Peace and Justice Post

By José Antonio Gurriarán | Inter-Press Service

MADRID, Oct 17 (IPS) – “We think it’s disgraceful that billions of dollars are available to bail out banks, and there is no money to eradicate poverty in the world,” said Marina Navarro, the spokeswoman for some 1,000 social organisations in Spain taking part in demonstrations against poverty between Friday and Sunday.

“We can understand the need for certain measures to address the economic crisis triggered by financial institutions in the United States, but we are completely opposed to that happening at the cost of an increase in hunger, poverty and inequality around the world,” the representative of the Spanish Alliance Against Poverty told IPS in Madrid.

The Alliance Against Poverty, made up of civil society organisations, trade unions, community associations, religious institutions and other groups, held demonstrations Friday to mark the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty and will continue mobilising over the weekend in response to the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP), whose campaign slogan this year is “Stand Up and Take Action”.

From Oct. 17-19, millions of people around the world will literally stand up in protests and other events to demand that their governments make the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) top priority in budget allocation.

Taking 1990 levels as a baseline, the MDGs include a 50 percent reduction in extreme poverty and hunger; universal primary education; promotion of gender equality; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; combating the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing a North-South global partnership for development.

“Far from meeting the MDGs, the number of poor people around the world has grown by 50 million, bringing the total to over 900 million,” said Navarro, referring to the first of the eight goals assumed by the international community in 2000, which have a 2015 deadline.

“I know it is a very harsh term, but I can’t find a better one: isn’t it disgraceful that it cost 700 billion dollars to bail out the banks in the United States, five times more than what the United Nations approved for reaching the MDGs?” asked Navarro.

In practically every large city and provincial capital in Spain, people have been mobilising over the last few days and will continue to do so through the weekend as part of the Alliance Against Poverty campaign, whose main aim is to call for compliance with the first MDG, against extreme poverty and hunger.

Developing regions, especially parts of Asia, have achieved steady economic growth and have seen the overall poverty rate shrink from 80 to 20 percent in the last 25 years. In addition, the proportion of children under five suffering from malnutrition dropped from 33 percent in 1996 to 26 percent in 2006.

“That’s true, and it should be highlighted as extraordinary progress,” said Navarro. “The case of Mozambique is also exemplary — one of the countries in the world with the greatest economic difficulties, which managed to reduce poverty to 10 percent of the population, thanks to active social policies and to donor countries like Germany, Spain, Britain and the Netherlands.”

But, she added, “half of the population of sub-Saharan Africa, and 1.4 billion people in poor regions around the world, still live on less than 1.25 dollars a day, according to the World Bank.”

In Spain’s large cities, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators are expected to stand up against poverty from Friday to Sunday.

In Friday’s enormous march in Madrid, signs carried by protesters also expressed concern about the unequal distribution of wealth, both between and within countries.

Another prominent activist who has been working hard over the last few days for the success of the campaign to sensitise Spanish society on the questions of poverty and hunger is Alliance Against Poverty spokesman David Ortiz, the only civil society representative to accompany Spain’s socialist Prime Minister José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero to the U.N. General Assembly in New York in late September.

“It is outrageous that as wealth grows around the world, so does inequality, and far from meeting the MDGs, we are getting farther and farther away from them in many cases,” Ortiz told IPS.

“In Latin America, the average income has gone up considerably in the last few years, but poverty has grown too, and there are intolerable problems of inequality that must be addressed,” he said.

“And in Africa, the number of people living in extreme poverty grows day by day, while a small elite becomes extremely wealthy. These are situations that are intolerable from a human standpoint,” he said.

The demonstrators taking part in the march in Madrid reminded the Zapatero administration of its pledge to increase official development aid to 0.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2012.

Ortiz said things have changed since the socialist party (PSOE) came to power in Spain in 2004, but argued that a much greater improvement is needed.

Under the previous government, of the centre-right Popular Party, “aid stood at 0.2 percent of GDP, and it has now grown to 0.4 percent and will apparently expand to 0.5 percent in the budget to be approved in the next few days,” he said.

“But we have to reach 0.7 percent of GDP as soon as possible, in Spain as well as in other countries, because the situation is critical, with millions of children and adults having their basic needs unmet or dying of hunger,” said Ortiz. (END/2008)