G20 protests follow Canada's failure to work harder to alleviate global poverty

The national media and assorted politicians will devote a great deal attention to the protesters who smashed windows and set fire to a couple of police cars in Toronto today before the start of the G20 summit.

Let's hope they focus a similar degree of scrutiny to Canada's role in undermining the UN's Millennium Development Goals.

World leaders approved these goals in 2000 to achieve several worthwhile objectives, including:

* Eradicating extreme poverty and hunger.

* Achieving universal primary education.

* Promoting gender equality and empowering women.

* Reducing child mortality.

The other goals concerned improving maternal health, combatting killer diseases such as HIV and malaria, ensuring environmental sustainability, and achieving a global partnership for development.

The first Millennium Development Goal was to halve the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day. This was to take place between 1990 and 2015.

According to the latest UN report on the topic, 67 percent of working people in sub-Saharan Africa were earning less than $1.25 per day in 1998. By 2009, it was 64 percent.

In South Asia in 1998, 55 percent of working people were earning less than $1.25 per day. By 2009, that had fallen to 51 percent in this region.

That doesn't sound like a lot of progress. From 1990 to 2005, the number of people living on less than $1.25 per day fell from 1.8 billion to 1.4 billion, with the poverty rate falling from 46 percent to 27 percent.

The report notes that the number of people living on less than $1.25 per day should fall to 920 million by 2015, which means that this goal will have been achieved.

Some regions, notably China and Southeast Asia, have made remarkable progress. But in South Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, the gains haven't been nearly as great.

Approximately 915 million were undernourished in 2008. That was expected to rise to more than a billion in 2009, according to the report.

The report states that the number of undernourished children has continued to grow. One in four children in the developing world is underweight.

"The gap between the richest and poorest households remains enormous," the report notes. "In Southern Asia, 60 per cent of children in the poorest areas are underweight compared to 25 per cent of children in the richest areas."

In 2002, Canada agreed along with other countries in Monterrey, Mexico to move toward contributing 0.7 percent of its gross national income to official development assistance.

Most industrialized countries have either achieved this goal or say they will do this by 2015.

Canada, on the other hand, has not made any commitment in this regard.

"The UN Millennium Project's analysis indicates that 0.7% of rich world GNI can provide enough resources to meet Millennium Development Goals, but developed countries must follow through on commitments and begin increasing ODA volumes today," the UN states. "If every developed country set and followed through on a timetable to reach 0.7% by 2015, the world could make dramatic progress in the fight against poverty and start on a path to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and end extreme poverty within a generation."

According to the group Make Poverty History, Canada is only contributing 0.32 percent of its gross national income to international development assistance. This is less than half the percentage proposed more than 40 years ago by former prime minister Lester B. Pearson.

Last year on his blog, international development economist Jeffrey Sachs summed things up this way: "There are few places on the planet as splendid as Canada, so it's truly hard to understand how a prosperous and free people enjoying a life expectancy of more than 80 years have to work overtime to justify spending only 30 cents on each $100 of national income to help people with a life expectancy of only 40 years."

He added that he found it "puzzling" that there were so few voices from any Canadian political parties advancing solutions to extreme poverty in the developing world.

Today, mobs were out in the streets of Toronto smashing windows to express their frustrations.

What's a bigger crime? Shattering a panel of glass in a building owned by a major chartered bank or contributing to the deaths of African children by refusing to follow the rest of the world in increasing foreign aid to 70 cents out of every $100 in national income?

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his cabinet ministers condemn the protesters, the media shouldn't give them a free ride for their dreadful record on foreign aid.

Follow Charlie Smith on Twitter at twitter.com/csmithstraight.