Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-06-14-Speech-1-061"
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"en.20100614.19.1-061"2
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"− Madam President, can I say, as I begin, I think we should really call these not ‘Millennium Development Goals’, but ‘millennium development challenges’. So often the word runs off our tongue – ‘the MDGs’ – but do we ever actually revisit what they are?
So we have an interesting debate tonight. I want to thank the NGOs across Europe for supporting my report. I wish us tonight and especially in the vote tomorrow to put aside our political differences. It will not be a perfect report; nothing produced by this House ever is, but let me say this: let us not now use party political differences to take away from ourselves the opportunity to go for a united position at the United Nations and achieve the MDGs by 2015.
Back in the year 2000 when we were going through economic boom times, we made promises and we made commitments. Sadly, colleagues, those commitments have not yet been achieved. We are five years away from the date that we set, 2015, when we would tackle these major challenges.
Let me restate them: the major challenges are extreme poverty and hunger, access to universal primary education, gender equality, child mortality, maternal health, AIDS, malaria and TB, environmental sustainability and global partnership for development: eight millennium development challenges which still remain challenges. And now, during this week, the EU will come together to hopefully forge a united position ahead of the September plenary at the United Nations in New York.
But I have to say the signs are worrying. There is a lack of commitment to that 0.7% of our gross national income that we said we would commit to taking on these challenges. In some of the least developed countries we are slipping way, way away from the targets that we need to be reaching mid-way through.
There has been some progress and, yes, the investment that we have made – and I use that term wisely – the investment that we have made so far has paid off. The maternal health improvements are there. Child mortality rates are low, low, low and, yes, the numbers of children dying are gradually decreasing.
But our problem is that, not only do we need more money to tackle these commitments, we now need additional finances to tackle the problems associated with climate change which are bedevilling the positions that we are taking in the developing countries and the least developed countries.
And that is why in my report I have looked at not only what we have done so far, but how much more we need to do. And that means looking at the big problem we have in the European institutions of policies, on the one hand, that want to deliver positive change and policies, on the other, which contradict and undermine that.
Think of trade, think of the common agricultural policy, think of the common fisheries policy. Without policy coherence our investment in these countries will never pay off. And it is investment. It is in our long-term economic interest to get rid of these MDGs, to achieve them and get rid of these problems that curse individual lives across the world.
So what I want to see is leadership from the EU. Not the minimum set that they can agree on, but a commitment to that 0.7% of gross national income, a commitment to additional financing; and we do not want a redefinition of overseas development assistance. There must be no tinkering at the edges."@en1
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