Beyond tomorrow
“The future starts today, not tomorrow,” Pope John Paul II once cautioned. That reality underpins the new Asian Development Bank study that sketches “a daunting unfinished agenda when the Millennium Development Goals expire in 2015.”
“What’s that?” asked this newly elected scion of a Visayas dynasty. “Cross my heart. I didn’t know that we and 188 other countries adopted MDGs in 2000,” he admitted.
MDGs are eight targets to tamp down deprivation: among them, hunger and high infant and maternal death rates. These goals were worked into indicators. “MDGs’ chief appeal is they convert high rhetoric into hard numbers,” the Economist noted.
We could have achieved MDGs under the (Arroyo) regime, says the study “Winning the Numbers, Losing the War.” But corruption raged unchecked. (The regime) “was born in turbulence, governed in turbulence (and) left many issues demanding urgent closure…”
In 2015, the United Nations will receive from member-states reports on how they achieved—or flubbed—the MDGs’ targets. That’s less than two years away. “I never think of the future,” the physicist Albert Einstein once said. “It comes soon enough.” But, many newly elected officials are not aware the world has moved on.
“A global debate is under way on challenges of a post-2015 development agenda,” ADB says. “The focus in this fast-growing region should be on the glaring gaps in MDG achievements.”
The Philippines Family Health Survey, for example, documents that 221 mostly faceless mothers now die in every 100,000 live births. That’s up from 162 deaths in 2006. There has been a tragic U-turn in the decline of maternal deaths, sociologist Mary Racelis notes. Then and now, most of those deaths are preventable. Our chances of meeting the MDG target to slash maternal deaths to 52 in two years are zero. “Goal 5 is least likely to be achieved by 2015,” the National Economic and Development Authority warned.
The bank’s new study is titled: “ADB’s Support for Achieving Millennium Development Goals.” Aside from measuring gaps between pledges and delivery, the study tries to improve the setting and tracking of development targets.
Asia and the Pacific did very well on tamping down income poverty. This slumped from 55 percent in the early 1990s to 24 percent by the late 2000s. This is a historically unprecedented global achievement. Nonetheless, two-thirds of the world’s poor cluster in this region. Gaps
between rich and poor have widened in about half of the economies in Asia and the Pacific.
Here, 28 out of every 100 Filipinos scrounge below national poverty lines—unchanged over the last six years, says the 2013 National Statistical Coordination Board report. About 20 percent of the poorest make do with P6 out of every P100 in the total national income. You see that in slum families or in scrawny kids cadging for handouts. “Children from the poorest households run twice the risk of dying before age five.”
“Continuing the same pattern of growth will not be enough to stem rising inequality,” says ADB’s Independent Evaluation Director General Vinod Thomas. “Nor will it reverse environmental degradation in time—problems that in turn threaten sustained economic growth.” Inequality is not strait-jacketed in income poverty. Much of Asia and the Pacific suffer “from large disparities in the provision of basic services.”
Out of 100 Filipino kids, 88 are immunized against measles, notes the United Nations Development Programme’s 2013 Human Development Report. It is 96 for Malaysia. Six out of 10 Filipino mothers deliver babies with properly trained birth attendants. In contrast, almost 99 percent of births in Thailand have medical personnel present.
In Asia and the Pacific, the number of underweight children aged below five declined only from 35 percent in the early 1990s to 25 percent by the late 2000s. Here, the under-five mortality rates or “U5MR” were halved between 1990 and 2011. Two decades back, 59 kids out of every thousand births never made it to age five.
Still, 29 out of every 1,000 kids under five die daily—far below is Sri Lanka’s 17. Unicef’s survey on U5MR pegs the Philippines into Slot 80 among 193 nations. That shoved us almost on a par with Dominican Republic, but far behind Malaysia.
Babies born preterm—before the 37th week of pregnancy—are specially vulnerable. “The shorter the term of pregnancy, the greater the risks of death.” About half of Filipino children’s deaths occur within this narrow, deadly window. Most of these deaths occur at home. Unrecorded, they remain invisible to all but their grieving families.
The quality of economic growth is essential. A positive link between economic growth and human development is not automatic. You can impoverish even in boom times.
Environmental degradation, caused by the region’s rapid economic growth, will persist well into the post-MDG era. “There has been slow progress and even regression on some environmental targets in many countries,” writes Linda Arthur, the ADB study’s principal author.
In his 2015 report to the UN, President Aquino shouldn’t dally with why we didn’t achieve MDGs 1, 2 and 5. You can’t eat excuses. P-Noy set higher standards of integrity. That would anchor the critical task of securing closing governance and accountability deficits at all levels for whoever Filipinos will elect president after P-Noy.
He (or more likely she?) can build on his reforms to tackle the post-2015 agenda vigorously. As John F. Kennedy cautioned: “Those who only look to the past are certain to miss the future.”
* * *
E-mail: [email protected]
