The year 2005 has been a chosen focus of civil society groups
working to end poverty, especially in Africa. These groups have
concentrated on three main areas: aid, debt cancellation, and
trade justice. Yet September’s United Nations World Summit,
intended to further progress on internationally agreed
development targets—the Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs)—ended in disappointment for many campaigners who were
hopeful that world leaders would have made stronger commitments
to new policies to “make poverty history.” Instead, even U.N.
Secretary General Kofi Annan agreed that the summit’s outcome
document had been watered down. This reflected the difficulty of
having so many countries agree to joint strategies, with the
U.S. government in particular playing a problematic role on the
language concerning the MDGs. The United States’ U.N.
ambassador, John Bolton, worked to limit new commitments on
development made by the U.S. and other rich countries. As the
U.N. Millennium Campaign noted in its statement on th