonies is already visible on
the horizon. I bet that at the end of 2015, no one will
propose a balance sheet of the achievements of the MDGs
or NEPAD, which will have been long forgotten.
Note:
*The NEPAD
framework document was adopted by the 37th Summit of
the Organization of African Unity in July 2001 at Lusaka,
Zambia and is available at:
http://www.nepad.org/2005/files/inbrief.php
Appendix: The UN Millennium Development Goals
Goal 1: Eradicate Extreme Hunger and Poverty
- Reduce by half the proportion of people living
on less than a dollar a day
- Reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer
from hunger
Goal 2: Achieve Universal Primary Education
- Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full
course of primary schooling
Goal 3: Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women
- Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary
education preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015
Goal 4: Reduce Child Mortality
- Reduce by two-thirds the mortality rate among
children under five
Goal 5: Improve Maternal Health
- Reduce by three quarters the maternal mortality
ratio
Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases
- Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS
- Halt and begin to reverse the incidence of malaria
and other major diseases
Goal 7: Ensure Environmental Substainability
- Integrate the principles of sustainable development
into country policies and programmes; reverse loss
of environmental resources
- Reduce by half the proportion of people without
sustainable access to safe drinking water
- Achieve significant improvement in lives of at
least 100 million slum dwellers, by 2020
Goal 8: Develop a Global Partnership for Development
with developing countries, develop and implement strategies
for decent and productive work for youth
- Develop further an open trading and financial system
that is rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory,
includes a commitment to good governance, development
and poverty reduction-nationally and internationally
- Address the least developed countries' special
needs. This includes tariff- and quota-free access
for their exports; enhanced debt relief for heavily
indebted poor countries; cancellation of official
bilateral debt; and more generous official development
assistance for countries committed to poverty reduction
- Address the special needs of landlocked and small
island developing States
- Deal comprehensively with developing countries'
debt problems through national and international measures
to make debt sustainable in the long term
- In cooperation with the developing countries, develop
decent and productive work for youth
- In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide
access to affordable essential drugs in developing
countries
- In cooperation with the private sector, make available
the benefits of new technologies-especially information
and communications technologies
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version 
Source: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/index.html
External links
Millennium Campaign (United Nations Millennium
Development Goals Campaign)
Millennium Campaign Youth Site (United Nations
Youth Millennium Development Goals Campaign)
Jubilee Zambia
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