Radio One Tonight 7pm - Millenium Development Goals Examined

international | rights, freedoms and repression | event notice Thursday September 15, 2005 10:32 by Michael

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/worldsapart/

Rodney Rice
Worlds Apart

When: Thursday 7pm
Presenter: Rodney Rice
Producer: Rodney Rice
Researcher: Sean Carroll

This week: 15th September 2005
The Millennium Development Goals - Promises, Promises.

Worlds Apart takes us into the lives of the hungry, the poor, the sick of the developing world.

Rodney Rice travels to Africa, Asia and Latin America to listen to local people tell their stories, explain their needs. He looks for hope amid the pain, for shoots of growth in economies suffering from underdevelopment.

This year the United Nations reviews the progress towards achieving the Millennium Development goals to which our leaders pledged themselves in 2000: to reduce dramatically poverty, hunger, maternal and infant mortality, to control preventable diseases, to increase access to education by 2015. "There's room for plenty of improvement in performance so far," says Rodney who looks at the some of the goals in specific countries.

Ethiopia will not succeed in halving poverty and hunger by 2015; Angola is unlikely to control malaria, AIDS and TB; Zambia is struggling with high rates of maternal and infant deaths. Sub-Saharan Africa is in some ways sliding backwards rather than progressing.

Even Ghana, stable and wealthier than many of its neighbours is being refused the aid money donors say its economic plan justifies. How do we explain our refusal in the rich North to let our aid match our rhetoric? Why don't we consider a fairer trade regime to assist developing countries make more from their
primary produce?

Bangladesh faces two immediate challenges: the first is how to protect itself against the annual monsoon floods that threaten it and the rising seas that will take some of its over-populated land; the second, how to cope with the challenge of free trade to its garment industry.

Worlds Apart also visits both Thailand and Indonesia to see contrasting approaches to post-tsunami reconstruction. Thailand says it's rich enough to look after tiself, Indonesia says give us the money to rebuild decimated Banda Aceh. How have they both been performing? And has Indonesia received the money our
governments pledged and our people donated?

In Brazil Rodney steps up behind the wealth and beauty of Copacabana and Ipanema to learn about life in the City of God slum; travels to the Amazon to learn about environmental destruction and human rights abuses; and visits the home town of the Brazilians who come to Ireland to work in the meat industry here.


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