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Abstract
The final report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) concludes that the project has been ‘the most successful anti-poverty movement in history’. Two key claims underpin this narrative: that global poverty has been cut in half, and global hunger nearly in half, since 1990. This good-news narrative has been touted by the United Nations and has been widely repeated by the media. But closer inspection reveals that the UN’s claims about poverty and hunger are misleading, and even intentionally inaccurate. The MDGs have used targeted statistical manipulation to make it seem as though the poverty and hunger trends have been improving when in fact they have worsened. In addition, the MDGs use definitions of poverty and hunger that dramatically underestimate the scale likely of these problems. In reality, around four billion people remain in poverty today, and around two billion remain hungry – more than ever before in history, and between two and four times what the UN would have us believe. The implications of this reality are profound. Worsening poverty and hunger trends indicate that our present model of development is not working and needs to be fundamentally rethought.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank Thomas Pogge and Andrew Sumner for their assistance with some of the data, and Martin Kirk and anonymous reviewers for their suggestions on earlier drafts of the manuscript.
Notes
1. United Nations, Millennium Development Goals Report 2015, 3.
2. Ibid., 15.
3. Ibid., 20.
4. “A Fall to Cheer.”
5. Gates and Gates, “Annual Letter.”
6. Oxfam, “Richest 1% will own More.”
7. Nelson, “What Oxfam doesn’t Want.”
8. World Food Summit, “Rome Declaration on World Food Security,” 1996.
9. UN General Assembly, “Millennium Declaration,” New York, 2000, Article 19 (emphasis added).
10. One hundred and sixty-five million people were lifted out of poverty at the $1.08 (1993 PPP) poverty line, and 400 million at the $1.25 (2005 PPP) poverty line.
11. "The First United Nations Development Goal"; Pogge, "How World Poverty is Measured"; Pogge, "Millions Killed."
12. This goal is significantly less ambitious than it would have been had it been framed in terms of absolute numbers. If it had followed the precedent set by the Rome Declaration, the goal would have been to lift 836 million out of poverty.
13. See Pogge, “The First United Nations Millennium Development Goal,” 377–397.
14. Ravallion et al., “Quantifying Absolute Poverty”.
15. World Bank, World Development Report 1999/2000 (emphasis added).
16. See Easterly, “The Lost Decades.”
17. Speech to G20 Finance Ministers and Central Governors, Ottawa, November 17, 2001.
18. Chen and Ravallion, How have the World’s Poorest Fared?
19. Reddy and Pogge, “How Not to Count.”
20. Morten Jerven illustrates how economic statistics on Africa are not very reliable. Jerven, Poor Numbers.
21. World Bank, World Development Report, 237.
22. Prashad, “Making Poverty History.”
23. “Poverty in India.”
24. Wagstaff, “Child Health.”
25. How much is $1.25 (2005 PPP) actually worth? Theoretically it represents what $1.25 could buy in the USA in 2005. It is impossible to draw exact comparisons, given that consumption patterns vary across countries, but we do know that $1.25 is inadequate to purchase enough food to meet even minimal nutrition requirements in the USA. The US government calculated that in 2005 the average person needed at least $4.58 per day to achieve basic nutrition (according to the USDA’s Thrifty Food Plan). For another point of comparison, David Woodward has calculated that living at the IPL in Britain (adjusted for PPP) would be ‘equivalent to 35 people living on a single minimum wage, with no benefits of any kind, no gifts, borrowing, scavenging, begging or saving to draw on (since these are all included as “income” in poverty calculations), and no free health service or education (since these are not generally available to the poor)’. Woodward, 'How Poor is too Poor?'
26. “Asians Poorer.”
27. Edward, ‘The Ethical Poverty Line.”
28. The ‘minimum’ EPL that Edward calculates takes Sub-Saharan Africa out of the equation, since violence and war make those numbers somewhat unreliable.
29. Sumner, “Did Global Poverty just Fall?”
30. World Bank, “There are Multiple International Poverty Lines.”
31. At the IPL of $2.50, the World Bank calculations show that the poverty headcount increased by 852 million between 1981 and 2005, excluding China.
32. World Bank, World Bank Development Indicators 2008.
33. In the Report on the World Food Summit, the chairman noted: ‘Many have said that this goal is too modest, that it would leave behind too many millions. This is a fair criticism and one that I take to heart.’
