 every year at the Sustainable Development Conference, they come up with the same assessment. Not enough is happening. Numbers are going backward. More funding is necessary. This is a definition of madness. Development is not working through the SDG paradigm. Why do we keep trying to build upon that? At the end of the SDG conference, why didn't they say, when we meet next year, let's commit to have a global campaign, hunger zero, zero hunger towns, zero hunger countries? Why not? They don't even do that. All they do is, can we please raise the quantum of our fund from so many hundred billion to so many hundred billion? For God's sake, guys, firstly, you're never able to meet your fundraising targets because nobody takes it seriously. Secondly, you don't seem to take yourself seriously. And that, in my opinion, is the lack of commitment to finally eradicating these issues. They know that this pathway doesn't eradicate things. It's the band-aid. And so, therefore, they don't make the ultimate commitment. Not goals should be met by 2030 and then you have the goal and so on. But we're going to try immediately, proximately, to end hunger. What about that? In 2015, the UN General Assembly, that's the countries of the world, adopted what has come to be called the Sustainable Development Goals. Now, there are 17 of these goals and they're actually quite non-controversial with aims such as ending poverty, ending hunger, ensuring education, etc., etc. And these goals have actually become a benchmark for how progress in the world is measured today. So, whether it be UN conferences, whether it be bilateral meetings, you will see a lot of references to achieving these SDGs, what are the steps you need to take. Recently, there was a summit which evaluated the progress on achieving these SDGs and apparently, the news is pretty bad. We are not on target at all to meet most of them. In fact, in some of them, we're even regressed. And SDG calculation has become a very elaborate exercise. There are 169 subgoals within these 17 SDGs itself and of course, a lot of discussion around that. But what really is the framework in which these SDGs are assessed, analyzed, talked about? What does it really say about the world we live in today? How we understand development? How we understand basic human rights? To talk about all this, we have with us Vijay Prashad of Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research. Vijay, thank you so much for joining us. Yes, of course. Thanks a lot. We wanted to do this conversation also because I think sometimes we all get caught a bit in the framework of SDGs itself. And obviously, the very important points, nobody's doubting the importance of eradicating hunger or poverty or the need to address climate change itself. But since a lot of your work in recent times has also been about how development is thought about, how development has been conceptualized, how now it's different from what it was many years ago. When you hear SDGs, what occurs to you? Well, first we have to understand that in the 1990s, when this conversation starts, there was a attrition of discussion about broad development agendas. Questions of, for instance, a reform of the financial system, industrialization for countries, agricultural reform, these big questions of structural change in societies in the world economy began to be set aside. And in their place, two different kinds of conversations began to dominate. One was a conversation around corruption. There was a lot of talk about corruption as the impediment to development. That means in a third world country or a developing country, if they just stopping corrupt, they could develop. Now, interestingly, even corruption was narrowly seen, not as corporate corruption, transfer mispricing, stealing of assets from a country, asset stripping. In fact, in a very broad way, none of that, it became bribery. Petty bribery was seen as the impediment to development. That was one discussion. And that advantaged certain political forces because then they could say, the state is corrupt. Let's privatize state functions. There's less corruption in the private sector. In fact, having basically left out private sector corruption in the concept, it led to privatization of the state. It allowed more privatization. That was one way in which the development discussion went. The second way, building on the UN development programs, human development index, was an idea of, let's quantify different areas of development. So in 1999, 2000, the UN released the Millennium Development Goals. There were eight of them. 2015, they expanded it to 17 and called it the Sustainable Development Goals. Now, there's two problems with this. One problem is that it effectively NGOizes development, the non-governmental organization form. That means it's suggested you can take, say, hunger in isolation from broader issues of agrarian reform, industrialization and so on. If you could only get food to people or if you could only get water delivered to their houses, it would solve things. The broader impediments were left out. So the SDGs and before them, the Millennium Development Goals really followed a kind of NGO perspective on development, leaving out the big structural features. At the time, one was very critical of the Millennium Development Goals, Sustainable Development Goals. Over the years, the discussion of development has become around these things. So everybody has to pay attention. It is also true that over the years, every year at the Sustainable Development Conference, they come up with the same assessment. Not enough is happening. Numbers are going backward. More funding is necessary. This is a definition of madness. Development is not working through the SDG paradigm. Why do we keep trying to build upon that? Right, of course. Like you said, Vijay, I guess development gets defined as an accumulation of projects, so to speak. You have one project after the other. If they all work together, then all these issues will be solved. But there's a very interesting point that you said that what is happening is that it's kind of repeating the same pattern again and again. And that brings us to the fundamental