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September 26, 2008
Religious leaders convene in New York as U.N. reviews Millennium Development Goals
Rising oil and food prices jeopardize gains of recent years, report concludes
NEW YORK — Seventy-five Jewish, Islamic and mainline, Pentecostal and evangelical Christian religious leaders met in New York Thursday (Sept. 25) to review the 2008 report from the United Nations on progress toward reaching its Millennium Development Goals (MDG) for greatly reducing extreme poverty worldwide by 2015.
The group — which included the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Sara Lisherness, director of Compassion, Peace and Justice; Ruth Farrell, director of the Presbyterian Hunger Program; and Joel Hanisek, director of the church’s U.N. Office — reviewed the progress report and consulted and prayed on the role of religious communities in responding to the continuing global hunger and poverty crises.
The interfaith consultation took place while more than 100 heads of state gather at the United Nations to assess the implementation of the goals that they agreed to in 2000.
“This is the first such gathering of leaders from the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish faiths to discuss the development goals in the context of the continuing global hunger crisis,” said Rev. David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World. “Through this consultation, we hope to encourage and embolden religious leaders in their efforts to engage their members to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, especially in ending hunger and poverty.”
The MDG report, released earlier this month, states that the strong and sustained progress in reducing extreme poverty is now being undercut by higher prices, particularly food and oil, and global economic slowdown.
The report was written and released before the Wall Street meltdown of recent weeks, a financial fiasco that is certain to exacerbate the problems, experts say.
“We have the resources — the ability to come up with $700 billion [for the Wall Street bailout] demonstrates that,” Farrell told the Presbyterian News Service in a Sept. 26 interview. “Do we have the will? We can end poverty. Do we have the will to re-order our values to do so?”
Farrell said she was in a group that clicked its fingers every three seconds, symbolizing the frequency with which children around the world die of poverty-related causes.
Updated estimates by the World Bank indicate that the number of poor people in the world has fallen from 1.9 billion in 1981 to 1.4 billion in 2005, putting the world on track to achieve the first Millennium Development Goal of halving extreme poverty from 1990 levels by 2015.
However, higher food prices threaten to push an estimated 100 million people back into poverty, reversing this progress. This is particularly true for countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia, currently regions with the highest numbers of people living in extreme poverty.
“The largely benign development environment that has prevailed since the early years of this decade, and that has contributed to the successes to date, is now threatened, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon declared in the introduction to the MDG report. “The economic slowdown will diminish the incomes of the poor. The food crisis will raise the number of hungry people in the world and push more millions into poverty. Climate change will have a disproportionate impact on the poor.”
Last week, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization reported that in 2007 the number of people suffering from hunger increased by 75 million people. It estimates that 923 million people are chronically hungry.
The MDG report notes progress in such areas as primary school enrollment and gender parity in schools, reductions in death rates from measles and increased immunizations, availability of clean water, increased access to essential medicines and increased spending on social services in many developing countries.
Numerous challenges remain, the report acknowledges, including:
- More than half a million mothers in developing countries die in childbirth or from pregnancy complications each year;
- About one-quarter of the developing world children are undernourished;
- Almost half of the developing world population still lack basic sanitation services;
- More than one-third of the growing urban population in the developing world are living in slums; and
- Almost two-thirds of employed women in developing countries hold vulnerable jobs as self-employed or unpaid family workers.
Hunger and poverty are on the rise, putting at risk the Millennium Development Goals, at a time when governments are running out of resources and options,” said Beckmann. “Our responses to the continuing crisis have not been commensurate to the challenge.”
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