Caritas Internationalis welcomes the renewed commitment to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which emerged at a global poverty meeting at the UN in New York this week.
 
By the end of the High Level Event on the Millennium Development Goals, new contributions and pledges on global poverty amounted to around US$16 billion.
 
Caritas Internationalis President Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga addressed heads of state at the event, urging them to go further on existing pledges on aid to address the impact of climate change on the poorest communities.
 
“We need to be able to imagine ourselves not in a “Third World” and a “First World” but in one world in which our duties to the poor are shared,” said the Cardinal in his speech.
 
"We don't need to go to the UN to understand poverty," he said after the event.
 
"We witness its harmful impact on the lives of the poor every day. But it was important that representatives of civil society were present at the meeting. By linking civil society with governments we can create the necessary partnerships to challenge the global structures that keep poor communities poor."
 
Caritas said that if the US$16 billion is new money then it will be an essential boost to achieving the MDGs by the target date of 2015. Currently many of the goals are decades off track, especially in sub-Saharan Africa 
 
However, rich countries at the meeting failed to address the decline in their aid flows to poor countries. OECD figures show that official development assistance of the G7 group of most industrialised countries fell by 1 percent in 2007, excluding debt relief. 
 
Caritas said that the US$700 billion loan proposed to save the US financial system this week shows that money exists when crisis threatens, and what greater emergency than nearly 10 million children dying each year of preventable causes? 
 
Up to US$1.6 billion was pledged at the UN to fostering food security and around US$2 billion was committed to improving child mortality and maternal health.
 
Caritas sees the US$3 billion pledged towards launching the Malaria Action Plan as particularly positive as the disease kills one million people each year and there are cheap low tech solutions to lowering that number.
 
An MDG summit is planned for 2010 in a bid to galvanize efforts in the run-up to the goals’ 2015 deadline.
 
Full text of Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga speech.