Thursday, September 25, 2008

Facing great Millennium Development Goals

World leaders at the Millennium Summit in the year of 2000 mapped out a set of millennium Development Goals to alleviate poverty. Progress has been made globally toward attaining them to date and 2008 is the year for a mid-term review of the MDGs. At the time for the new periodic review of these goals, the High-level Event on the Millennium Development Goals that opens at the UN Headquarters Thursday, or September 25, will draw increasing global attention.

MDGs, which were agreed at the UN Millennium Summit in Sept. 2000, cover eight areas with goals set to be achieved by 2015 that respond to the world's main development challenges. In fact, they are, among others, to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, to popularize education in elementary schools, to promote sex equality and autonomy of women, to reduce child mortality and morbidity rate, to improve maternal health reinforce, to battle against HIV/AIDS, malaria and other major diseases, to ensure environmental sustainability and to advance a global partnership of development.

The eight goals, which offer a blueprint with concrete targets for development, are to halve the global population in extreme poverty by 2015, to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2005, to fulfill tasks to eliminate gender disparity at all levels of education by 2015 and to halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS by 2015. So, actions rather words are particularly crucial and imperative before these great goals.

This poses indeed a final examination on global development, whereas China's performance in this severe test is especially eye-catching because the nation is a permanent member of the UN Security Council as well as the largest developing country with a population of 1.3 billion people.

With an aggravated imbalance in global economy coupled with outstanding, thorny problems of finance, energy and food security over recent years, China has, for its part, worked in an earnest, pragmatic and down-to-earth way to overcome all kinds of difficulties and obstacles, and contributed itself in the attainment of MDGs. As a pace-setter to eliminate extreme poverty, the country has solved the problem of feeding its own 1.3 billion people by means of protecting the arable land, building or further improving farmland irrigation facilities and farming conditions, and striving to spread agro-science technologies.

Thanks to these viable and active efforts, its poor population dropped from 62.13 million in 2000 to 28.41 million in 2007, and the ratio or proportion of rural poverty fell from 6.7 percent to 3 percent during the last seven-year period; those Chinese freed from poverty during the 1990-2007 period accounted for more than 70 percent of the global population in poverty. Consequently, China has become the first country to fulfill the goal of halving its needy population set by the United Nations MDGs ahead of schedule.

While stepping up its own economic development, China has constantly helped other developing nations in their endeavors to attain their MDGs in strict compliance with the "principle of acting according to one's ability and each doing his utmost". Apart from reducing or exempting 376 debts of 49 heavily indebted poor countries and least developed countries without any conditions, it has decided to grant zero-tariff treatment to 42 least developed nations which have diplomatic ties with the country, and it has so far actually carried out the zero-tariff treatment with 39 of these LDCs.

With regard to the African countries, which have more difficulties in achieving MDGs, China has intensified its efforts to come to their aid. Its government has offered various types of aid packages to assist them, and signed bilateral aid agreements with 48 countries, and provided them with more than 800 complete sets of equipment. Meanwhile, the Chinese government has helped Africa train approximately 30,000 personnel of various professions; it also exempted 308 debts of 34 heavily indebted and least developed African nations, and signed debt exemption protocols or deals with 32 countries.

Besides, China has scored periodic progress in such aid avenues as its grant of preferable loans to Africa, in building agricultural technology demonstration centers, putting up hospitals, setting up centers for malaria prevention and treatment, and proving new combination drugs for malaria treatment for African nations.

In the present-day world, people have come to recognize "the me in you" and "the you in me", and so global ties of interests have never been so close and interwoven as they are today. So we have no option but to pull together and concert efforts to help one another in times of trouble. We not only want to be good ourselves alone but also very much want others to be good too. Its significance is not merely a good political intention, as we believe to a great extent that helping others is simply meant to help oneself.

China has striven to implement MDGs in an all-round way via its own endeavor and, with its own development, it proceeds to prompt other developing countries to attain their MDGs; this gives expression to China's diplomatic concept of keeping to the path for peaceful development, the mutual-beneficially and win-win strategy of opening to the outside world and adherence to spurring the development of a harmonious world.

Taking a broad and more farsighted view, the establishment and execution of this concept in such a big developing nation is indeed a vital contribution, which is beneficial to the Chinese nation and its people as well as the world at large.

By People's Daily Online and its author is PD desk editor Wen Xian

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