TOKYO, Oct 13 (TerraViva) – After a decade of progress, it had seemed that the world was on target to meet many of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that were set in 2000 to halve extreme poverty and hunger, boost health and literacy in 15 years.

But the global finance and food crisis have threatened to reverse gains.

For the first time in many years, hunger worldwide is increasing instead of decreasing – mainly because of the widespread drought this summer and the increasing use of farmlands for the production of biofuels. Food prices have soared to all-time highs, affecting vulnerable populations in poor countries the most.

And all this is coinciding with the global economic crisis, which has affected aid flows and investment in developing countries, undermining their capacity to cope with the crisis of inflation, food security and development.

With three years to go before the target date, the United Nations is now trying to come up with new goals for beyond 2015 that will draw lessons from the current MDG campaign, and look at the new challenges that have come up since 2000.

In September, the UN set up a High-level Panel post-2015 Task Team that UNDP Administrator Helen Clark says will look at the new development landscape and look at new areas not tackled in the current goals, like equality, inclusiveness, sustainability, conflict and climate change.

Clark was speaking at a panel at the World Bank-IMF Annual Meetings in Tokyo this week with the World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institution, who is the lead author of the High-level Panel, and its other members, including Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Gunilla Carlsson, Sweden’s Foreign Minister.

Most panelists agreed that the world had changed dramatically since 2000. It had become much more interconnected, and the new goals should not just be goals for developing countries but for the whole world. The global financial crisis was worsening inequality, global climate change was affecting food security, and there was a danger that there would be a reversal of even the MDG goals that had been attained so far.

The High-level Panel has its work cut out to be able to present its report to the UN Secretary-General by end-May 2013. And its main challenge will be to ensure that new post-MDG goals, whatever they are, also have the ability to absorb global financial, climate and natural shocks. This would mean that poor countries should not just be trying to lift their populations out of poverty, but also develop “shock absorbers” and social stabilisers to deal with them.

World Bank President Kim weighed in with his own priorities for the post-MDG plan: to look beyond just GDP growth, pay more attention to equity and inclusion, and give special attention to fragile and conflict states.  While the 2015 target called for halving extreme poverty, Kim is now on a campaign to put international development organisations to agree to an ambitious campaign to eradicate extreme poverty altogether by 2030.

However, to really go to the heart of the reasons why some countries have lagged behind on meeting MDG targets and not others, some basic questions need to be asked not, just about what areas they lag behind in, but also why.

One key issue is that while targets are global, meeting them is a local matter that hinges on governance, leadership, accountability and transparency. These are generally beyond the purview of the United Nations, international creditors or aid agencies.

Sometimes, countries make progress despite conflict and political disarray. Nepal, for example, has met most of its MDG targets ahead of schedule, more than halving maternal and child mortality, doubling female literacy and reducing extreme poverty despite a 10-year conflict, bad governance, endemic corruption and government mismanagement.

The MDGs have worked because they have packaged development goals neatly into targets that are easy to explain and monitor. They have also galvanised the UN, governments and donors to row in the same direction.

However, while MDGs quantify progress, they don’t answer questions about the structural international and domestic factors that keep countries poor.

Not many of donor countries that once pledged to set aside 0.7 percent of their GDP for ODA have met their target, for instance. Also, there has been a net outflow of resources from poor countries to rich. Most developing countries pay more in debt servicing and imports to advanced countries than they receive in aid or remittances. As someone said, trying to achieve MDGs in a situation like this is like trying to go up in a down escalator.

The Tokyo meetings this week were a venue for the new World Bank President to give himself and his Bank the challenge to eradicate poverty in the next 15 years after 2015. In numerous speeches he made here, he kept asking “what will it take” to achieve that goal, and his staff distributed black t-shirts that said ‘End Poverty’ and the Bank even has a twitter hashtag, #whatwillittake.

Said Kim: “It is time to move from dreaming of a world free of poverty to achieving it. It is time to bend the arc of history.”

In the final analysis, whatever the global goals, it will ultimately come down to improving local governance through accountable leadership. That is the way all countries that have made progress have done so. Maybe the hashtag should be: #whyisittakingsolong? (END)

TOKYO, Oct 12 – If anyone still needs proof that the epicenter of the world economy has shifted away from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the Annual Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Tokyo this week provided ample evidence.

