Make Poverty History

Union Aid Abroad – APHEDA, the overseas humanitarian aid arm of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) supports the international Make Poverty History campaign. The aim of this campaign is to put pressure on governments around the world to take action for global poverty, especially in before and during the recent G8 meeting in Scotland and the UN summit 14-16 September 2005 in New York and in the lead up to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong 13-18 December 2005.

According to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), "this year, trade unions are joining with others all around the world in the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, demanding that the grand promises made by governments at the United Nations and elsewhere should be put into action urgently. Creating decent jobs for all has never been more important, as divisions between the haves and the have-nots in the global economy grow ever greater. One billion people are unemployed, underemployed or working poor: 60% of these are women. In the Global Call, we demand debt relief to the poorest countries, greatly increased development aid and justice in the global trading system."

More than a billion people live on less than US$1 per day. Union Aid Abroad, in conjunction with other members of the Australian Council for International Development, is campaigning for Australia to make a proper contribution to the goal of halving global poverty by 2015. According to the non-government and non-profit overseas aid agencies, doing our fair share means:

• Significantly increasing Australian government aid towards the internationally-agreed target of 0.7% of our national wealth (more than double the current level of 0.26%)
• Focusing our aid on basic rights such as education, health, clean water, and sanitation for the poorest people
• Cancelling the debts owed to us by poor countries who can't adequately support their own people while they have to repay the rich
• Working for trade justice to help the poor trade their way out of poverty
• Respecting human rights in the workplace, so people have decent jobs with a living wage.

Millennium Development Goals: The context of this campaign is that governments, including Australia, signed on to a set of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), at the United Nations conference in 2000.

The goals are:

Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger: halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day; halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger

Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education: ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to 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 in all levels of education no later than 2015

Goal 4: Reduce child mortality: reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate

Goal 5: Improve maternal health: reduce by three-quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio

Goal 6: Combat HIV, malaria, and other communicable diseases: have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and the incidence of malaria and other major diseases

Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability: halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation; have achieved, by 2020, a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers

Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development: develop further an open, rule-based, predictable, non-discriminatory trading and financial system; deal comprehensively with developing countries' debt; develop decent and productive work especially for youth; provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries; make available the benefits of new technologies.

Are these goals enough?

To meet the goal of halving poverty by 2015 requires:- Firstly, increased aid. It requires a doubling of aid by donor countries like Australia. Union Aid Abroad supports these admirable goals, but recognises that these slogans cover over some key issues.

Firstly, the aid budget. Just increasing the aid budget is not enough, since most of the government aid budget of $2 billion is contracted to a handful of high profit-taking Australian companies (and now key American companies registered in Australia as well). The real question is how aid is delivered, and whether it helps to build societies in which workers, farmers, women and poor people can organise to defend their rights.

Secondly, debt cancellation. The Global Unions, as part of the Global Call for Action Against Poverty (www.whiteband.org), have renewed their call for the Group of 8 (G8) powerful industrial countries to cancel the debt of the poorest countries. A child dies every three seconds from a preventable disease, and yet the world's poorest countries spend more on debt repayments - USD$100 million a day - than they do on health. "Without urgent action on debt cancellation, the obscene poverty that kills 50,000 people every day will continue," said ICFTU General Secretary Guy Ryder. "We strongly believe that now is the time for G8 governments to truly act against poverty before it scars several future generations and condemns millions more to a hopeless and miserable form of poverty".

Thirdly, good governance. Debt cancellation and increased aid to governments can also be misused by local elites and corrupt, repressive governments, so it is essential that all types of debt relief and increased aid are geared to improve basic health, education and services for the poorest. To some extent, corrupt governments are kept in power by western companies who either buy their raw materials, sell them arms, or bank their stolen funds. Some positive steps that Australia could immediately make to combat corruption would be to clearly and unambiguously support the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, to support the Publish What You Pay initiative for Australian companies operating overseas, and to support the Extractive Industries Transparency initiative.

In countries where high levels of corruption exists, it is almost always condoned or even initiated by that countries' political, military and business leadership. Union Aid Abroad - APHEDA believes that "bottom-up" initiatives are the best way to combat corruption. By strengthening the voice of democratic and independent community organisations, an independent media and an independent judiciary, civil society will be in a stronger position to speak out against corruption. The poor, who suffer the most from corruption, will have the power to fight it.

Fourthly, fair trade. The MDGs assume that trade-related growth is alleviating hunger and need, and that trading systems are becoming more fair for "developing countries", but the reality is often the opposite. World trade is also exacerbating impoverishment of millions by consigning them to the role of producing commodities that cannot be sold at decent prices and that international patents keep prices of goods from industrialised countries high. Even if commodities such as copper, coffee and cotton are sold at reasonable prices on the international market, the owners of mines and farms may not reward their workers properly. The free trade agenda is often used by the biggest corporations to privatise infrastructures and take over markets in the most exploited countries.

Fifthly, human rights. The MDGs ignore the questions of self-determination, sovereignty and democracy: who decides on ownership of resources? Unions around the world see the development of democracy, political freedom, and democratic control of resources and the economy as crucial, and in particular the right to organise to struggle for decent wages. People have a right to decent incomes from their labour (wage work or farming) as well as health care and schooling. Aid can be more than charity for the poor and victims of conflict, it can help shape a fairer, healthy, democratic and environmentally sustainable world.

Sixth, decent work. The key agenda of the union movement all over the world is that of decent work and the creation of sustainable jobs. No progress can be made against poverty, in fighting HIV, in ensuring access to education and health, if adult women and men cannot get skills training and worthwhile employment that pays a fair wage. Mass unemployment and underemployment, the marginalising of the majority of the workforce (and particularly women) in "developing" countries into the informal and seasonal sectors of the urban and rural economy, and the loss of livelihoods in primary production, contributes to the polarisation of the world into the prosperous elite and the impoverished majority.

According to the ICFTU, "extreme poverty is linked to a shortage of jobs and low wages - for example, of a total of 550 million working poor in the world, (paid less than $1 a day) 60% are women, a further 78 million women are unemployed - this acerbates the "feminisation of poverty". These women face a lifetime of poor working conditions and severe exploitation. Therefore, the anti-poverty alliance calls on G7 governments - who together hold more than half of the voting power in the IMF and World Bank - to properly integrate the issue of decent work into the international financial institutions' agenda, as this is the only sustainable avenue out of poverty for millions of people across the world."

© Union Aid Abroad - APHEDA 2003.
Site proudly produced by Social Change Online

Last Modified: Wednesday, 16-Nov-2005 16:05:18 EST
This page: http://apheda.org.au/news/1121210860_9553.html