The Millennium Development Goals continued to serve as the main focal point for the UN system’s development activities. The year 2007 marked the midpoint of the MDG process, which was targeted to conclude in 2015, and so far the results were mixed. On the one hand, many countries were achieving rapid poverty reduction, and globally extreme poverty was declining to below the one billion mark. At the same time, however, the world was not on target for achieving the MDGs, and the world’s poorest peoples remained mired in squalor.
The World Bank’s Africa Development Indicators 2007 reported that fundamental change was occurring in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Many African countries were demonstrating sustained growth rates, but such growth was very uneven. Large oil-exporting countries accounted for more than 60% of total net foreign direct investment in the region. Those countries with expanding and diversified economies were also moving ahead. Nigeria and South Africa accounted for more than half of all gross domestic product in the region. Countries being left behind were generally those with few natural resources and little to trade or those that were prone to internal conflict.
The eighth identified goal (known as MDG 8) focused on building a global partnership for development, with three primary targets: trade, aid, and debt. MDG 8 called for the further development of an open rule-based, predictable, and nondiscriminatory trading and financial system. The World Trade Organization’s latest series of trade negotiations—the Doha round—continued its on-again, off-again character. After having made some progress in getting countries to commit to eliminate tariffs and quotas on most imports from less-developed countries, talks had stalled in 2006 over reducing agricultural subsidies, tariffs, and industrial market access. Negotiations resumed in June 2007 but again broke down when the so-called Group of Four—the U.S., the EU, India, and Brazil—were unable to find common ground for agreement.
After several years of increases, official development assistance fell in 2006 by 5.1% to $103.9 billion. Only five donor countries—Denmark, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden—had reached the 0.7% of gross national income target consensually agreed to by participants at the 2002 Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development. On the other hand, debt relief for the world’s poorest countries moved ahead. As of October 2007, 41 countries were involved in the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) process and were eligible or potentially eligible for $68 billion in debt relief, and 22 had reached the so-called HIPC “completion point” making debt relief irrevocable. Ten additional countries were receiving some relief under HIPC, and another nine were potentially eligible for such relief.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 issued its fourth assessment report, which concluded that irrefutable scientific evidence showed that climate change was occurring and that there was high certainty that the cause was human. (See Special Report.) The secretary-general and other world leaders inside and outside the UN increased pressure on the United States and other countries to move beyond denying the problem of global climate change and join in finding solutions. In October the IPCC and former U.S. vice president Al Gore were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for their “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” (See Nobel Prizes.)
HIV continued to be the world’s most serious infectious disease. The 2007 AIDS Epidemic Update, using significantly revised and improved epidemiological data and analyses, reported that the percentage of people newly infected with HIV had been leveling off, even though the total number of persons living with HIV continued to increase. In December 2007, 33.2 million people were living with HIV; 2.5 million were newly infected during the year, and 2.1 million died of AIDS-related causes. The new methodology, when applied to 2006 data, reduced the previous estimate of 39.5 million people living with HIV in 2006 by 16% to 32.7 million. The new UNAIDS epidemiological methodologies indicated that global HIV prevalence peaked in the late 1990s, and the total number of persons dying from AIDS-related illnesses had declined in the past two years. Sub-Saharan Africa remained the most severely affected region, with 68% of the global total, but even there a significant reduction in new infections had occurred since 2001. Eight countries in that region accounted for one-third of the new cases.