Both Bretton Woods institutions have been part of a post-World War II trans-Atlantic project. The IMF was created to hold up the gold standard, tie it to a global exchange rate system linked to the US dollar, and to step in with “advice” and short-term loans whenever a macro-economic crisis hit.

The World Bank (which includes the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Development Agency) was originally supposed to lend to countries for post-war reconstruction, and later turned to lift countries out of poverty and to invest in infrastructure.

But as the role of the United States as a global military and economic power wanes, as Europe slides, and as the Pacific Rim countries become the engine of growth and sit on piles of cash, there is pressure on the IMF and the World Bank to change with the times.

In the past, the IMF has stepped in to rescue developing countries in the throes of economic crisis, as in 1974 to bail out Mexico from an oil price shock and Asian economies hit by crisis 15 years ago. But the IMF often became the bad guy as its rescue packages came with onerous conditionalities and mandatory austerity measures.

Today, instead of being entirely a short-term lender of last resort to emerging and developing economies, the IMF is now riding in as the knight in shining armour to save Europe. In the past year, the proportion of IMF lending to Europe has gone from zero to 56 percent.

The IMF is now being criticised not for its conditionalities, but for not giving enough priority to developing countries. The IMF’s Christine Lagarde’s speech at the conference in Tokyo on Thursday, in which she urged Europeans not to be too harsh on their ailing neighbours, drew a sharp rebuke from none other than the Germans.

There is also bitterness among Asian, African and Latin American countries that remember the strict austerity conditions imposed on them when they sought IMF bailouts in the past, and the kids-gloves treatment that Europe is getting in contrast. China, which is now the third largest contributor of cash to the IMF, is particularly unhappy that poor countries are being asked to help rich countries.

In a speech to the plenary session of the IMF-WB Annual Meetings Friday, Lagarde said that the globalised economy was so interconnected that the Euro slowdown was affecting Asian growth, too, so that rescuing Europe was important for Asian growth as well.

Despite this, there is a strong feeling among Asian delegates to the Fund and Bank meetings in Tokyo this week that the governance of the World Bank and the IMF, which has been monopolised by the US and France respectively for the past six decades, should be replaced by a fairer system that reflects new global economic realities.

Such sentiments are no longer restricted to rhetoric. The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) agreed in New Delhi in March to set up their own parallel world bank to use their reserves to help poorer countries in their periphery. The BRICS Bank may still take time to take off, but the point has been made.

Much more dramatic has been the rise of new Chinese state-controlled lenders like the China Development Bank (CDB) and the Export-Import Bank of China. The CDB’s portfolio is now crossing 900 billion U.S. dollars, more than double that of the World Bank itself. China Ex-Im Bank has been entering even into private deals and recently lent 10 billion dollars to the Brazilian state oil company.

For many in developing parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia, this “Great Wall of Cash” is already an alternative to the World Bank and IMF.

Besides, the World Bank is already also competing with the regional focus and the starkly different priorities of regional multilateral lenders like the Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.

And the fun part for borrowing countries is that these loans do not come with any strict conditionalities. There are no cumbersome anti-corruption guidelines, there are no sensitive questions about governance and transparency, and the disbursement for infrastructure projects is quick.

To be sure, the recent flare-up in territorial tensions between Japan and China on the one hand and with Korea on the other has led to questions about whether the Asia-Pacific powers can work together. China’s retaliation by its high-profile targeting of Japanese products has seriously hit bilateral trade, and may affect Japan’s macro-economic recovery. China itself has pulled back on some of its aggressive forays into lending as the global slowdown hits home.

Still, the long-term question for the World Bank and the IMF will be how to respond to the shift in the epicenter of global growth from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There was glimmer of recognition of this shift in Tokyo this week, but their preoccupation with Europe showed that old habits die hard.

Will the Bank and the Fund come to terms the tectonic shift, adjust priorities and change standard operating procedures accordingly, or will they keep on looking at the world through their traditional trans-Atlantic perspective?

