UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe
At the UN General
Assembly in September
2013, John Ashe of
Antigua and Barbuda
speaks about the
success of the Millennium
Development Goals
(MDGs) as part of a
high-level panel forum
convened by SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki-moon.
14?Introduction
n
We don’t have to look far to see that goals drive progress. The Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs) have been remarkably successful in driving progress against global hunger
and poverty. When the goals were launched in 2000, every country pledged to cut extreme
poverty and hunger in the developing world in half by 2015. As the end date approaches,
it turns out we are on track to achieve them. The MDGs have clearly resonated with world
leaders and ordinary citizens in far-flung places.
While developing countries have been making progress, however, in the United States we’ve
been headed in the other direction.
Development is a word that means
many things to many people. In the
United States, development tends
to be used in the sense of economic
development. It’s about increasing
the nation’s Gross Domestic
Product (GDP). Before the MDGs,
the conventional development
yardstick in developing countries
was also growth in GDP. But the
MDG yardstick focused on human
dignity and people’s well-being. A
goal to end hunger in the United
States may well broaden our own
views of development.
The United States has set
national goals in the past, and just
the idea that “we have a goal” has
been successful in focusing the
attention of those whose help is needed to make it happen. Most of us know about the goal
to land a man on the moon, but there are other examples that are more relevant to ending
hunger. At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States set a goal to provide a free
high school education to every child. Parents at the time demanded it. As any parent knows,
lack of education is closely associated with poverty. By the middle of the twentieth century,
the United States had the most educated workforce and military on the planet.8 The generation of Americans who fought in World War II and set the United States on the longest
period of broad-based prosperity in the nation’s history had years more education than their
peers elsewhere in the world.
Another example of national goal-setting came in the 1960s, when President Lyndon
Johnson set a goal to end poverty. And in fact, the so-called War on Poverty that he launched
was a catalyst for dramatic reductions in poverty. Progress continued during the Nixon
administration, which expanded the Food Stamp Program and the Special Supplemental
Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), leading to impressive reductions in hunger. When the economy stalled in the mid-1970s, however, the country’s commitment to fighting poverty flagged.
Hunger and poverty are a package deal. They reinforce each other. See Figure i.3. Federal
Bread for the World Institute