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By the end of the decade, the development assistance agencies of industrialized countries wanted to boil these agreements down into a manageable set of goals, with quantitative indicators by which they could monitor progress. These goals were embraced by the heads of government of the eight most powerful countries in the world at their annual Group of 8 (G8) Summit.
    At the United Nations, the developing countries also embraced these goals. They added some specifics about what the industrialized countries should do to help, and virtually all the nations of the world approved them in 2000 as the Millennium Development Goals. 1 Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have both affirmed that the United States will do its part to achieve these historic goals.
    THE MILLENNIUM
DEVELOPMENT GOALS
     
Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
Achieve universal primary education
Promote gender equality and empower women
Reduce child mortality
Improve maternal health
Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
Ensure environmental sustainability
Develop a global partnership for development
    The Millennium Goals articulate aspirations that people around the world now share. Virtually all the world’s religions and competing ideologies affirm efforts to overcome hunger, extreme poverty, and related ills. Many governments and people around the world are now using the Millennium Goals to guide and measure their work. Bread for the World focuses on hunger, but we understand that hunger is interconnected with the other aspects of poverty, so we have embraced the Millennium Goals as the framework for our international advocacy.
    When the Millennium Development Goals are described to Americans, about half of us find them inspiring. The other half find the idea of a comprehensive, internationally agreed strategy to reduce poverty utopian. But if you ask about specific goals—letting all the world’s children go to school, for example—nearly all Americans are supportive. 2
    The Millennium Goals helped inspire the industrialized countries to more than double the amount of their total development assistance from $53 billion in 2000 to $121 billion in 2008. 3 The donor countries have also agreed, at least in theory, on strategies to improve the quality of development assistance. 4 Many developing-country governments are using the goals to track development progress, and some have focused additional resources on achieving the goals.
    The United Nations has done a good job promoting the Millennium Goals and monitoring how the world is doing in relation to the quantitative targets. I served on the Hunger Task Force for the U.N. Millennium Development Goals Project, led by Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world’s leading economists. The project developed strategies for achieving the goals, including estimates of what it would cost and how much of the cost could be borne by poor countries themselves. Sachs concluded in 2005 that annual development assistance from the industrialized countries would need to increase by roughly $70 billion right away, with the increase rising to $130 billion by 2015. 5 If the United States would provide a fourth of $130 billion (which is sometimes considered our fair share for joint projects among the industrialized countries), the U.S. share of the cost would be roughly $33 billion.
    More development assistance will not, by itself, cut world poverty in half and achieve the other Millennium Goals. Hundreds of millions of poor people must—and will—work hard over many years. Corrupt governments need to be reformed or replaced. The quality of development assistance and trade policies needs to improve. But the $33 billion figure gives us a rough idea of how much it would cost the United States to do its share to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.
    Most developing countries are not on track to meet all the goals. Progress has lagged far behind targets in some of the poorest countries and for some of the goals—notably,