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China has key role in global poverty battle

By Gao Zugui (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-09-25 10:16

The 63rd United Nations General Assembly has invited more than 100 heads of state and government leaders to a high-level meeting starting today to conduct the interim assessment of the implementation of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Premier Wen Jiabao will attend the high-level meeting and general debate to explain China's stance in the world's most important political arena.

Eight years ago, leaders attending the UN Millennium Assembly signed the United Nations Millennium Declaration on Sept 25, 2000, pledging to achieve "decisive progress" in reaching the MDGs of eradicating extreme poverty worldwide, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability, and developing a global partnership for development.

After eight years of hard work, definite progress has been made in the implementation of the plan. For example, many countries are now close to reaching the goal of universal primary education; and the number of people living below $1 a day has been reduced from 1.25 billion in 1990 to less than 1 billion.

However, as the UN Millennium Development Goals Report 2008 points out, alongside the successes are an array of goals and targets that are likely to be missed. For instance, poverty reduction has progressed fast in East Asia and South Asia but very slowly in the sub-Saharan region, while Chile appears to be the only Latin American nation likely to fully reach the MDGs by 2015.

Besides, soaring prices of food and energy resources, a global economic slowdown and developing nations' growing inflationary pressures, as well as more frequent extreme weather conditions and a higher incidence of natural disasters so far this year all posed serious challenges to efforts to achieve the MDGs. Rising food prices alone added 100 million people to the worldwide population in poverty, making the goal of eradicating poverty harder to reach.

During the past eight years China, as the largest developing country in the world, has made its unique contribution to global efforts to realize the MDGs. It has not only focused on economic development, with issues concerning agriculture, rural development and farmers always handled as priorities, but also carried out educational, cultural and environmental development in rural areas as part of the nationwide drive to advance scientific, harmonious and peaceful development. With one-fifth of the world's population, China, by simply handling its own development well, makes a major contribution to overall global progress.

China has achieved the goal of halving the number of its people in poverty ahead of schedule, offering the world a better chance to achieve the MDGs by 2015. Meanwhile, China has been assisting other developing nations, particularly in Africa, which is the key area in terms of efforts to realize the MDGs.

At the 2006 China-Africa summit held in Beijing, China announced an eight-point policy of assistance for African countries in their economic, cultural, educational and social development, including writing off a total of 10.9 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) in debts owed by 31 African nations on the list of least-developed debtor countries and signing 27 framework agreements on low-interest or interest-free loans. All these measures have been implemented in an orderly fashion.

Today, take a look at the world from the podium of the UN's high-level meeting on the Millennium Development Goals, and you will see that many developing nations still have some way to go toward meeting the goals, but these developed countries are also faced with emerging economic and social problems.

The US subprime crisis continues to evolve as it spreads across the country's financial system and threatens to become a global financial crisis. European countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain remain troubled by their bearish economies, which make reform efforts all the more difficult.

Western society's confidence in globalization has plummeted, while a sense of failure is growing. This proves developed countries are challenged by development issues which are different from those faced by developing nations. More importantly, this also shows the universal significance of development as the theme of our time, as well as the complexity and challenges brought by the ever-changing situation.

The new situation requires all nations and regions of the world to reexamine the direction and pattern of development for the sake of common sustainable development, global security and stability, while combining efforts to find the best way to solve the problems with a stronger sense of urgency and political resolve.

For a start, developing nations need to figure out the path of development best suited to their own national conditions rather than blindly following blindly "prescriptions" from others. Next, the international community should carry out ever more proactively broad, pragmatic and effective cooperation in the spirit of genuine partnership in global development to drive economic globalization toward a balanced and universally beneficial future.

Though burdened by their own problems at the moment, developed countries remain obligated to reverse the downward spiral of their assistance to needy countries and deliver on their promise made at the 2005 G8 summit to increase annual official development aid to $50 billion by 2010, and raise overseas aid as a proportion of their gross domestic product from the current 0.35 percent to 0.7 percent as set in the MDGs in order to provide developing nations with even firmer support.

In this era of globalization and in a world where interdependence is growing by the day, helping other countries means saving yourself.

In the meantime, it is all the more necessary for developing nations to join hands and help one another, working hard to expand the scope and mechanism of cooperation so as to make south-south cooperation a better supplement to north-south cooperation.

During this process China will, in the spirit of being ever more responsible to itself as well as the whole world, continue to play its unique yet significant role as a constructive force in advancing the strategic objective of building a world of lasting peace and common prosperity.

The author Gao Zugui is director of the Center of Strategic Studies, China Institute of Contemporary International Relations.