questions, like you said, the structural questions. So what are the structural questions really that are being really cut off at this point? When we're talking about, say, ending poverty or ending hunger, when you're talking about bringing education, when we're talking about, say, gender equality, for instance, what are the structural questions that I think these discussions serve to sort of allow you to relate that, so to speak? Let's take one of them. Let's actually follow the logic of the Sustainable Development Goals. You see, initially the Millennium Development Goals and the discussion around them was, let's abolish hunger. Then it became, well, let's halve hunger and so on. They began in a way to negotiate down from the ultimate principle, abolishment of hunger. Okay, let's take hunger. It's very clear. The Food and Agriculture Organization says there's enough food to feed people on the planet. That's established fact. In fact, twice the number of people can be fed by the quantum of food available. And yet we have 1.2 billion, that's the UN number, hungry. 680 million people at the edge of starvation, but 1.2 billion people hungry. That's one in seven. It's a lot of hungry people. Why hasn't that been eradicated? There's a couple of reasons. There's enough food, but people can't eat. Why? They don't have money. Why don't they have money? Well, they don't have decent jobs. Take the International Labor Organization concept. They don't have decent work. Doesn't pay them enough. Doesn't sustain them regularly. Their work is precarious. They are part of the precarious. There is no agrarian reform. Landless workers don't have access to land. They don't have the right to be on land. In other words, their tenancy is not registered. They are thrown off the land whenever and so on. So these broad questions of having trade union rights or the right to work for people, where a government makes a commitment to find employment or to generate employment, or indeed agrarian reform, these big questions are the only solution to the hunger crisis. Otherwise, all you're doing is increasing the charity economy, whether it's income transfers from the state that allows people to buy food or you give people boxes of food. So you can't have the SDGs, which end up being part of the charity industry, be a development agenda. I have no problem with charity in the moment we are in now. People need to eat now. If the only way they're going to eat is if a box of food is provided by a charitable organization or by the state, that's fine. That's going to help people not starve to death. I don't have a problem with charity. Shouldn't be misunderstood on this. But charity cannot be the end of the road. There has to be a road beyond that. And the SDGs, the way they are constructed right now, don't address the structural problem of hunger. They don't address the structural problem. People can't eat because they don't have money. They don't have money because they don't have adequate employment. They don't have adequate employment because on the one hand, government is not doing enough to generate employment in other sectors and because there's no aggregate reform, these issues are not debated in the SDG conference. It remains down to the problem of the data is bad. Let's fund the goals more. That's the basis of the debate. I watched some of the SDG conference. That's what they talk about. The data is bad. Let's get some more funding for the goals. That's not going to solve the problem. That might be the best bandaid you can find right now, but you're still going to bleed. Right. Not a matter of fact that funding these goals seems kind of, you know, you're talking about funding these goals on the one hand, but you're also talking about what is definitely a global debt crisis caused by the very nature of multilateral institutions itself. We've been talking a lot about that in recent times, but whatever minimal amounts you pour in for some of these goals, they just completely eclipse by the fact that country after country is sinking under massive amounts of debt and nothing is being done about that. Well, that's it, right? I mean, that's why the SDGs have become part of the charity industry because countries are not able themselves to take care of some of these basic social welfare issues. And this is also a question in some respects of perspective and commitment. You know, the way the debate has gone on, for instance, carbon zero, okay? It is now completely acceptable for a government to say we want to create net zero municipalities, you know, net carbon zero municipalities. But what you don't see is a municipality saying we want to be zero hunger municipality. We want to be zero homelessness municipality. We want to be zero illiteracy municipality. The commitment even to these goals is not very high. And I find that frustrating. So yes, of course, you're drowning in debt, and then you have to see if effectively aid and charity to fund your SDGs, which you should be able to fund with your own resources, you know, because there are resources in these countries. It's just that the resources are going to pay off yesterday's debt. That's one. And secondly, the commitment is low, you know, that even the posters put up, I mean, for God's sake, at the end of the SDG conference, why didn't they say, when we meet next year, let's commit to have a global campaign, you know, hunger zero, zero hunger towns, zero hunger countries. Why not? They don't even do that. All they do is can we please raise the quantum of our fund from so many hundred billion to so many hundred billion. For God's sake, guys, firstly, you're never able to meet your fundraising targets, because nobody takes it seriously. Secondly, you don't seem to take yourself seriously. And that in my opinion, is the lack of commitment to finally eradicating these issues. They know that this pathway doesn't eradicate things. It's the bandaid. And so therefore, they don't make the ultimate commitment, not goals should be met by 2030, and then you have the goal and so on. But we're going to try immediately, to end hunger. What about that? Absolutely. I think everything you said boils down to