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In September 2000, at the United Nations Millennium Summit, the 191 member countries in the United Nations agreed to a set of eight Millennium Development Goals for the world's poor nations. These goals, targeted for fulfillment by 2015, have since become the fulcrum for public policy discussions and actions concerning economic and social development. Meetings and conferences on the goals under the auspices of the United Nations and the governing bodies of member countries have been held regularly since 2001, most recently at the 2005 Millennium +5 Summit. The aim of these meetings and conferences has been to reiterate the goals and to reaffirm the commitment of countries to them, as well as to assess the extent to which progress has been made toward their fulfillment. Most of the Millennium Development Goals may seem at first sight unobjectionable. Nevertheless, they were not the result of an initiative from the South itself, but were pushed primarily by the triad (the United States, Europe, and Japan), and were co-sponsored by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. All of this has raised the question of whether they are mainly ideological cover (or worse) for neoliberal initiatives. Samir Amin's systematic and revealing critique of the Millennium Development Goals is therefore of the utmost significance. The goals themselves are appended to this article. The declaration adopted by the general assembly is available at http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e.pdf.-Ed.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were adopted by acclamation in September 2000 by a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly called "United Nations Millennium Declaration." This procedural innovation, called "consensus," stands in stark contrast to UN tradition, which always required that texts of this sort be carefully prepared and discussed at great length in committees. This simply reflects a change in the international balance of power. The United States and its European and Japanese allies are now able to exert hegemony over a domesticated UN. In fact, Ted Gordon, wellknown consultant for the CIA, drafted the millennium goals!
The claim is made that the MDGs follow up on the conclusions reached in the cycle of summits organized in the 1990s. That's going a bit too far. The preparatory meetings to these summits had tried something...