By suzannei on August 25, 2010
Tags: international
Staff from the Quaker United Nations Office in Geneva report
The forthcoming Millenium Development Goal Review Summit has prompted an enormous amount of activity by groups and governments around the world. Mostly missing from this, however, has been attention to armed violence – a key factor that is undermining MDG progress. Some 740,000 men, women and children are thought to die each year from the effects of armed violence. But the impact extends much further than that.
In a 2009 report, the UN Secretary General stated that “Armed violence not only destroys lives, it also damages infrastructure and property, limits the delivery of public services, undermines investment in human, social and economic capital, and contributes to unproductive expenditures on security services. Armed violence undermines development and constitutes an impediment to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.”
Each of the MDGs is affected by the pervasive reality of armed violence. For example, poverty reduction (MDG1) is undermined as victims are often households’ primary income generator and because violence disrupts production and distribution of food. Armed violence affects child mortality (MDG4). Under-fives are often the first to die when armed violence reduces availability of necessities like food, shelter, clean water and healthcare. Violence against women is associated with an increased risk of unintended pregnancy and armed violence disrupts access to skilled birth attendants. This hinders MDG5 – improving maternal health.
But this relationship also works both ways. Not only can strategies to reduce armed violence support progress on the MDGs, but poverty reduction can also work to reduce the impact of armed violence on individuals and communities. For example, good street lighting can inhibit crime, thus making shoppers feel safer and economic investment more likely.
That there is little recognition of this critical “cross-cutting” issue as part of the preparations for September’s summit is, on reflection, rather astonishing. Despite this, recent years have seen a growing understanding of these relationships. QUNO has been working on this for the last three years. It serves as the focal point for civil society engagement with what is called the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development, a diplomatic initiative by 108 states to take steps “to reduce the global burden of armed violence by 2015.” (See www.genevadeclaration.org). This has drawn QUNO into engagement with the MDG Review Summit process as we seek, with a number of other organisations and key states, to see that an armed violence lens gets some attention at the Review Summit itself. There are some signs in these final weeks that these efforts may yet produce some language on armed violence in the Summit Outcome Document currently being drafted.
As part of our ongoing work QUNO is also calling upon organisations working in areas such as development, health and education to examine how they could incorporate this critical dimension. A website www.violenceanddevelopment.org has been set up as a tool in this regard. This work is building strong foundations to ensure that international, national, and non-governmental actors alike pay more attention to the links between armed violence and development in their work in the period between now and 2015.
Contact: David Atwood datwood@quno.ch
This article appears in issue 17 of QPSW newsletter Better World Economics
2 Comments
An excellent point about violence, which will be quoted, Suzanne.
At UNA meeting at Birmingham Council House [June 2011, one of several contributors,
Rianne ten Veen, of Green Creation, examined assertions made about the MDGs:
Too ambitious?
In 1996, the Rome Declaration on World Food Security aimed to halve the number of hungry people by 2015, but MDG 1 merely aims to halve the proportion of people in developing countries who suffer from hunger and has a baseline of 1990 instead of what would be a more ambitious 1996.
Too expensive?
The estimated cost of achieving the MDGs is $189bn but:
» Annual fossil fuel subsidies: $312bn
» Iraq War: $648bn
» Wall Street bailout: $8.5trn
Lagging because of lack of effort from poor countries?
No; because of the lack of a level playing field in terms of debt, trade and investment.The amount of debt relief is often deducted from the aid budget. Only 1% of foreign direct investment benefits the poorest and 82% FDI goes into the extractive industries.
The role of the WTO was questioned by Malcolm Harper – is it really acting in the interest of poor countries? Rianne points out that the Millennium Declaration had fair trade as its ambition, but MDG8 offers more obvious advantages for foreign multinationals, and trade liberalisation.
A brief case study of Argentina was given to illustrate the uneven playing field.The ICSID Convention is a multilateral treaty formulated by the Executive Directors of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank). ICSID’s website reveals that, in all but one of the first fifty pending cases, wealthy corporations are bringing charges against small developing countries – 24 against Argentina. The MNCs usually ‘win’.
MDG7 on environmental sustainability appears to relate only to poor countries, though the rich countries are responsible for the high greenhouse gas emissions and the poor suffer most of the consequences. Rianne concluded that Millennium Consumption Goals (MCG) could help make our development path more sustainable, by focusing on the 1.4 billion people in the richest 20 percentile of the world’s population. They consume over 80% of global output, or 60 times more than the poorest 20 percentile. Instead of viewing the rich as a problem, they should be persuaded to contribute to the solution.
The blog: http://ungalink.org.uk/category/hr/
Quakernomics – I like it! Thanks Barbara for showing me the way. & I did enjoy the UNA B’ham event. In peace, Rianne