The First United Nations Millennium Development Goal: A cause for celebration?

The first and most prominent United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG-1) has been widely celebrated. Yet, four reflections should give us pause. Although retaining the idea of "halving extreme poverty by 2015", MDG-1 in fact sets a much less ambitious target than had been agreed to at the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome: that the number of poor should be reduced by 19% (rather than 50%), from 1094 million to 883.5 million. Tracking the $1/day poverty headcount, the World Bank uses a method that may paint far too rosy a picture of the evolution of extreme poverty. Shrinking the problem of extreme poverty, which now causes some 18 million deaths annually, by 19% over 15 years is grotesquely underambitious in view of resources available and the magnitude of the catastrophe. Finally, this go-slow approach is rendered even more appalling by the contribution made to the persistence of severe poverty by the affluent countries and the global economic order they impose.