World Summit on Sustainable Development Department of Public Information - News and Media Services Division - New York
	Johannesburg, South Africa 26 August-4 September 2002	29 August 2002

PRESS CONFERENCE BY SECRETARY-GENERAL'S SPECIAL ADVISER ON MILLENNIUM GOALS   If the rich world, with its $25 trillion annual economy, put aside just one penny of every $10 of income, a fund of $25 billion would be created, which would save 8 million lives each year, and "that was a war worth waging", Jeffrey Sachs, Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General on the Implementation of the Millennium Development Goals, said today at a Summit press conference. Dr. Sachs, who was also director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, said the Summit was taking place in a context in which the world had already agreed, and agreed again, and reconfirmed its intentions to fight global poverty to the extent of halving absolute poverty by 2015. The Millennium Development Goals were the eight major targets of poverty reduction agreed by 189 leaders at the Millennium Summit in 2000. Those were specific, quantified, time-limited goals for reducing poverty, hunger, disease and environmental degradation by 2015. Every rich country in the world had signed on to them, as had virtually all of the rest of the globe. Detailed goals were already on the books, to an important extent, he said, adding, however, "we were not on track to meeting those goals". The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which was the 'scorekeeper' for the United Nations system on monitoring the Millennium Development Goals, had confirmed that for dozens of countries in the world, "we are seriously off track in addressing hunger, disease, environmental degradation". At the United Nations, he had been asked what single word might apply to the Summit, and he had answered, "accountability" of governments for commitments already made. He said that today was a day in which various new partnerships were being announced. Those were to everyone's benefit by engaging a broad part of global society. Indeed, every study had found that it would take a lot more money from the rich countries to help the poor countries meet those goals. So, as everyone listened today to the new partnerships, they should ask whether the rich world was also committing the financial resources at the magnitude that was realistic, systematic and sustained. The answer to that question was a key issue for the Summit. Noting that the business sector was not keen on the Millennium Development Goals because those set at Rio had not been attained, a correspondent asked why that sector would sign onto new ones. Mr. Sachs said it was ironic for the rich and powerful groups in the world to say they were not interested in those goals because they had failed before, especially since they failed largely because those groups with the means to do so had failed to come through. They had signed up to those lofty declarations, and if they had done so in complete cynicism, they should explain that to the rest of the world. If they had taken those commitments seriously, and he thought they had, they needed, on moral grounds, to follow through with the means to achieve them. Asked if the Summit would be an exercise in futility without any new financial commitments, he said it was his personal view that without new financial commitments, "this would be a great disappointment". Spokespeople in rich countries claimed that these meetings were just 'talking shops'. That was a self-fulfilling prophecy of the rich countries and not a flaw of the United Nations. To further questions about how realistic was the expectation of extra money and what would be the impact of United States' policy on the Summit, of course, it was realistic to expect more from the rich world, in the macroeconomic sense. When the United States was spending 0.1 of 1 per cent of its gross national product (GNP), or one-seventh of a widely accepted international norm, then, yes it was realistic to expect more. Also regarding the United States, he said he was uneasy that there had been two discussions in the world this week -- most of the world was in Johannesburg to discuss the urgency of sustainable development, and the United States in Washington was discussing a potential new war against Iraq. Those were two dialogues that were not intersecting. The world needed to discuss a common agenda. Asked if he had taken into account the real downturn in the rich countries' economies, he said that when the United States was rich and booming, it was giving little money; when it was in recession, it was giving little; when the stock market had raised wealth by more than $12 trillion, it was giving little; and with a budget surplus, it gave little. When there were ample resources in the budget, that Government and the political system gave a huge tax cut to the American people, and had not chosen to meaningfully address even a small amount of the issues of the Summit. No downturn, which was deemed to be modest, in a country with an average annual income of $36,000 per year, or roughly 100 times the income of the countries in this region, and with a $10 trillion economy, could change the fact that a lot more could be done to address the problems central to this Summit, he said. So, for all of those reasons, the answer was emphatically yes, much more could be done. That was not something that the rich should do for the poor. It should be done to ensure that they lived in a world of growing prosperity, and not danger. To think they could address terrorism in a world of poverty and stress and disease was incorrect.   Press Conferences Summit News