A Grand Yet Practical Agenda for World Leaders

This will be the year that world leaders are confronted with a hugely ambitious agenda to make the world safer and its people healthier and more productive. But the same groups of experts who have laid out the daunting challenges of our times have also offered detailed recommendations on how to meet these lofty goals.

On Monday, January 17, a new report on economic development and poverty reduction was released by the UN Millennium Project, an assemblage of ten task forces led by outspoken Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs. The project presents a status report of little or no progress 5 years into a 15-year push, known as the Millennium Development Goals, in which governments promised to alleviate extreme poverty by broadening access to health care (including prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and TB), education (particularly for girls), safe drinking water, productive employment, and world markets. Far from defeatist, though, the Millennium Project showed what can be done to achieve the goals in the remaining decade.

This document comes six weeks after another group—the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, a group of 16 eminent figures from around the world convened by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan—called for an overhaul of the intergovernmental system for peace and security. The two reports are closely linked in both substance and process. The high-level panel casts aside the oft-drawn distinction between "hard security" (weapons and wars) and "soft security" (social and economic conditions) and highlights the interconnections between the threats of today's world.

In societies with very few resources, armed gangs often opportunistically move in to seize control and use their grip on power to consolidate their position and wealth. Their ability to do so is enabled by the relative weakness of the government; sometimes, as in Sierra Leone and Liberia, they gain control over the formal levers of power. The shadowy networks of black markets are also used by terrorists, such as when Al Qaeda laundered some of its finances through the West African diamond market. But even when the connection is not so explicit, terrorists use the economic disparities of globalization as a grievance against the industrial powers.

Looked at another way, how can AIDS, which claimed more than three million lives last year, not be viewed as a threat to the security and stability of countries, particularly in Africa? In many countries, extreme poverty reduces life expectancy as dramatically, or more so, than war does in other places. The high-level panel took a comprehensive and holistic approach in its definition of security: "Any event or process that leads to large-scale death or lessening of life changes and undermines states as the basic unit of the international system is a threat to international security."

Conversely, a serious international effort to reduce extreme poverty will mean longer and higher quality lives for millions. As the Millennium Project points out, if the development goals were achieved, 30 million more children would survive past their fifth birthday than do today—just as two million of their mothers would survive their birth. More important, the development experts remind us that the means for achieving the goals are readily at hand. Experience has shown that aid workers and local officials offer the best ways to keep girls in school, prevent mothers from dying in childbirth, improve agricultural yields, and reverse deforestation.

The High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change similarly outlines practical approaches to seemingly daunting challenges. It recommends programs to boost the ability of nations to collect and share information on terrorists, new controls on fissile nuclear material to prevent the spread of dangerous weapons technologies, tougher monitoring and enforcement of sanctions, and clearer criteria for the use of force.

For all of these challenges, all that is needed is concerted effort and adequate resources—both of which can be unleashed only through the shared commitment of developed and developing country governments alike. And that is the other common thread through the Millennium Project and high-level panel reports: they both throw down gauntlets for the world's political leaders.

This will be an intensive year of diplomacy and negotiation over major issues. The two reports set the agenda for a UN summit in September (Kofi Annan will add his own report in March to sharpen the issues). The danger is that leaders will try to deflect pressure from themselves onto others. This is the international politics-as-usual that has stymied action on such situations as the current genocide in Darfur, Sudan; agricultural subsidies and other trade barriers; and the tug-of-war over the sanctions on Saddam that ultimately led to the Iraq war. These reports serve as a conscience, reminding us of the real problems, the available solutions, and the stakes for ordinary people the world over.