By Jonathan Steele and Charlotte Denny
GuardianJuly 24, 2002
Global progress on reducing poverty has slowed to a "snail's pace" and the international goal of halving the share of the world's population living on less than Dollars 1 (63p) a day by 2015 is likely to be missed, the United Nations will warn today.
In its annual survey, which has become the most authoritative study of human development, the UN says that at the current rate of progress it will be 130 before the world is free of hunger.
Calling for an end to rich countries' dominance of the institutions of global financial governance, the UN Development Programme says that decisions about how to manage globalisation must become more democratic. The countries' control over the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank must be reduced, says the report, suggesting an end to the veto rights of the five permanent members of the UN security council. It says the poorest countries must also have a bigger voice in the World Trade Organisation.
Such calls, along with demands for the international financial institutions to open up their procedures, have become commonplace among prominent non-governmental aid groups. But this is the first time concrete steps to reform the IMF and World Bank have been endorsed by a UN agency.
"Powerful states are always going to have a major role in global decision-making," says Mark Malloch Brown, the administrator of the programme, which commissions the report. "But there is plenty of room to give poorer countries a real say."
One method the report suggests is increasing the weight of the "basic" votes in the IMF - one is allocated to every country - compared with the other votes given to countries based on economic size. At the moment the "basic" votes count for only 3% of the total.
Another suggestion is giving developing countries more seats on the executive boards of the IMF and World Bank.
The report uses cautious language to attack the convention whereby an American leads the bank and a western European the IMF, saying the selection process "needs to be opened and perhaps made somewhat more substantive regarding the candidates' views". It points out that vetoes by the security council's permanent members have become very rare and says they are seen as "fundamentally undemocratic".
A call for a UN economic security council to act as a watchdog over the financial institutions was repeated.
The extent of development in the first post cold war decade, when neo-liberal policies of urging countries to privatise held sway, was also the subject of criticism.
"Having figures for the year 2000 gave us a chance to look at the decade as a whole and the picture is less rosy than when you take longer-term trends over 30 years. We have seen a process of increasing fragmentation and division in the world," Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, the chief author, says.
Development is still uneven in the first years of the new millennium. Progress towards the goals proclaimed by world leaders at the millennium summit is poor. The target of halving the number of people in extreme poverty by the year 2015 has been so slow in many countries that it already looks unattainable, the report says.
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