UN Seeks to End Poverty by 2015

The United Nations has organized a summit of world leaders later this month to address progress on the Millennium Development Goals. The website created for the summit even has the audacity to suggest that "We Can End Poverty in 2015." I am certain that everyone wishes that were possible, but there is nothing in the draft report prepared for the summit that would lead you to believe so, as Oxfam has already pointed out. For example, Paragraph 4 states that:

Our challenge today is to agree on an action agenda to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. With five years to go to the target date of 2015, the prospect of falling short of achieving the Goals because of a lack of commitment is very real. This would be an unacceptable failure from both the moral and the practical standpoint. If we fail, the dangers in the world — instability, violence, epidemic diseases, environmental degradation, runaway population growth — will all be multiplied.

And Paragraph 81 points out that:

Cities in developing countries around the world are home to rising numbers of poor people and do not have the capacity to create jobs to sustainably absorb the population influx and achieve the necessary progress needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals. In the face of rapid urbanization, these challenges will only become more acute unless adequate corrective actions are taken. These measures should include sound urban planning, which is essential for the sustainable growth of urban centres.

In between those paragraphs are many others detailing the genuinely sad state of affairs in many parts of the world. I agree that it is important to reassert the importance of these goals in the midst of the worldwide recession, but I'm not so sure that overhyping the expectations is the way to do it.