by Piyaporn Hawiset
16 October 2002
The world is failing to meet the commitments to reduce poverty and promote peace its leaders agreed to two years before at the UN Millennium Summit, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on October 1, 2002. In the first scorecard on implementing the millennium plan, Annan said prospects for reaching its goals were "decided mixed" and warned that insufficient progress was being made in the areas of human rights, good governance, peace and the needs of Africa.
"Progress must be made on a much broader front," he said in the report. "Otherwise the ringing words of the declaration will only serve as grim reminders of the human needs neglected and promises unmet."
In September 2000, at the largest-even gathering of world leaders, more than 150 heads of state met at the United Nations and pledged to give billions of people a better life. Their Millennium Summit declaration vowed, by 2015, to send every child to primary school, deliver millions from destitution, and halt the spread of AIDS, malaria and other major diseases. Other goals included promoting democracy and peace, ending racism and preventing environmental destruction.
In the report, released on October1, Annan said he would start a campaign to promote the commitments and named Eveline Herfkens, the former Netherlands Minister of Development Cooperation, as his advisor to assist in promoting the millennium goals.
According to the secretary-general's report, there had been some progress toward meeting the goals. Primary school enrollment rose to 84 percent from 80 percent between 1992 and 2002, and malnutrition fell from 20 percent of the world's population to 17 percent. But the report said these trends were too slow and had to be accelerated.
The proportion of people living on US$1 per day--the measure of extreme poverty--had fallen from 29 percent to 23 percent between 1992 and 2002, but while this drop had been sharp in East Asia, it had been minimal in Africa.
The report said that the September 11 attacks in the United States gave new impetus to the declaration's pledge to take "concerted action against international terrorism" and reminded everyone of the threats to peace. Conflicts in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Colombia, the Philippines, Algeria, Burma, Kashmir, Indonesia, Chechnya, Palestine and Central Africa continued or had become worse.
"Instead of moving toward achieving the goals of the Millennium Declaration, the world has seemed at times to be slipping backward into more and more conflict," the report siad.