| Do you remember the
Millennium Goals? When world leaders celebrated the year 2000 with
a solemn pledge to reduce poverty and hunger, check
the spread of AIDS, get boys and girls into school, and improve
health and sanitation, all by 2015? Well, three years down
the road, and the UNDP's yearly collection of facts and figures
already shows that if we carry on
as we are, the only target likely to be met is that for halving
poverty, and that is entirely due to the success of one country
- China. It is so vast that growing prosperity in China lifts literally
millions of people above the poverty line,
even though in Africa, Latin America and the former Soviet Union
people have actually been getting poorer.
Otherwise progress is patchy.
East Asia should meet its target
of halving hunger by 2015, and Latin America and the Caribbean
are not far behind, but at present rates of progress Africa and
South Asia won't get there for another hundred years. For Africa
- right at the bottom of virtually
every table - reducing infant mortality by two thirds and getting
all its children into school look like an impossible dream until
well into the twenty-second century.
The good news is that it can be done - that there are success
stories. Ghana - an economic basket case
in the eighties and early nineties - has pulled
itself together and it's now comfortably in the middle
range of countries, way ahead of the much more naturally wealthy
Nigeria. For every Congo, Cambodia or Iraq, ruined by war or dictatorship,
or every southern African country devastated by AIDS, there is
a Mauritius or a South Korea, steadily working its way up
the league table towards a better life for its people.
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check: limit, stop from spreading
down the road: later, further
on in time
carry on: continue on as before
the poverty line: if you are on the poverty line you
have just enough income to buy what you need in order to live
patchy: not completely satisfactory;
good only in parts
meet its target: achieve the
results it wants
virtually: almost, very nearly
an economic basket case: whose economy is in a very bad
state. (This is an informal use)
pulled itself together: managed
to find a way out of its difficulties
the league table: when countries
or organisations are listed in a league table they are listed
according to the results they have obtained, with the most successful
at the top and the least successful at the bottom
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