Commentary

I biked past banners flapping in the breeze outside the Department of Health and Human Services: "Eat more fruits and vegetables!" they said. "Take the stairs instead of the elevator!" The next day I read about it in The Washington Post. Not only had HHS launched a Slim Down America campaign, but Secretary Tommy Thompson himself was on a diet - fruit for breakfast, salad for lunch, no more beers at The Dubliner after work. "It's difficult at the beginning," Thompson told the Post, "but every single one of us has got to take care of ourselves. We can't expect somebody else to do it for us."

From the low-carb craze to the organic food movement, it seems that the whole world is watching what it eats. My own Mennonite Church USA, so fond of cream sauces and jello salads, nevertheless rallied behind a recent health care statement that included among its objectives: "Our potlucks will no longer look like an invitation to a heart attack."

With 64 percent of Americans overweight, and obesity-related health care costs approaching $117 billion annually, calls to shape up and eat right might be warranted if they didn't obscure the fact that not everyone has access to the produce aisle. A 2000 USDA analysis found that low-income women are half as likely as wealthy women to eat salad or fruit on any given day. A 2002 study by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reported that they're also 50 percent more likely to be obese.

2005 is a crucial, defining year; a year of challenge but also a year of opportunity. Five years before, in an historic declaration, every world leader, every major international body, almost every single country signed up to the historic shared task of meeting over 15 years eight Millennium Development Goals—an extraordinary plan to definitively right some of the great wrongs of our time. At the heart of which is a clear commitment to ensuring education for every child, the elimination of avoidable infant and maternal deaths, and the halving of poverty.

Next year is the date that the first target comes due. We know already that the 2005 target that ensures for girls the same opportunities in primary and secondary education as boys is going to be missed. Not only are the vast majority—60 percent of developing countries—unlikely to meet the target but most of these are, on present trends, unlikely to achieve this gender equality for girls even by 2015. This is not good enough; this is not the promise that we made.

At the current rate of progress more than 70 countries will fail to achieve universal primary education by our target date, and in sub-Saharan Africa we will not achieve what we committed to by 2015 until at the earliest 2129. This is not good enough; the promise we made was for 2015, not 2129.

Because inexpensive cures are not funded, 2 million die unnecessarily each year from tuberculosis, 1 million die painfully from malaria—curable diseases—40 million are suffering from HIV/AIDS, and, tragically, on current forecasts sub-Saharan Africa will achieve our target for reducing child mortality not by 2015 but by 2165. This is not good enough; the promise we made was for 2015, not 2165.