*Dateline Earth is a column written by Kunda Dixit, editor and publisher of ‘The Nepali Times’ during this TerraViva edition.

TOKYO, Oct 11 (TerraViva) – The world may be in economic crisis, Asian growth may be stumbling, and Japan may be suffering a slowdown, but you wouldn’t be able to tell in glittering Tokyo this week as it hosts the Annual Meetings of the World Bank and the IMF.

There is a sense of normalcy in the streets outside, as if all is well with the world and it is business as usual. But inside the conference venue at the Tokyo International Forum, there is a pall of gloom as it debates the impact of the European crisis, the slow recovery in the US, the absence of China from the meeting, even questions about whether globalisation has been the panacea that the ‘Washington Consensus’ always said it was.

The Annual Meetings of the World Bank and the IMF are held in Washington every two years, but every alternative year they take place in a developing country. Bangkok, Istanbul, New Delhi have all had their turns. But in recent years as anti-globalisation protests have become more organised and vigorous, the conferences have been located in places like Dubai and Singapore, which have banned all street protests. This year’s meeting was supposed to take place in Egypt, but due to the volatile political situation it was shifted to Tokyo.

The streets around the conference venue in Tokyo have a heavy, but discreet, security presence with busloads of police parked along the fringes of Hibiya Park. But for those who have come to associate water cannons and tear gas with World Bank-IMF meetings, this one so far doesn’t have them.

The World Bank has returned to Tokyo after 48 years. The last time the city hosted the meeting was in 1964, the year Japan also hosted the Olympics. The country was in the process of rebuilding, and 20 years after the end of the war it was on track to recovery and had regained confidence in itself. Much of that restoration was carried out with the help of the World Bank.

In the early years, the Bank was involved in infrastructure and energy. Its first loan in 1953 was to build thermal and hydroelectric power plants below 100 megawatts, the kind of energy projects that the Bank is now involved in in poor developing countries. It was a World Bank loan that helped build the first Bullet Train line, and it forced Japanese engineers to scale down the project so that the trains would run at 200 mph instead of 250 mph. Bank consultants also wanted the trains to carry freight at night to make them feasible, which the Japanese rejected. The World Bank
loaned money for the Toyota assembly line and for the first intercity expressways in 1960, which was later expanded to one of the most modern road networks in the world.

The World Bank then invested in Japanese bonds and tapped Japan’s economic growth to generate cash to reinvest in other developing countries in Asia, like China, Indonesia and Thailand. As World Bank President Jim Yong Kim reminded his audience here on Thursday, 60 years later, Japan has turned from a borrower to being the third biggest donor to the World Bank.

This week, as 22,000 delegates from 188 countries gather in Tokyo to look at the global economic slowdown, it has also turned attention to how catalytic lending can work in averting crisis and building prosperity.

But there is a sense that Japan is also coming full circle as it struggles with second-generation problems of an ageing population, recession and a future fiscal emergency.

*Dateline Earth is a column written by Kunda Dixit, editor and publisher of ‘The Nepali Times’ during this TerraViva edition.

(END/TV/IPS Asia-Pacific)

SENDAI, Japan, Oct 10 (TerraViva) – The debris of the devastated Arahama elementary school yielded two enduring lessons for its principal, Takao Kawamura, in the months after the massive 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan’s north-east coastland on Mar. 11, 2011.

“The first lesson is that we survived the horrible tragedy simply because we were prepared for disaster,” he explained to a group of international development officials who visited the area on Wednesday on the sidelines of the 2012 International Monetary Fund (IMF)-World Bank (WB) Annual Meetings here.

“The other is the important challenge we face today,” he pointed out. ”We are committed now to be even better prepared for the next disaster by learning from what we missed out on that fateful day.”

Kawamura shared his insights from the rooftop of the now abandoned school, where a rescue helicopter had landed as he instructed a team of teachers to protect the lives of his trapped students after the 10-metre tsunami destroyed the rest of the building.

The experience of communities like Kawamura’s illustrates the need to mainstream disaster risk management, called DRM, into the development agenda under a plan by the Japanese government and the World Bank in Sendai.

