Does the UN still consider that Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are feasible?
I fear that the MDGs are typical of a ‘top-down’ mentality in which technocrats – experts – set priorities and policies, with little or no involvement of those from ‘the bottom’, who often are the real experts about what they need most urgently. In many regions and for many of the MDGs, the targets set will not be achieved. With global hunger, the outcomes will be much worse than expected. The MDGs belong to what the Norwegian economist, Erik Reinert, refers to as ‘palliative economics’. They seek to help. But they leave untouched, for the most part, the structural causes of hunger and malnutrition, or more broadly, underdevelopment: an inequitable multilateral trading system, an international division of labour that locks countries into the production of raw commodities and does not allow them to climb the development ladder. These are deep imbalances between North and South that money alone cannot solve. Sharing money is important, but it is not enough; it is sharing production and t
