UNDP Official Praises China's Millennium Achievements

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, July 09, 2003

UNDP Official Praises China's Millennium Achievements

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China is succeeding in meeting most of its millennium goals, said Kerstin Leitner, the outgoing United Nations Development Program (UNDP) resident representative in China Tuesday at a farewell press conference.

At the United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000 in New York, the United Nations Millennium Declaration was adopted. All the participating UN member states pledged to achieve by 2015 the following goals: eradication of extreme poverty and hunger; universal primary education; gender equality and the empowerment of women; reduction of child mortality; improved maternal health; control of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; environmental sustainability; and a global partnership for development.

"China is doing well", said Leitner, who will soon finish her five-year term as the top UNDP official in China, and will work as a senior official at the World Health Organization, also a UN agency.

She said that in the past five years, the Chinese people overall had attained a higher standard of living. Leitner demonstrated some maps of China human development, mortality rate, maternal mortality rate and rural safe drinking water to emphasize what she said was a surprising achievement.

To achieve these goals would need the participation of the government, business circles, the private sector and individuals, she said.

She said severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) had also brought opportunities to China. For example, more people tended to drink boiled water, reducing the spread of infectious water-borne diseases.

Public awareness of the benefits of hygiene and physical activity had also been raised, and people knew that they must be fit to protect themselves from disease, she said.

Leitner said her happiest moment at the post was China's ratification of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 2001. The resulting projects to relieve poverty in the countryside had brought practical benefits to the poor.

She said China had undergone rapid changes and become economically successful, but the benefits of development were uneven: some people paid attention to the economy and trade aspects, but forgot about social and cultural life; some wanted to become rich and ignore happiness and social security, among others.

China needed to focus on these issues as it integrated with the international community, Leitner said.

UN Hails China's Anti-poverty Campaign

Serving as an inter-governmental UN agency, the UNDP has been working closely with the Chinese Government since it started its operations in China in September 1979, wrote Leitner in the foreword of a UNDP brochure.

The UNDP also hailed China's achievements in poverty reduction as an example for countries throughout East Asia to follow.

Kerstin Leitner said she was very happy that the UNDP's programme has helped many poor people out of poverty.

For example, a Uygur woman in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region lifted herself out of poverty after receiving a micro-credit from the UNDP programme.

Living a poor life in the past, the woman even "wanted to commit suicide," Leitner noted. Moreover, such poverty alleviation projects also helped the local women improve their social status.

The number of people living in extreme poverty in China has been halved over the past decade - a success linked not only to its enormous economic growth, but also to its efforts to productively employ society's have-nots, another UN expert was quoted as saying Tuesday by the Associated Press.

The UN said China led the attack on poverty in East Asia, where the percentage of people living on less than US$1 a day dropped from 33 per cent in 1990 to 16 per cent in 2000. China's 9 per cent growth rate during the decade helped lift 150 million people out of dire poverty, the agency said.

"China has been key because of economic and policy reforms, focusing on agriculture and small-to-medium enterprises," said Santosh Mehrotra, one of the authors of the UN Human Development Programme 2003 report.

The report, which covered the entire world, praised China's approach in fighting poverty.

China's reforms are "why the poor are coming out of poverty," Mehrotra said at a news conference in Bangkok. "The pace of growth matters, but the pattern of growth matters even more. The focus needs to be on sectors where the poor are employed."

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