Dummy outposts
Settlers quietly re-establish outposts after Israeli army dismantles them. Jonathan Cook reports from the West Bank
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More than 1,000 Israeli police officers and soldiers struggled all day last week to remove an "illegal" outpost -- home to 10 settlers -- on a hilltop south of the Palestinian city of Nablus.

Hundreds of other settlers, mainly Jewish religious extremists, came to defend Mitzpe Yitzhar after a court order preventing the dismantling of the site was finally lifted on Thursday. It was the first inhabited settlement to be taken down.

It looked -- and was meant to look -- like a turning point in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's relationship with the decades-old settlement project in the occupied Palestinian territories.

During his long political career, Sharon has been one of the chief architects of "Greater Israel": the gradual and de facto annexation of the West Bank and Gaza. In 1998, as Israel began ceding parcels of land under the Oslo agreements, Sharon notoriously called on the settlers to "grab hilltops".

There is little reason, however, to believe that Sharon is a new convert to the downsizing of Israel.

Rather he has come under intense American pressure behind the scenes to implement the meagre conditions required of him in the first phase of Washington's roadmap to a Palestinian state: the freezing of settlement growth and the removal of dozens of "illegal outposts" established under his premiership. All settlements are illegal under international law, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its population into the occupied territory; the outposts are illegal in Israeli law too.

The precise number of outposts created since March 2001 is unclear. According to Peace Now, the figure stands at around 60; according to some US officials, it may top 100. What is known is that earlier this month the Israeli army handed the Yesha Council, the settlers' governing body in the West Bank and Gaza, a list of 15 outposts that were to be removed. All but four were uninhabited.

These sites are known -- even by the settlers -- as "dummy outposts": small clusters of tents or dilapidated caravans that are established as bargaining counters in the settlers' negotiations with the government.

Their destruction can be traded for the licensing of inhabited outposts, and the televised pictures of soldiers manhandling Jewish youths elicit waves of sympathy for the settler movement from other Israelis, most of whom ordinarily want the settlements evacuated.

But the biggest advantage to the settlers is that a sacrificed outpost can be quietly re-established as soon as the army and television cameras have left. The crackdowns, despite appearances, are a win-win game for the settlers.

In fact, this is not the first time the government has appeared to turn on the settlers. Last October the then Defence Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer, Labour Party leader at the time, began a campaign to remove a dozen outposts. Most famously, he sent soldiers to confront hundreds of "hilltop youths" at Havat Gilad, west of Nablus, where they were greeted with curses and stone-throwing. Although the Gilad outpost was dismantled, it was soon re-established as were most of the other sites supposedly taken down six months ago.

There is every sign that the same ritual is being played out again. Yesha Council leader Benzi Lieberman even boasted to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz at the weekend that 10 new outposts had secretly been erected. He refused to reveal their locations but at least some of the sites were revived "dismantled" outposts. For example, the few tents and a shipping container that comprised Neve Tsuf, north of Ramallah, which was removed on 15 June, were replaced a few days later. The site was hastily set up earlier this month to mark the spot where two Israeli women were injured during a shooting attack.

Progress on destroying the four inhabited sites listed by the government was delayed by petitions lodged by the settlers that have been treated with unusual indulgence by the courts. The opportunity to dismantle Mitzpe Yitzhar came only when the courts dismissed the petitions of the settlers living there.

The timing, however, was fortuitous: the settlers were evicted the day before US Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived in the region to visit Sharon and the Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. In fact, the army began dismantling the site on the morning of 19 June, before the way had been fully cleared for it by the High Court. The judges still had to rule on a petition by one settler who had been missed in the original evacuation order. Nonetheless the army pressed ahead, with the court duly dismissing the last petition later that day.

The political coordination between the government, the settlers, the army and the courts suggested that, far from being a real attempt to begin evacuating settlements, the events of the last fortnight were a charade making use of the outposts as a backdrop.

