The Vital Development Mission

Poverty is no longer uniquely a humanitarian challenge for the developed nations of the West; it is now a first-order security problem. The evidence is now overwhelming that poverty contributes to violent conflict, helps the spread of infectious diseases, threatens global income growth and causes environmental damage. Governments are beginning to react to this threat, but have yet to mount a collective effort sufficient to stem the tide. What is needed is an alignment of resources, cooperative action and policies that will reverse the momentum of pervasive poverty in a world whose population of poor people is expected to grow exponentially in coming decades. This alignment will not be possible until there is renewed appreciation for the development mission. It would appear that Western governments find it easier to reach accord on development goals than to find the political will necessary to achieve them. In 2001, for example, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These goals collectively commit nations to address a series of development challenges and specified targets for them to meet, most by the year 2015.1 Despite an increase in official development assistance from US$56 billion in 1993,2 to US$78 billion in 2004,3 few are optimistic that these goals can be reached within this timeframe. American leadership has been largely absent despite a significant rise in its foreign assistance spending, some 60 percent since the mid-1990s.4 President George W. Bush created a new development agency, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), with the promise of US$5 billion a year in new spending for poor nations deemed to “rule justly, invest in their people and encourage economic freedom.”5 He also pledged US$15 billion to combat HIV/AIDS,6 and US$1.2 billion to counter the threat of malaria in Africa.7 The MDGs and the increase in resources committed to foreign aid are promising signs of a new awareness of the threat poverty holds, but thus far efforts fall far short of what is needed. I will argue here that: 1) most of the US increase in foreign assistance appropriations is non-developmental in nature and has little impact on poverty per se; 2) the utter absence of coordination within the US Government significantly reduces our ability to adopt a strategic approach to development and to play the leadership role expected of the United States in the achievement of the MDGs; and 3) the lack of coherence among development, finance and trade policies undercuts the limited investments we are making in the effort to reduce poverty.