The MDGs Need a Ninth Goal: Human Security

As a recent attendee of the Rights and Democracy conference entitled, “Implementing the Millennium Development Goals: Our Human Rights Obligation”, I was buoyed and inspired by diverse calls for a human rights-based approach to development. The conference further impressed me with its depth when Dr. Walter Reid, Director of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, presented, thus adding environment sustainability to the already long list of issues we should consider in our development efforts. The conference sensitized me to the need to approach the Millennium Development Goals with a broad number of concerns and issues in mind. I read and re-read the MDGs with a growing sense that some important issue was missing, and I have come to the conclusion that there is: there is no Millennium Development Goal, including Goal 8, that adequately affirms the need for human security to ensure true and lasting development.

By human security, I want to say an environment where individuals can live and grow in safe communities. It is simply common sense to suggest that hunger, education, equality for women, health, environmental sustainability and global partnerships all require citizens who enjoy a degree of peace. Without peace, without human security, international development efforts are a Sisyphus-like undertaking: constantly building, only to rebuild when everything falls apart due to war and conflict.

As examples, and there are certainly many more, I would like to suggest that development is impossible under the two following conditions:

1. As long as the proliferation of small arms continues at its current rate. The United Nations projects that there are more that 500 million unregulated small arms around the world today, many of which are in developing countries. This human security disaster has obvious ramifications for international development efforts. For example, approximately 30 million light arms reside in Africa alone; development, therefore, must be understood in this context of increasingly militarized and insecure societies. Violence invariably compromises the sustainability of communities. Until the international community addresses this issue, the Millennium Development Goals will fail.

• As long as many acres of land are unsafe due to the presence of landmines. In many of the countries in most need of assistance, landmines seriously hinder development efforts. The Campaign to Ban Landmines projects that between 15, 000 and 20, 000 people are injured or killed by landmines each year. Landmines deprive communities of land for farming and the ability to travel safely. The consequences of landmines strain the resources of developing countries and often complicated international assistance efforts. If we are speaking about a need for food, a need for safe work, a need to travel to school, then we must see the banning of landmines as a development goal.

I believe the MDGs should clearly state human security as a development priority and design strategies, like arms-reduction and banning landmines, to combat the increasingly militarized environment of developing states. A human rights-based approach to development is a fitting conceptual platform to demand that human security be better reflected in the MDGs as they, more than anyone else, know how violence affects the livelihoods of millions. In order to achieve the eight Millennium Development Goals before 2015, I have no doubt that we need greater security for the world’s poorest people, and one more goal.