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JK pleads for support for poor nations to achieve MDGs
2007-02-21 09:07:55
By Guardian Reporter
President Jakaya Kikwete has said poor countries cannot attain the UN Millennium Development Goals without support from international partners.
That was the gist of remarks he made at a meeting with officials of the Swedish International Development Agency in Stockholm on Monday.
`We in poor countries cannot change this architecture alone and cannot attain the MDGs without concrete support from friends like Sweden,` noted the President, who is on an official tour of Sweden, Denmark and Norway.
He told the SIDA officials that the development goals were `the creation of everybody`, adding: `We adopted them amid high hopes that they constitute a blueprint for the building of a better world for the 21st century. Let us all act and treat them as such.`
President Kikwete said if developing countries continue to spend an annual $300 billion subsidising their farmers, poor farmers in poor countries cannot compete in the marketplace, and progress in achieving MDGs would be a distant prospect.
`We in Tanzania also believe that the international conditions are critical in whether or not we attain our development objectives,` he explained, noting that the existing international financial and trading set-up was not hospitable enough to poor countries and ought to have undergone fundamental a long time ago.
`If global politics continues to heat up and oil prices shoot the sky, we in the developing countries suffer the most and so will our aspiration to attain the MDGs,` he observed.
`If the value addition chains for primary products are continually skewed against producers who toil the most, the green revolution I talked about will have little or no positive impact to the well-being of our farmers. This is where international partnership comes in,` he added.
The President told his audience that Tanzania has been registering impressive progress on the economic front, with the national economy now performing much better than in previous years, noting: `GDP growth rates have increased from the negative territories in the mid-1980s to positive gains. The average growth for over a decade now has been around 5 per cent.`
He pointed out that in 2005 the growth was 6.9 but that fell to 5.8 per cent last year following unprecedented drought which adversely affected agriculture and power supply.
President Kikwete explained further that inflation has remained at a single digit 5 per cent in 2005 but that rose to 6.7 per cent in last November, again prompted by the impact of drought on food prices as well as high oil prices.
He said that GDP per capita has increased from US$ 180 in the 1980s to US$ 370 at present.
The President also used the occasion to explain that Tanzania had made notable achievements on many fronts but it was still one of the poorest nations on earth as per GDP per capita and other human development indicators.
`It was therefore no accident that in 2004, on reviewing our previous poverty reduction efforts, we decided that a new strategy that will be a local vehicle for the attainment of MDGs was needed,` he said.
He said in 2001 Tanzania became the first country ever to produce an MDG Report that indicated that it still had a long way to go, adding: `We produced our second MDG report in 2005.
Each of the reports indicated improvement and policy options for scaling up interventions.`
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