Beyond tomorrow

“The  future starts today, not tomorrow,” Pope John Paul II once cautioned. That reality underpins the new Asian Development Bank study  that sketches “a daunting unfinished agenda when the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) expire in 2015.”

“What’s that?” asked this newly elected scion of a Visayas dynasty. “Cross my heart. I didn’t know that we and 188 others countries adopted MDGs in 2000,” he admitted.

MDGs are eight targets to tamp down deprivation from hunger as well as high infant and maternal death rates. These  goals were worked into indicators. “MDG’s chief appeal is that they convert high rhetoric into hard numbers,” the Economist  noted.

“We could have achieved MDGs under the (Arroyo) regime”, says the study “Winning the Numbers, Losing the War.” But corruption   raged unchecked. (The regime) was born in turbulence,governed in turbulence (and) left many issues demanding urgent closure….”

In 2015, the United Nations will receive from members states reports on how they achieved—or flubbed—MDG targets. That’s less than two years away. “I never think of the future,” the physicist Albert Einstein once said. “It comes soon enough.” But, many newly elected officials are not aware the world has moved on.

“A global debate is underway on challenges of a post-2015 development agenda,” ADB says. “The focus in this fast growing region should be on the glaring gaps in MDG achievements.”

The Philippines Family Health Survey, for example, documents that 221 mostly faceless mothers now die in every 100,000 live births. That’s up from 162 deaths in 2006. There has been a tragic U-turn in decline of maternal deaths, sociologist Mary Racelis notes. Then and now, most of those deaths were preventable. Our chances of meeting the MDG target to slash maternal deaths to 52 in two years are zero. “Goal 5 is least likely to be achieved by 2015,” the National Economic and Development Authority warned.

The bank’s new study is titled: “ADB’s Support for Achieving  Millennium Development Goals.” Aside from measuring gaps between pledges and delivery, the study  tries to improve the setting and tracking of development  targets.

Asia and the Pacific did very well in  tamping down income poverty. This slumped from 55 percent in the early 1990s to 24 percent by the late 2000s. “This is a historically unprecedented global achievement.”  Nonetheless,  two-thirds of the world’s poor cluster in this region. Gaps between the rich and poor have widened in about half of  economies in Asia and the Pacific.

Here, 28 out of every 100 Filipinos scrounge below national poverty lines—unchanged over the last six years, says the 2013   National Statistical Coordination Board  report. About  20 percent of the poorest make do with six pesos out of every 100 in the total national income. You see that in slum families or in scrawny kids cadging for handouts. “Children from the poorest households run twice the risk of dying before age five.”

“Continuing the same pattern of growth will not be enough to stem rising inequalit,” says Independent Evaluation’s Director General Vinod Thomas.  “Nor will it  reverse environmental degradation in time—problems that in turn threaten sustained economic growth.” Inequality is not strait-jacketed into income poverty. Much of Asia and the Pacific suffer  “from large disparities in the provision of basic services.”

Out of 100 Filipino kids, 88 are immunized against measles, notes the United Nation Development Program’s 2013 Human Development Report. It is 96 for Malaysia. Six out of 10 Filipino mothers deliver babies with properly trained birth attendants. In contrast, almost 99 percent of births in Thailand have medical personnel present.

In Asia and the Pacific, the number of underweight children aged below 5 declined only from 35 percent in the early 1990s to 25 percent  by the late 2000s. Here, under-age-5 child death rates or “U5MR” were halved between 1990 and 2011. Two decades back, 59 kids out of every thousand births, never made it to age 5.

Still, 29 out of every 1,000 kids under five die daily—far below Sri Lanka’s 17. United Nations Children’s Fund’s survey on under 5 deaths  pegs the Philippines into Slot 80 among 193 nations. That shoved us almost on a par with Dominican Republic but far behind Malaysia.

Babies born preterm—before the 37th week of pregnancy—are specially vulnerable. “The shorter the term of pregnancy, the greater the risks of death.” About half of Filipino children’s deaths occur within this narrow deadly window. Most of these deaths occur at home. Unrecorded, they remain invisible to all but their grieving families.

The quality of economic growth is essential. A positive link between economic growth and human development is not automatic.  You can impoverish even in boom times.

Confronting environmental degradation caused by the region’s rapid economic growth will persist well into the post-MDG era. “There has been slow progress and even regression on some environmental targets in many countries,” writes Linda Arthur, the ADB  study’s principal author.

In his 2015 report to the UN, President Benigno Aquino III  shouldn’t  dally with why we didn’t  achieve MDG Goals 1, 2 and 5. You can’t eat excuses. P-Noy set higher standards of integrity. That’d  anchor the critical task of closing governance and accountability deficits at all levels for whoever  Filipinos will elect after P-Noy.

He (or more likely she?) can build on his reforms to tackle the post-2015  agenda vigorously. As John F Kennedy cautioned: “Those who only look to the past are certain to miss the future.”