Special Report LAST UPDATE April 27, 2010
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April 23, 2010 Millennium Development Goals Round Table Meeting Held on Peace Boat
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Meeting participants convene in front of the MDGs logo painted on the hull of Peace Boat's ship
“…When you empower women, with an integrated strategy for health care, education, agriculture and small business, you can change the world”, declared United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on March 25, 2010. Agreeing fully with this statement, Peace Boat worked together with the Vietnam Peace and Development Foundation (VPDF), and other partners including the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) and the International Association of the Economic and Social Councils and Similar Institutions (AICESIS), to host a round table meeting regarding the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and gender equality and women's empowerment onboard its ship on April 23 while docked in Da Nang, Viet Nam as part of its 69th Global Voyage for Peace. With 2010 marking the 10th year of the 15-year deadline to achieve the eight Millennium Development Goals and the 15th year of the Beijing Summit on Women, this 6th MDG Round Table served as an important chance for government officials, and NGO and Civil Society Organization representatives from Brunei, Cambodia, China, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Japan and Viet Nam to exchange ideas and opinions on the advances and remaining roadblocks to women's empowerment, and to draft a declaration on the issue.
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Yoshioka Tatsuya and Hanifa Mezoui greet Viet Nam's national heroine, Madam Nguyen Thi Binh
In a welcome speech at the meeting, Madam Nguyen Thi Binh, the former Vice President of Viet Nam and a highly respected international figure who helped negotiate an end to the Vietnam War, noted that women make up half of the world's population and have a role to play in all aspects of life including peace, freedom, the environment, and sovereignty. If given sufficient resources, women can fulfill their roles in such areas, making the world better for all, she stated, and called upon the United Nations and other important international organizations to make strong recommendations to national governments around the world to achieve the eight MDGs--one of which is to promote gender equality and women's empowerment. Hanifa Mezoui, permanent representative of AICESIS to the United Nations, pointed out that the percentage of women legislators and decision makers is still 10 percent or less in more than half of the world's countries, despite the Beijing Platform of Action's affirmation that women should have at least 30 percent of decision making positions. Other participants noted that violence, wage disparity, maternal mortality, lack of reproductive self-determination and other problems still affect many women worldwide, especially those living in poverty.
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Madam Nguyen Thi Binh and participants of Peace Boat's Hibakusha Project pledged to strive for an end to war (Photo courtesy of Sakura Sasano)
Yoshioka Tatsuya, Director of Peace Boat, reiterated a point made by the UN Secretary General that if even one percent of global military spending were redirected toward development, significant progress could be made toward fulfilling the MDGs. “It's absolutely clear that spending money on development rather than on the military will be far more effective in developing long term and real security for people everywhere,” he asserted. Yoshioka said that Peace Boat would continue to make strong efforts to promote disarmament—especially nuclear disarmament—for the MDGs in various international venues. For the past two years, he noted, Peace Boat has been carrying out a special Hibakusha Project for a Nuclear Free World, which takes survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki around the world in order to help build consensus on the need for the total elimination of nuclear weapons and the reallocation of the world's limited resources to sustainable development and peace promotion.

Addressing the needs of people is not just a matter of delivering development assistance, or even of addressing the Millennium Development Goals, concluded Dr. Mezoui. “It is a matter of life and death and a fundamental question of whether countries currently wracked by strife and civil disorder, economic crisis and natural disasters will be able to maintain durable social frameworks in the face of chronic under-development and crippling poverty,” she said. “All of us have a stake therefore in ensuring that the ideas and objectives embodied in the Millennium Development Goals are fully realized, however challenging that may be,” she emphasized.

As part of its commitment toward helping to fulfill the MDGs, Peace Boat will continue to make strong efforts to raise awareness of their importance among national governments, local authorities, NGOs, academia, the private sector, and the wider population. For more information on the MDGs, please visit: www.un.org/millenniumgoals