34. Cited in Caparros, “Counting the Hungry.”
35. In FAO, State of Food Insecurity 2009, the number of hungry in the world was stated as 845 million.
36. FAO, State of Food Insecurity 2008, 8.
37. United Nations, Millennium Development Goals Report 2013, 10.
38. Moore-Lappé et al., “Framing Hunger,” 6–7. See also Haddad, “The New Hunger Figures.”
39. FAO Statistics Division, “Revision of the Methodology,” 2.
40. The FAO justifies this move on the grounds that the IMF estimated in 2010 that the global economic crisis did not affect developing countries as badly as predicted. This informed its State of Food Insecurity 2011 report. But even if we accept this claim about the economic crisis, it does not mean that the food price crisis (a separate but related phenomenon) did not have an impact on hunger. In personal correspondence Carlo Cafiera, the FAO official in charge of the methodology changes, stated to me: ‘My opinion is that the price spike on international food commodity markets had a limited impact on the extent of hunger’. He assumed that people diverted expenditure from other consumption to compensate for rising prices. His reasoning for this was convoluted: ‘Elementary market economics explains that price spikes occur because levels of consumption do not drop to compensate for tightening supplies. It is because demand remains relatively stable that prices spike’ (emphasis in original). This is false. Prices spiked because of market speculation, which pumped up a bubble. Food prices tell us nothing about demand (or hunger) in this case.
41. FAO, “Food Security Methodology.” This second phase of changes was reflected in the 2012 report.
42. These changes are made periodically. FAO, State of Food Insecurity 2008 featured prominent changes to MDER and population estimates for the first time.
43. Compare the new MDER (http://www.docs-library.com/xls/1/7/2217-2548.html) with the old MDER (http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/ess/documents/food_security_statistics/MinimumDietaryEnergyRequirement_en.xls).
44. FAO, State of Food Insecurity 2012, 12, 8.
45. It is also important to point out that the food price shocks have not been ‘short-term’, but rather long-term and systemic, lasting years.
46. Cited in Caparros, “Counting the Hungry.”
47. FAO, State of Food Insecurity 2012, 12.
48. Moore-Lappé et al., “Framing Hunger,” 6–7. See also Haddad, “The New Hunger Figures.”
49. Recovery with a Human Face. Accessed October 12, 2015. http://www.recoveryhumanface.org/. See Thomas Pogge’s posts in June 2015.
50. FAO, State of Food Insecurity 2012, 12.
51. In FAO, State of Food Insecurity 2012 and in Technical note 8 online.
52. See Moore-Lappé et al., “How We Count Hunger, 5.”
53. FAO, State of Food Insecurity 2012, 23.
54. Ibid. Cited in Moore-Lappé et al., “Framing Hunger,” 9.
55. State of Food Insecurity 2012, 50.
56. I am indebted to Thomas Pogge (personal correspondence) for drawing my attention to this issue.
57. Moore-Lappé et al., “Framing Hunger,” 6–7. See also Haddad, “The New Hunger Figures.”
58. A fact that even FAO, State of Food Insecurity 2012 recognises. Moore-Lappé et al., "Framing Hunger," 7.
59. Moore Lappé et al., “Framing Hunger.”
60. Fukuda Parr and Greenstein, “How should MDG Success?”; and Friedman, Causal Inference. There was no acceleration of progress against poverty at the $1.25/day line. At higher lines, it appears that there was an acceleration of progress after 2000, although it is not clear whether this had to do with the MDGs.
61. FAO, State of Food Insecurity 2012.
62. World Hunger Education Service, “2015 World Hunger and Poverty Facts.”
63. Woodward, “Incrementum ad Absurdum.”
64. Pollin, Contours of Descent, 166.
65. Chang, Bad Samaritans, 27.
66. Chang, Bad Samaritans, 28.
67. Kar and Freitas, Illicit Financial Flows, show that $1.138 trillion was drained from developing countries in 2010, mostly through trade mis-invoicing. See also Shaxson, Treasure Islands. The extent of abusive transfer pricing is difficult to calculate, but Raymond Baker, Capitalism’s Achilles Heel, estimates that it roughly equals that of trade mis-invoicing, which in 2010 was 80% of up to $1.138 trillion, or $910 billion.
68. According to the World Bank’s International Debt Statistics database.
69. Raman, “WIPO Seminar.”