one point, which is that, you know, you pull at the logic of this, and you realize you're hitting the wall, that is, neoliberalism or capitalism itself, because any grad, some of the aspects you talk about the immediacy of your ambition, what constraints it is, the lack of that kind of project. But then going back in history a bit, did such projects exist at some point of time, especially at a global level, we've talked in the past about the new international economic order, for instance, or say a kind of vision which actually puts some of these goals front and center and talked about envisioning it. So how do you see that as well? Well, 100 years ago, the question of land reform was really at the center of all anti-colonial movements. You know, I mean, when movements came to power, they were under pressure to reform the land question. Land hunger is one issue. The other is, if you don't give people land, they won't have a way to get income and food. That's very clear. It was interesting, some countries conducted land reform, whether it's from the right, that is to say, Japan, South Korea, it was done under American occupation, they did land reform, or in China, whether revolution of 1949 conducted land reform, it had an impact on the ability of the Chinese economy to grow. And it's the basis by which China was able to eradicate absolute poverty because they've already destroyed, as it were, hierarchical social relations in the countryside. India was an interesting place because in India, the leadership kept articulating a commitment to improving the conditions for people's lives, to strengthen local development and so on, but they never conducted land reform, effective real land reform, never strengthened the power of trade unions, always tried to negate that. So you can't have a powerless population that doesn't have access to land, that doesn't, is not in unionized, you know, they're not building mass organizations of strength. If you have a demobilized population of poor people, you're not going to be able to transcend these granite block issues of hunger and so on. And that is why when you look at the examples in the world, you know, you look at a tiny country like Cuba, 11 million people, they were able to smash landlordism in the countryside. You see, smashing landlordism isn't just an economic issue, it's social, it's cultural, it's about human dignity. It gives people a sense that they can contribute to their country, they are not diminished in the eyes of the Lord of the soil and so on. And SDGs doesn't get to the heart of that. By, you know, in a sense quantifying these problems, it doesn't understand, part of the problem is cultural. Land reform is not only economic, it's also cultural. Trade unions are not only economic, they're cultural, they give working class communities the confidence to make demands upon the work. SDGs is reform from above. Land reform and trade unions, this is reform from below. If not revolution from below, they're very different perspectives. And finally also, since we are at the midpoint, because that is why this recent meeting was held as well, we have say about seven more years technically for the goals to be achieved. But like we said, the data is really bad, and this seems to be a trend that continues. So for movements in the global south for, or for that matter, progressive governments in the global south, how do they sort of, it's of course a very existential question almost, but in the sense that what is the broad framework within existing realities that actually permits some of these, not the goals to be met per se, but the issues behind this to be addressed. Well, look, firstly, the very fact that they keep these issues on the table means that there's a possibility to have a debate about the limitations of this strategy. We're not at a stage in human history where the people in charge have said, we don't care about hunger. We don't care about homelessness. We don't care about ill health and the lack of medical care. It's a free for all. Every dog will have its day. We're not there. Liberalism of a certain kind still exists. People still say, powers that be still say, all the countries in the world are committed to ending hunger. Well, popular movements have to utilize that. We have to be able to come into this debate and discussion, not ignore it, not say it's garbage. Enter this debate and say, well, we are also seized on the necessity of zero hunger, but we don't think this strategy is going to do it. We have to go in a different direction. The SDGs provide a place to accelerate the debate about the limitations in the world today, but at the same time, the SDGs shouldn't provide us with illusions that they are going to be transcendence. I mean, the speech by Antonio Guterres at the SDG conference, the UN Secretary General, was very revealing. Basically, he said, we are midway through this process and my God, I don't think we're going to get there. I mean, his was almost a surrender and this, I should say, in this era post Soviet Union 1990, this is the second attempt again to repeat of this goal oriented development. The millennium development goals died in 15 years. They went from 2000 to 2015. This is the second iteration, 2015 to 2030. It's likely it's going to die. Get ready for the third articulation of the DGs, for millennium development goal to sustainable development goal. And perhaps the next one is going to be the market development goals. Who knows what they're going to come up with? Thank you so much, Vijay, for that analysis also because I think useful to sort of step back once in a while and take a look at terms which are become so centered in our discussions, in our understanding that you sometimes miss out some of these aspects as well. Thanks so much for talking to us. And that's all we have time for today for more videos and more articles that challenge the common sense around some of these terms. Then actually try to paint a different way of development. Try to understand some of these geopolitical developments around us from a different perspective. Do visit our website peoplesdispatch.org. Do subscribe to our YouTube channel. See you later.