Do you remember the Millennium ( 千禧年) Goals? (61) When world leaders celebrated the year 2000 with a serious promise to reduce poverty and hunger, check the spread of AIDS, get boys and girls into school, and improve public health, all by 2015?
Well, three years down the road, and the UNDP' s yearly collection of facts and figures al-ready shows that if we carry on as we are, the only goal likely to be met is that for reducing pover-ty by a half, and that is entirely due to the success of one country--China. (62)It is so vast that the fast growing economy in China lifts millions of people above the poverty line, even though in Africa, Latin America and the former Soviet Union, people have actually been getting poorer.
Otherwise, progress is good only in parts. (63)East Asia should meet its goal of reducing hunger by a half by 2015, and Latin America and the Caribbean are not far behind, but at the pres-ent speed of progress, Africa and South Asia won' t get there for another hundred years.
The good news is that it can be done--there are success stories. (64)Ghana--an economic basket case in the eighties and early nineties--has managed to find a way out of its difficulties and it's now comfortably in the middle range of countries, way ahead of the much more naturally wealthy Nigeria. (65)For Congo, Cambodia or Iraq, ruined by war, or every southern African country damaged by AIDS, there is a Mauritius or a South Korea steadily working its way up the league table towards a better life for its people.