Progress of the MDGs’ Targets on Global Poverty Reduction

According to the World Bank (2011d, p. 15), ―75 percent of countries in East Asia and Pacific, 75 percent of countries in Europe and Central Asia, 59 percent of countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are on target to achieve the MDGs‘ targets on poverty reduction‖ by 2015; also, ―19 percent of countries in South Asia and 35 percent of countries in SSA are on target to achieve the MDGs‘ targets on poverty reduction‖ by 2015. On the basis of the recently updated projections, the overall poverty rate is still expected to decline below 15 percent by 2015, indicating that the MDGs‘ targets on poverty reduction can be met. This is as a result of the fastest growth and sharpest reductions in poverty consistent in Eastern Asia, particularly in China, where the poverty rate is expected to fall to below 5 percent by 2015 and India where

poverty rates are projected to fall from 51 percent in 1990 to about 22 percent in 2015. Between 1990 and 2005 in these countries, the number of people living in extreme poverty reduced by about 455 million, and expected to join their ranks by 2015 is an additional 320 million people (World Bank, 2011d).

The first target of the MDGs on poverty reduction which has to do with halving between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than US$1 a day; this used to be the common international poverty line in the past. Poverty line or threshold refers to the minimum level of income considered appropriate in a particular country (Ravallion, 1992). The international poverty line was adjusted to US$1.25 at the 2005 Purchasing-Power Parity (PPP) by the World Bank in 2008 (Ravallion, Chen and Sangraula, 2009). In the developing countries, the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day was reduced from about 1.8 billion in 1990 to 1.4 billion in 2005 courtesy of the ―robust growth in the first half of the decade.‖ The

―corresponding poverty rate‖ simultaneously ―dropped from 46 percent to 27 percent.‖ The 2008 economic and financial crisis of the Global North and the World Bank projection that it was expected to push an estimated 64 million more people into extreme poverty in 2010 notwithstanding, ―current trends suggest that the momentum of growth in the developing world remains strong enough to sustain the progress needed to reach the global poverty-reduction target.‖ As adjusted by the World Bank in 2008 however, even if these positive trends continued, in 2015, roughly 920 million people would still be living under the international poverty line of $1.25 a day (UN, 2011a, 6-7). According to World Bank (2011d, pp. 18-19), 17

‗lagging countries‘ across the globe are close to the target of halving the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015; 67 are far from the target of halving the proportion of people in

extreme poverty by 2015; while 96 are off the target of the target of halving the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015.‖

In relation to achieving the second target of the MDGs on poverty reduction which has to do with achieving full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people ―the employment-to-population ratio dropped from 56.8 percent in 2007 to 55.4 percent in 2009, with a further drop to 54.8 percent in 2010‖ in the Global North. Without capturing the Caucasus and Central Asia and Eastern Asia in the Global South, ―the estimated employment-to-population ratio in 2010 has changed little since 2007.‖ Based on the available data, the estimate of ―the vulnerable employment rate remained roughly the same between 2008 and 2009, both in developing and developed regions;‖ also, the rate of vulnerable employment increased in ―Sub-Saharan Africa and Western Asia.‖ Going by the figures captured by the International Labour Organization (ILO), ―one in five workers and their families worldwide were living in extreme poverty (on less than $1.25 per person per day) in 2009 which ―represents a sharp decline in poverty from a decade earlier, but also a flattening of the slope of the working poverty incidence curve beginning in 2007.‖ This 2009 estimated rate represents ―1.6 percentage points higher than the rate projected on the basis of the pre-crisis trend.‖ Though, "a crude estimate, it amounts to about 40 million more working poor at the extreme $1.25 level in 2009 than would have been expected on the basis of pre-crisis trends‖ (UN, 2011a, pp. 8-10).

The last target of the MDGs on poverty reduction has to do with halving, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger. According to HTF (2003, p. 33), hunger is ―a condition, in which people lack the basic food intake to provide them energy and nutrients for fully productive lives.‖ Food poverty refers to the inability to acquire or consume an adequate quality or sufficient quality of food in socially acceptable ways, or the uncertainty that

one will be able to do so (Riches, 1997). It has been consistently revealed by research that

―nutritional status is related to income; that is, the poorer you are, the worse your diet‖ (Dowler, Turner and Dobson, 2001, p. 2). In other words, ―those who are better off are more likely to eat healthier diets than those who are poorer, to grow better infants and young children, and to be a healthier body size when adult‖ (Dowler, 2008, p. 34). UN (2011b) reports that in the developing world, ―the proportion of people who went hungry in 2005-2007 remained stable at 16 percent, despite significant reductions in extreme poverty.‖ On the basis of this trend including the economic crisis and rising food prices, ―it will be difficult to meet the hunger-reduction target in many regions of the developing world;‖ and going by the flows noticed in South-Eastern Asia, Eastern Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, ―they are likely to meet the hunger-reduction target by 2015;‖ though, there exist wide disparities among countries in these regions (p. 11). As for SSA, on the basis of the current trends, it ―will be unable to meet the hunger-reduction target by 2015‖ (p. 12). According to UN (2010, p. 1), there is decline in the proportion of people suffering from hunger; this is however at an ―unsatisfactory pace;‖