The officials’ visit to Sendai was part of the ‘Sendai Dialogue’, where delegates from leading aid and financial organisations, national and local government officials, the private sector and civil society, gathered for two days to discuss ways to strengthen international commitment to mitigate the impact of disasters around the world.

The dialogue also highlighted the focus on disaster risk management and prevention of this year’s IMF-WB meetings.

“We learned many lessons following the disaster through reflecting on the role of a city government in regards to disaster preparation,” Sendai Mayor Emiko Okuyama said in her opening remarks at the dialogue. “Based on a policy of disaster mitigation, we are undertaking a comprehensive approach including the implementation of multiple safeguards and the development of a new environmental policy including energy measures.”

Sendai City, a city of 1.6 million people and the gateway to the north-east of Japan, lost 891 people in the Great East Japan Earthquake. Though by no means a small number, that was a casualty count reduced in no insignificant way by strict quake-resistant building codes in Japan.

Indeed, stories of quake survivors vouch for the need to build resilience at the official, regional and community levels.

Kawamura explained that Arahama, a large flat farm area dotted with 1,600 households just 15 kilometres out of Sendai, had one of the most active disaster preparedness programmes. This was why none of the students died in the school, he added.

In the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami, the children did not panic because rescue drills had been held regularly in the school, one that had also stocked relief supplies. In fact, just a few days before the March 2011 disaster, Kawamura had decided to take the relief goods kept in the gymnasium on the ground floor to higher areas – and this prevented them from being lost in the tsunami.

Data has shown that when the tsunami struck, the school, which had been built as an earthquake evacuation site, held strong as did most buildings across Japan. But what had not been foreseen was the unprecedented height of the tsunami, which reached up to almost 15 metres and swept through the tall pine trees that had been planted on the coastline as a breaker.

Says Norizami Ootobu, who heads a massive debris cleaning programme in Ido, directed under the Sendai city government: “We now realise that it is impossible to be hundred percent secure against a disaster. The best way to deal with the crisis is to put in the prevention steps that will minimize the impact.”

Concrete evidence of the benefits of being better prepared for disaster, in the form of research-based risk assessments, were presented in Sendai by disaster and financial experts.

Disasters are by no means the concern only of poor or developing countries, but they often suffer more damage when these occur. World Bank research has shown that developing countries will be hit heavily by disasters from climate change and vast urban growth. Economic losses have been estimated at one-third of official development assistance, and that 1. 2 trillion U.S. dollars have been lost in disasters.

Equally sobering was the statistic that the official budgets for disasters provide for spending less than 4 percent on prevention. Most of such resources are extended to emergency or reconstruction.

Rachel Kyte, vice president for sustainable development at the World Bank, explained that there has been growing evidence that “greener and inclusive growth with investment in disaster risk management (should be) to be part of global development agendas.”

But officials from emerging economies said this is tough for many developing country governments.

Nadeem Ul Haque, deputy chairman of Pakistan’s planning commission, explained the government’s priorities lie heavily on schemes such as providing jobs for 90 million local youth and providing health and necessary infrastructure. “Electoral issues are the current demands of the people. The dilemma for governments is current priorities versus future disasters,” he explained.

Sendai’s experience also showed that resilience to disasters did not always mean heavy spending, and can be achieved through community and private sector collaboration.

In fact, the private sector’s role has been significant in Sendai’s post-disaster rehabilitation through the provision of loans for affected businesses and the reconstruction of houses.

Smaller businesses too have contributed solutions not only by providing recovery funds, but by becoming potent players in disaster prevention and preparedness and in the process helping ease the burden on public funds.

Take the case of Takeshi Niinami, chief executive officer of Lawson, a trillion-yen business comprised of convenient stores across Japan.

After the Great Quake, Lawson sprang into action in the Tohoku area by providing food for the tens of thousands who sought refuge in evacuation centres. Eighteen months later, Niinami told TerraViva, the company remains involved by supporting the education for children who have lost homes or family members.

Said Niinami: “Global business today is being able to work closely with the community, which is what I realised through my work in disaster relief. Unless we work to protect the community, business cannot prosper.” (END/IPS/AP/TV/SK/JS/12)