If Sharon was serious about implementing the limited provisions of the roadmap, he could have dedicated his energies to the more painful but productive task of evacuating the few thousand settlers in the Gaza Strip, a concession that would have sent a hugely reassuring message to Palestinians that the Israeli government was taking a new direction.

It would also have vastly simplified the proposed transfer of power in the Strip from the Israeli army to the Palestinian security forces under Mohamed Dahlan.

Instead Sharon chose to rearrange the furniture on a few hilltops in the West Bank, a territory in which some 400,000 Israeli settlers are now firmly entrenched, many of them in small fortified cities around Jerusalem.

For those who doubt the deception, including some of the more extremist -- and literalist -- settlers, Sharon offered more than a hint of his true intentions. On Sunday he told a cabinet meeting that Israel could carry on building settlements in the territories "but should not celebrate the construction". The point, apparently, is to ensure only that Israel does not rub the international community's nose in this West Bank farce.

Asked whether the settlement of Ariel, home to nearly 20,000 Israelis, could be expanded, Sharon said it was possible -- apparently forgetting that such a move would violate the freeze on settlement expansion he agreed to at the Aqaba summit on 4 June. In fact, for anyone travelling through the West Bank, the orgy of Israeli construction is only too evident. At Avne Hafez, for example, an "authorised" settlement of some 1,000 Israelis close to Tulkarm, there are cranes working everywhere on erecting blocks of flats.

Intensive settlement building has been going on since the Oslo accords were signed in 1993: over the last decade the settler population has increased by some 60 per cent to 400,000, and the population living outside illegally annexed east Jerusalem has nearly doubled to 195,000.

The reason, says Dror Etkes of Peace Now, who monitors settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza, is that successive governments of the left and right wanted to create facts on the ground that would undermine the spirit of Oslo and make a Palestinian state unrealisable.

By dotting settlements and outposts around the main Palestinian population centres, Israel has gained control of nearly half the territory of the West Bank, including its vital water resources.

To encourage Israelis to move into the territories, the governments of Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and now Sharon have offered huge subsidies in almost every sphere of the settlers' lives.

One study last year by Zvi Ekstein, an economist at Tel Aviv University, suggested that settlers received as much as 16 times the government funding of ordinary Israelis. Most is hidden in the annual budget but some of the money has been identified:

* A treasury report last November revealed that 160,000 settlers enjoyed tax breaks worth some $30m in 2001, including tax rebates of seven per cent for those in the West Bank and 10 per cent for those in Gaza. In 2003, the tax breaks were costing $120m, according to information released by Meretz MK Mussi Raz.

* At least $60m has been spent on bypass roads in the West Bank in the past three years, with a similar amount budgeted for this year alone. Over the last decade three times as much has been spent per capita on paving roads in the occupied territories as has been spent in Israel.

* The army pays more than $2m rent each year to settlements for buildings used by soldiers to protect the sites. Many outposts also hook themselves up to the electricity supplies of military bases, leaving the army -- and Israeli taxpayers -- to foot the bill.

* Municipal budgets, according to a study last year by the Adva think-tank in Tel Aviv, were on average 60 per cent higher for settlements than they were for Jewish communities inside Israel over the past decade. Publicly funded house construction was more than 60 per cent higher in the settlements than inside Israel.

* Raz's figures revealed that 40 per cent of the rural construction budget went to the settlers, even though they are less than seven per cent of the population.

* A B'Tselem report shows that government discounts mean the cost of land in the occupied territories is between 50 and 70 per cent cheaper than in Israel.

* Almost all settlers receive a 90 per cent discount on pre- school tuition fees.

These figures do not include the huge defence bill incurred by Israel in guaranteeing the safety of the settlers, including the colossal costs currently being incurred to divert the wall being constructed around the West Bank to include as many of the more established settlements as possible.

Meretz MK Ran HaCohen was at a Knesset committee meeting last June where a Defence Ministry official, Yossi Vardi, admitted that there were three times the number of soldiers guarding the settlements and outposts as before the Intifada. At the same meeting the army demanded an extra $250m for settlement protection.

