In 2005, there were still supposedly about 1.4 billion people living below $1.25 per day, down from 1.8 billion in 1990. Without China, to which most of the reduction is ascribed, the number actually increased by 36 million. Rising food prices and the global economic crisis that erupted in 2008 is pushing millions more into absolute poverty. The share of the poor in the world’s income is also declining. In 1990, the ratio of the per capita income in the richest 20 countries to that in the poorest 20 was $42 to one dollar; in 2005, it was $59 to one dollar.

The UN claims that universal primary education is on its way to being achieved. But nearly half of all secondary school-age children in developing countries are known to be out of school, especially those from impoverished families in remote rural areas where public schools, teachers and other basic social services are not provided by governments due to fiscal tightening or austerity imposed by imperialist financial institutions. Monopoly capitalists are also pushing for the privatization and commercialization of education in order to profit from building schools, charging fees and churning out students adapted to the needs of multinational corporations.

The UN admits to making little headway in redressing gender discrimination, whether this be in the realm of education, employment, incomes and most especially in terms of maternal health. As of 2005, a woman in the third world dies of complications related to pregnancy every minute while more than 1 million infants are left motherless every year. Some 8.8 million children under the age of five die every year — 13 times more likely in poor countries compared to advanced capitalist countries.

Malnutrition and preventable diseases due to lack of access to health care, water and sanitation are the primary causes. As in the case of education, the priority given to servicing foreign debts and privatization has eroded most third world government’s capacities to provide these basic services and deploy health personnel where they are needed most. Monopoly control of giant pharmaceutical companies over medicines, medical technologies and medical research, reinforced by so-called intellectual property rights protection provided to them by governments and the WTO, also undermine efforts at combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases that are rampant in poor countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

While the MDGs include environmental sustainability in the wishlist, the anarchic, wasteful and destructive capitalist production for profit has now pulled our world close to the brink of ecological disaster. The massive dumping of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere by the operations of monopoly capitalist firms in the energy industries, manufacturing, transportation, industrial agriculture, mining, construction, etc., is now generating climatic changes that are causing massive devastation and loss of human lives around the world.

The relentless extraction of mineral ores and wanton destruction of forests by multinational mining corporations persist in the underdeveloped countries that are rich with natural resources. Massive environmental destruction and pollution, widespread landlessness and displacement, loss of livelihood, distortion of local culture, and rampant human rights violations are left in their wake.

Central to the MDG schema is the avowed obligation of the advanced capitalist countries to provide more development aid, debt relief, access to markets, medicines and new technology for the underdeveloped countries in the name of “global partnerships for development.” But in fact, these are the very same instruments by which imperialists exploit and keep backward countries dependent. Debt relief and aid granted to the most indebted countries are a mere fraction of the resources siphoned off by monopoly capitalists from underdeveloped countries in the form of debt payments, unequal trade, profit remittances, tax evasion, capital flight, and resource plunder.

According to UN estimates, the underdeveloped countries are transferring resources to the industrialized countries at an average rate of nearly USD 500 billion per year since 2000, reaching a peak of USD 891 billion in 2008. Moreover, so-called development assistance remains attached to policy conditionalities such as liberalization, privatization and deregulation that favor monopoly capitalist interests over the requirements of real national development.

The MDGs are a grand and expensive distraction from the real effort to address the structural roots of poverty, injustice, oppression and underdevelopment. That is the struggle against imperialist exploitation and plunder through painstaking education, organizing and mobilization of the masses. This is the only path to national and social liberation and all-rounded development. (Bulatlat.com)

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