UN report analysis The Un report in the context of McMicheals text Development and Social Change a Global Perspective text is ripe with many inconsistencies. It claims to have reached Millenium Development Goals goals but there is no clear way of statistically monitoring these values. “Important data on development—such as the number of births and deaths, the number and quality of jobs, and data on agricultural productivity—are still missing in many developing countries (UN report pg7).” Millennium development goals include persistent poverty, pandemic disease, environmental damage, gender inequality and Southern debt. The UN uses a monetary form of measurement as a way of saying if regions have obtained progress in reducing poverty. This form of measurement assumes that people are using money as a means of living rather than traditional farming. It’s my understanding from the lectures in our class that the traditional dollar a day quote that we have all heard so much leaves out many important aspects such as access to health care, education unemployment levels and the type of food people have access to. I find that these figures are incredibly inaccurate and there is no true clear way of monitoring these goals. It seems that the data may be skewed in order to achieve the results desired. The UN report it’s self states that there data is inaccurate and under utilized if it is available, although the report states that there have been improvements in gathering data there is data that goes unused. “ Data sources used to produce development indicators have not been exploited sufficiently. For instance, the wealth of information available from population censuses and household surveys, such as MICS and DHS, has remained underutilized.(UN report pg 7)” Simply placing a monetary value on what makes a person live above or below poverty is unacceptable as a means of measuring. “The world has made remarkable progress in reducing extreme poverty. In 1990, close to half of the people in developing regions lived on less than $1.25 a day. This rate dropped to 22 per cent by 2010. This means that the world reached the MDG target—of halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty—five years ahead of the 2015 deadline.(UN report Pg9).” The amount of money needed to survive is very different in developing nations, also it must be taken in to consideration that before The development project money was not a measurement of quality of life in fact it may not have been a factor at all. Agro-industrialization and the fact that people are eating a diet completely unnatural to there way of life should be a consideration. A consequence of unbalanced diets is that “The 817 million undernourished in 1990- 1992 were predicted to exceed 1 billion in 2010.( McMicheals 2009)” I tend to agree with McMicheals that the development goals are just a way to calm the masses or make one turn a blind eye to the oppression that the first world TNC’s and banks are still making money off of poverty. The1.4 billion working poor and the mico-finance that just in-debts them to 1st world banks are proof of this. Providing credit to the poor to live in under our capitalist ideology is the last thing that developing nations need, they need a away to support themselves of of their land that has been taken for profit. Surveying the amount of money that people are able to earn at EPZ’s or other demeaning jobs is far from obtaining the the goal of addressing global inequality.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 01:17:59 +0000
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