The parasitic relationship between the settlers and the army was highlighted this week when it was revealed that an infantry brigade preparing to begin service in the Palestinian city of Hebron, to protect a small enclave of 400 extremist settlers, had been addressed by a local settler leader, Noam Arnon. The meeting was apparently considered a normal part of the soldiers' induction and only came to light because a soldier objected to political remarks made by Arnon.

In fact, it is unclear whether the soldiers are in the West Bank and Gaza to safeguard the settlers, or whether the settlers are in the West Bank and Gaza to justify the presence of so many soldiers.

The one certainty is that both are tools of the government, used to provide constant justifications for confiscating more land from Palestinians: the expanding settlements and outposts eat up land close to Palestinian towns and villages, and the army can then declare closed military zones around the sites, on the grounds that the settlers need protecting.

The extent of the deception currently being perpetrated by Sharon, in destroying a few outposts while leaving the real problem untouched, was highlighted by a tour of the hilltops south of Bethlehem at the weekend led by Peace Now outpost hunter Dror Etkes.

He took a group of 30 left-wing Israelis to the Gush Etzion bloc of settlements that form a barrier between Bethlehem and Hebron. They stopped at Neve Daniel, a settlement established by Israel in 1982 that lies across the valley from the Palestinian village of Al-Khader, to the southwest of Bethlehem. Several cranes there are constructing yet more luxury villas to add to those already inhabited by some 800 settlers.

About half a kilometre along the ridge is Neve Daniel North, an "illegal" outpost set up a year ago as an "agricultural institute". Then there were only two caravans and a water tower; now there are about 10 caravans, four of them inhabited by families, guarded by a military base which is supplying the caravans with electricity.

"This is how a new settlement is born," says Etkes. "As soon as soldiers are attached to the site it is given a legitimacy by the government, whether or not it is still officially illegal. It becomes part of Israel's security needs. Within time it will become a new neighbourhood of Neve Daniel."

As the Peace Now coach pulled into the road leading to the settlement, it was greeted by a police van and two army jeeps. Alongside them was a car driven by the head of the Gush Etzion settlers council, Shaul Goldstein. Although the coach was not stopped from entering the area, Etkes told his party: "The army and the settlers know our every movement. They work together closely." He says the expansion of the outposts, which has been gathering pace in the last few years, is a reaction by the settlers to the Oslo process. "The settlement expansion began in the mid-1990s and it's been like an amoebae ever since, constantly growing."

The inhabitants of Neve Daniel now control swaths of land owned by Palestinians from surrounding villages like Al- Khader and Nahalin. After the army declared the surrounding area a closed military zone, Palestinian farmers were unable to reach their land. Under Ottoman law, if the land is uncultivated for three years it reverts to state ownership (in this case, becoming Israeli).

One farmer, 32-year-old Daoud Nassar from Bethlehem, has been struggling for a decade to keep hold of 400 dunums (100 acres) of fields registered in the name of his father in 1924. His lands are now encircled by the "authorised" settlements of Neve Daniel, Elazar, Allon Shevut and Rosh Zurim, as well as their "illegal" outgrowths -- Derech Haavot, Givat Hahish and Beerot Yitzhak.

Despite having ownership papers from the Ottomans, British, Jordanian and Israeli authorities, he has been fighting a legal battle through the Israeli courts since 1991 when the army declared the area state land.

Like his neighbours his lands were confiscated, in his case after the military courts ruled in January 2000, following a series of postponements, that he could not prove his ownership claim. He is currently appealing to the High Court, which has temporarily halted attempts by Neve Daniel to build access roads through his land.

But, according to Peace Now, the settlers will probably find a way to circumvent the law. Etkes says he responded to an official advert placed by the Gush Etzion council a fortnight ago asking for applications from "pioneer families". Without revealing his identity, he called the number on the leaflet and discovered that settler families were being recruited to set up an outpost on land close to Nassar's fields.