and irrespective of the fact that the number of people globally suffering from malnutrition and hunger has reduced since the early 1990s, ―progress has stalled since 2000-2002.‖ UN (2010) further reports that the figure captured by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as the estimate of the number of people who will suffer chronic hunger in 2011 is "925 million, down from 1.023 billion in 2009, but still more than the number of undernourished people in 1990 (about 815 million)." Approximately "one in four children under the age of five was underweight in the developing world, down from almost one in three in 1990" and "between 1990 and 2009, the proportion of children under age five who are underweight declined from 30 percent to 23 percent in developing regions‖ (p. 13). As for Eastern Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and

the Caucasus and Central Asia, they ―have reached or nearly reached the MDGs‘ target, and South-Eastern Asia and Northern Africa are on track" (p. 13). Overall, this is not sufficient to reach this MDGs‘ target on poverty reduction by 2015. In developing regions, "the proportion of underweight children under five declined from 31 percent to 26 percent between 1990 and 2008;" this is with particular success in Eastern Asia, notably China (UN, 2010, p. 1). These improvements notwithstanding, progress is currently not fast enough to reach the MDGs‘ target, and particular focus is required in Southern Asia, a region that accounts for almost half the world‘s undernourished children. In these regions, children in rural areas are almost two times as likely to be underweight as those in urban centres. For the developing world, the figure captured as the new estimate of the average prevalence of undernourishment in 2006-2008 is 15 percent.

If compared to the figure captured by the estimate for 2005-2007, it is slightly different. Going by this, it follows that the average number of people suffering from lack of adequate food over the three years remained discomfortingly high at 840 million worldwide (UN 2011a, pp. 11-13;

UNDP, 2011). According to World Bank (2011d, pp. 18-19), 9 ―lagging countries‖ across the globe are close to the target of halving the number of people suffering from hunger by 2015; 35 are far from the target of halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger by 2015; while 60 are off the target of halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger by 2015.

Coming to the overall poverty rates, the level of achievements recorded in the poverty reduction targets of the MDGs is as a result of extraordinary success in Asia, mostly East Asia.

The poverty rate in East Asia fell from nearly 60 percent to under 20 percent over a 25-year period. By 2015, poverty rates are expected to fall to around 5 percent in China and 24 percent in India (UN, 2010). In SSA, little progress has been made to alleviate extreme poverty; here, the poverty rate has declined only slightly, from 58 to 51 percent between 1990 and 2005. SSA,

Western Asia and parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia are the few regions not expected to achieve the MDGs‘ poverty reduction targets (UN, 2010). On the basis of the recent economic growth performance and forecasted trends, the extreme poverty rate SSA is expected to fall below 36 percent (World Bank, 2011d). Some other pieces of information suggest that very few of the MDGs will be achieved in the region within the stipulated time (Rispel and Nkibua, 2011).

According to McGillivray (2008), UN (2009a), and UNECA (2005), with the current trend, SSA is not in the right position to attain the MDGs goals for the reduction of extreme poverty and hunger. Corroborating this, Beaglehole and Bonita (2008) state that, the data available as at June 2007, suggest that none of the MDGs would be achieved by SSA. The region has been argued to be a most off-track on the MDGs as it lags behind the rest of the developing world on most of the MDGs; the Millennium Project estimates that a typical country in SSA will need to significantly increase public investments to approximately US$75-US$80 per capita by 2006, rising to US$125-US$160 by 2015, in order to meet the goals. In a typical rural community, the required investments average US$110 per capita/year over 5-10 year period (DCPP, 2007;

Chovwen et al., 2009). However, Easterly (2009) sees the attainment of the MDGs by SSA from a different angle; though, he pitches his tent with other authors that SSA could not meet the MDGs targets by 2015 but he does not see the region as a complete failure as it is often presented. According to him, ―a series of arbitrary choices made in defining success or failure as achieving numerical targets for the MDGs made attainment of the MDGs less likely in Africa than in other regions even when its progress was in line with or above historical or contemporary experience of other regions;‖ therefore, ―the statement that Africa will miss all the MDGs thus has the unfortunate effect of making African successes look like failures‖ (p. 26).

All the preceding arguments suggesting SSA‘s inability of meeting the MDGs notwithstanding, UNECA (2014) confirms that over the past decades, there has been continuous decline in the number of Africans living in extreme poverty ―in spite of the excruciating impact of the recent food, fuel, financial and Eurozone crises‖ and that the proportion of people living in extreme poverty ―in Southern, East, Central and West Africa as a group decreased from 56.5 percent in 1990 to 48.5 percent in 2010, an 8 percentage point reduction‖ (p. 12).