By Fernando Morales-de la Cruz
When all UN Member States adopted the Sustainable Development Goals at the UNGA in 2015 thousands of articles were published in all continents praising the historic decision to adopt the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. I wrote then 'We need a real Shared Value system in global trade and not glitz at the UN or buzz in the media.'
According to the UN The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future. At its heart are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals SDGs, which are an urgent call for action by all countries - developed and developing - in a global partnership. They recognize that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth all while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests.
Today, almost 9 years later, its impossible to deny that the Sustainable Development Goals are failing, mainly because there was never a real plan to reach them. It is absolutely impossible to reach the SDGs without changing the terms of global trade, specially trade between the wealthy nations and the Global South. In fact, this means that its impossible to Improve the State of the World, as the WEF claims to be doing since 53 years, unless all governments rein in at least the top 2,000 corporations that generate USD 45 trillion in revenue each year 45 of the global GDP. The vast majority of these corporations have business models that are the opposite of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The failure of the Sustainable Development Goals is about the 4 billion poorest people in the world, about the one billion of them that go hungry, about inequality, about the 50 million modern day slaves, about the more than 350 million children that do not study, about the nearly 400 million children that must work to survive, more than 100 million of these poor children work in the supply chains of corporations to reduce costs and increase profits.