"Once the families are recruited, a road will have to be built through Daoud's land and an army base established to protect it. He will lose his land to the settlers."

Similar land thefts are taking place -- at an even more official level -- a short distance away close to two settlements southeast of Bethlehem: Tekoa and Noqedim. The latter is home to Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the avowedly racist National Union-Yisrael Beiteinu Party and a cabinet minister.

Last summer some 4,000 Palestinian villagers at Zatara discovered that a giant bypass road had been approved through their lands to connect the two settlements to Har Homa, a recently completed "city settlement" close to Jerusalem.

The need for the project, which is costing at least $15m, is based on a "combination of land and security considerations", according to the Defence Ministry. Officials also say it will enable the residents of Gush Etzion to reach Jerusalem more safely because they can avoid using roads that run through local Palestinian villages. What the ministry fails to mention is that there have been no incidents of violence in the area during the Intifada.

With the new eight-kilometre road in place, the villagers will lose hundreds of acres of land to the project, as well as more land that they cannot reach because it will be declared a military zone. If previous precedents are followed, Palestinians will also be banned from using their own roads in the area, many of which will cross the main highway.

Taha Donun, whose home lies on the very edge of the building site where bulldozers are levelling the land for the road, said he and his brothers had already had 100 dunums confiscated by the army. His cousin's house had been demolished.

Etkes said: "The road is pure incitement. It has no other purpose other than to steal land and instill yet more hatred in Palestinian hearts."

From AL.Ahram Weekly, please read to know the real facts.

During the Age of Enlightenment, Voltaire still had no doubts: "There is only one morality, just as there is only one geometry." But that universalist certainty decomposed long ago in the face of the denunciation of a wholly human origin of morality. The suspicion of a historical and cultural relativity of values, like the demystification undertakings that reduce them to ideological clothing hiding mechanisms of power, has shaken philosophical, religious or artistic faith in the absolute meaning of Truth, Good and Beauty. This great crisis of values, which profoundly stirred up the two centuries preceding ours, led to multiple uncertainties. Does the absence of a transcendent foundation, which allows for the rooting of eternal values in an unchanging heaven, or receiving them once and for all in an unquestionable revelation, signify the twilight of values? In a world marked by the planetary encounter of cultures, should we foresee virulent antagonisms and shocks between contrasting values? In the course of this new century, will we witness surprising and innovative hybridisations between value systems of origins and orientations that are currently foreign to one another?

Dividing lines

Overall poverty in Egypt may have dropped but there is a growing welfare disparity between urban and rural areas. Niveen Wahish looks at the findings of a recent report
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Amm Abdel-Ghaffar is poor. All day long, he stands by a set of Dokki traffic lights selling tissues, Ramadan lantern medals or balloons, depending on the time of year. It probably wouldn't interest Ghaffar that, according to a recent World Bank/Ministry of Planning joint report, poverty in Egypt has dropped from 19 to 17 per cent of the population. He has not benefited from this drop. In fact, there are still 10.7 million individuals living under the poverty line in Egypt despite these promising statistics.

The World Bank/Ministry of Planning report entitled, "Poverty Reduction in Egypt: Diagnosis and Strategy", attempts to diagnose the constituent elements and extent of poverty in Egypt in the latter half of the 90's. It is part of a larger effort to come up with detailed strategies to tackle poverty reduction.

The report draws on data from the Household Income, Expenditures and Consumption Surveys conducted by the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS) in 1995-96 and 1999-2000 as well as national accounts data and secondary data from government sources.

Arup Banerji, task team leader at the World Bank, said the report used the basic food and non-food needs approach to estimate the poverty line. Using expenditures or income as an indicator of poverty, the team concluded that there are multiple poverty lines for Egypt, depending on age and location. The average figure arrived at was LE998. However, Banerji noted that poverty was relatively shallow and not very severe, that is, most were close to the poverty line.

