Two from Roger Coate

Roger Coate, a long time member of the Board of Directors of Americans for UNESCO has published two important articles in The Interdependent Winter 2007-2008 issue. The Interdependent is the flagship publication of the United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA).

• Poverty Goals: The Possible, the Probable, the Unlikely

  The article points out that while the Millennium Development Goals are not likely to be met, their importance may not be so much in defining a specific development path as in creating a process by which the nations of the world focus on poverty and agree on means to combat it.



• AID AND DEBT RELIEF: Development’s Bottom Line

  Coate shows that the donor community is lagging badly on its committments to provide financial assistance to developing nations. Moreover, that assistance is being focused on only a few countries, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The lack of donor assistance, which is covered in MDG 8, is in part responsible for the shortfall in meeting the other Millennium Development Goals. So too is the international trade domain that does not allow developing nations equitable access to international markets. Coate notes that a bad as the failure to achieve the Millennium Development Goals might be, abandonment of the global effort to erradicate poverty would be much worse for the world.