According to the report, the two per cent drop in poverty was achievable because of a high growth in the late '90s. However, this growth was not sustainable: "Since the time of the survey, growth rates have slumped, a slowdown in the domestic stimulus (especially credit) has also slowed the construction industry and tourism has slumped since 11 September. Given that poverty is shallow, there is a chance that many of those who escaped poverty during the 1995-2000 period, may have slipped back into poverty again."

But on the other hand, Egypt has made considerable progress towards improving some of the non-income dimensions of poverty such as improving literacy, mortality and healthcare.

While poverty has dropped, the drop has not been uniform across the country. According to Banerji, "the poverty pattern has changed into a geographical/ regional pattern." Rural areas are poor whereas urban areas are better off. The report found that most of the poor live in rural Upper Egypt. Moreover, the number of poor people and the share of people who are poor have also gone up in Upper Egypt. It attributed this "to a regionally biased pattern of growth during the late 90's. Most import- substituting manufacturing and domestic construction and trading has been in Lower Egypt. Upper Egypt has seen very little manufacturing activity". This difference may also be due to the differing productivity and crop patterns in the two regions.

Not only was there a disparity between regions, but poverty also varied according to the degree of education. The rate of poverty was highest amongst the illiterate. Almost 46 per cent of the poor are illiterate and 40 per cent have a basic education or less. "Poverty fell sharply as educational attainment grew," the report said.

One factor which made a difference to poverty is Egypt's safety net. However, according to the report, it was minimal and expensive. "350,000 more individuals would have been in poverty in 99/2000 had it not been for cash transfers from the government," the report stated. Subsidies on basic commodities, especially baladi bread, have raised 730,000 individuals out of poverty, the report added. But while this government assistance was useful, it could do with some modifications. For example, the bread subsidy, while being the most effective of commodity subsidies, was available to all Egyptians, regardless of their financial status. As for cash transfers, they need to be adjusted to take into account increases in the cost of living. They also need to be better targeted by broadening the eligibility criteria and making larger allocations to poorer governorates.

With these findings the report has set a number of criteria on which a poverty-eradication strategy could be based. It has pointed to the importance of establishing the economic foundations for more sustainable job growth with an increased focus on productivity. The report also stressed the need to improve education, whether by expanding primary education or improving the quality of secondary education. Furthermore, the government needs to work on improving regional disparities. "Upper and rural Egypt in particular, need a continued push in terms of effective development investments."

From Al.Ahram weekly newspaper

Getting a grip on poverty
Can the current global economic system bring about the eradication of poverty? Fatemah Farag went to Alexandria for an answer

"Why doesn't anyone listen to the poor?" asked Mustafa Kamel El-Sayed, director of Cairo University's Centre for the Study of Developing Countries (CSDC). It was a peculiar question to ask the participants in the closing session of an international conference entitled "From poverty to dignity: strategies for social cohesion in Euro- Mediterranean countries," that was held this week in Alexandria. The delegates had just spent the past two days re-iterating how important "listening to the poor" is and using, in the process, a smorgasbord of developmental terms: human development, advocacy, participation and mobilisation. Again and again the concepts of democracy, social responsibility and peace were brought up as keys to development -- comprehensive and sustainable development that is.
"These ideas and concepts have been expressed before and will be expressed again," admitted El-Sayed to Al-Ahram Weekly. "However, this event is different in that it brings together five constituencies in the battle against poverty; namely, members of parliament, senior government officials, the media, non- governmental organisatons and academics. The objective is not only to come up with new ideas but to stress the principle of sharing responsibility at different levels -- private and public, government and civil, North and South -- and to use this understanding as a basis for action. For example, our European partners complain of immigration. It is up to us to tell them that they must hold their governments accountable for their investment decisions, as measures to be taken in dealing with the problem of immigration from south to north."
And while yet another reiteration of well practiced clichés seemed to be the order of the day, undercurrents of genuine debate erupted throughout the two days.
One such contretemps unfolded at the closing ceremony. "A world cannot stand that it is partly rich but mostly poor," said Ismail Serageddin, director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and a senior World Bank veteran. While Serageddin went on to assert that poverty could only be eradicated at times of economic growth and that this entailed a sound macro-economic policy, development of the private sector and several other factors, he averred that, so far, the formula has resulted in the "poor benefiting last and benefiting the least". Hence the emphasis on social policy. "I want to abolish the term 'free market' from our vocabulary. We want competitive markets that are regulated -- after all, Wall Street is highly regulated," added Serageddin.
And while it seemed that everyone was speaking the same language, Adib Ne'meh, project manager at the Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs, got up and argued that much of what had been said implies that "We must eradicate poverty without eliminating the [free market] economy. I do not believe this is true. I argue that this is a society that cannot last."
Ne'meh's outburst brought murmurs of "finally" and "at last" from across the room. After all, although everyone agrees that knowledge is key to human development, one participant pointed out, "Where would Bill Gates be if he did not have minimum wage labourers working to put together his computers?"
The conference, held at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, was organised by both CSDC and the North-South Centre of the Council of Europe -- an autonomous agency whose official name is the European Centre for Global Interdependence and Solidarity and which currently boasts 20 member states. "The idea of this conference came as a common reflection between the CSDC and the North-South Centre regarding the relationship between poverty and social cohesion," recounted El-Sayed.
And hence, the prestigious list of delegates -- Klaus Halla, director of the Finnish Strategic Planning Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, Pierre Salama, director of the Economy Centre at the University of Paris Nord, Miguel-Angel Martinez, president of the Executive Council of the North-South Centre and from Brazil, Candido Grybowski, representing the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analyses (IBASE) and chairperson of the WSF.
The gathering seemed to reflect a wide array of perspectives, ranging from mainstream development theory of the World Bank variety to an anti-globalisation premise. El-Sayed noted the representation of the anti-globalisation perspective as one of the significant features of the conference. "Clearly, the anti-globalisation movement has been much stronger in Latin America. In the Arab world, although there have been many critics of globalisation and its manifestations, we have not participated actively in the wider movement. This meeting is an opportunity to bring us closer to an international movement," explained El-Sayed.
In the end, the initial question remained -- can poverty be eradicated by working from within the prevailing economic system?

A wealthier world will not necessarily result in the eradication of poverty
"More than 1.2 billion people -- one in every five on Earth -- survive on less that US$1 per day. During the 1990s the share of people suffering from extreme poverty fell from 30 per cent to 23 per cent. But with a growing world population, the number fell by just 123 million -- a small fraction of the progress needed to eliminate poverty. And, excluding China, the number of extremely poor people actually increased by 28 million." -- Human Development Report 2003
These are the stark facts that a world proud of its advancement in the realms of technology, communications, economic growth and culture, must face. The number of hungry people in the world has increased; 15 per cent of the world's population suffers from chronic hunger. In many parts of the globe the number of people with access to education remains low; more than 30,000 children worldwide die every day of preventable diseases; only 10 per cent of global research and development focusses on the health problems of 90 per cent of the world's people; gender inequality continues to result in the oppression of women; over one billion people have no access to safe water -- as a direct consequence of which the number of children who died as a result of diarrhoea in the 1990s was higher than the total number of deaths due to armed conflict since World War II. According to this year's Human Development Report (HDR) launched this week by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), "Growth can be ruthless or it can be poverty reducing, depending on its pattern, on structural aspects of the economy and on public policies. Poverty has increased in some countries that have achieved overall economic growth, and over the past two decades income inequality worsened in 33 of 66 developing countries with data."
In a press release issued at the launch, UNDP Administrator Mark Mallock Brown noted that, "This report shows that there are many countries where income levels are high enough to end absolute poverty, but where pockets of deep poverty remain, often because of worrying patterns of discrimination in the provision of basic services." Arab countries provide a case in point. According to HDR 2003, while high income has improved many aspects of human development since 1970, "of all the regions [of the world] the Arab States have the widest gap between incomes and other aspects of human development."
The HDR, which has been published annually by UNDP since 1990, is prepared by an independent team of experts and aims to measure human development in terms beyond mere per capita income. This includes access to basic requirements, freedom, dignity and human agency. HDR has developed the Human Development Index (HDI), which is a composite measure of life expectancy, education and per capita GDP. The 2003 HDI ranks 175 countries for 2001, the most recent year of available data. Norway is at the top of the list, while Sierra Leone is at the bottom; most of those countries rated as being poorer in 2000 than 1990 are in sub-Saharan Africa.
HDR argues that this trend of increasing poverty -- and all its manifestations -- can be reversed if there is political will to adopt and work towards the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). The MDG comprise eight goals, each of which is a specific commitment to contain the spread of poverty and disease by 2015. The goals were ratified by 189 countries at the UN-sponsored Millennium Summit in September 2000. Omar Noman, deputy director of the Human Development Report Office in New York, was in Cairo for the launch of 2003 HDR, and told journalists that the MDG "are not abstract goals, but clear benchmarks that provide a framework for accountability".
Most developing countries, however, have non- transparent systems where little information is available to the public and governments are not held accountable for their actions. Noman pointed out that government policy reforms were an important aspect of the MDG, stating also that in some cases where access to information had been provided, development problems had been solved. "In Uganda it became clear that 75 per cent of resources [earmarked for] education did not reach local schools. Through the involvement of the media and civil society this figure was brought down to 3 per cent. A change in the culture of accountability is possible. But the first step is to have the information." He acquiesced, however, that the MDG "will not solve all the problems of participation. But what they will have done is have pushed the envelope on the table."
A pledge to support the MDG was made again recently during the G8 Summit held last June in Evian, France. And last year, the long decline in aid flow ended and the amount of aid increased from $52.3 billion in 2001 to $57 billion in 2002; at the Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, both rich and poor countries pledged support for policy reforms and to provide new resources -- namely an annual increase in aid flows which will reach $16 billion by 2006 -- to achieve the implementation of MDG. However, the UNDP estimates that the total aid flows "will still fall far short of the $100 billion minimum needed per year to meet the goals". The 2003 HDR also points out that, "despite these welcoming commitments in principle to reducing poverty... the world is already falling short."
It is not just the amount of aid which is problematic, but its content. According to Noman, "politically motivated aid has yielded poor results... [Another] chronic problem has been short- term aid. Long-term commitments to fund recurrent costs is what is required."
According to the 2003 HDR, in order to achieve development goals "poor countries cannot on their own tackle the structural constraints that keep them in poverty traps, including rich country tariffs and subsidies that restrict market access for their exports, patents that restrict access to technology that can save lives and unsustainable debt owed to rich-country governments and multilateral institutions".
And liberalisation of economies is no longer the "one answer that fits all" solution. Asked by Al- Ahram Weekly to comment on the relationship between structural adjustment packages and human development, Noman said that, "it would take a brave person to say that privatisation has been bad for India. But premature liberalisation can also be harmful, and in the priority countries [the 50 poorest countries identified by the HDR 2003] the market will not do it. It is important to find the balance between the responsibilities of the state and the private sector. This report shifts the debate from being either with or against liberalisation to breaking the process down."
To address the fact that global achievement of the MDG is behind schedule, HDR 2003 has also launched the Millennium Development Compact (MDC), which is a partnership between developed and developing countries "aimed squarely at implementing the Millennium Declaration" by providing a "broad framework for how national development strategies and international support from donors, international agencies and others can be both better aligned and commensurate with the scale of the challenge of the goals... [putting] responsibilities squarely on both sides; requiring bold reforms from poor countries and obliging donor countries to step forward and support those efforts".
The HDR 2003 suggests increasing the level, efficiency and equity of investments in basic health, education, water and sanitation; expanding poor people's access to land, credit, skills and other economic assets; and promoting labour intensive industrial growth involving small and medium-size enterprises.
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, the report's author, noted that, "there is nothing inevitable about human poverty." All that remains it seems is to redistribute the world's wealth more equitably.

Al-Ahram Weekly