Robert Skidelsky
LONDON – In 2023, 150,000 migrants crossed the Central Mediterranean in small boats from North Africa, fleeing war, pestilence, and starvation in their own countries. Over the years, thousands have died making this journey, because their boats have capsized or caught fire. Yet while these tragedies regularly evoke humanitarian concerns, the steady flow of migrants has also fueled right-wing nativist parties across the democratic world.
A prescient, but now almost unobtainable, 1990 film hinted at darker outcomes. Director David Wheatley’s The March (based on a screenplay by William Nicholson) tells the story of thousands of starving Sudanese refugees who make their way to the Mediterranean and attempt to cross into Europe at the Strait of Gibraltar, only to be met by a wall of machine guns. The crisis depicted in the film should by now be purely fanciful. Yet Sudan once again faces catastrophic hunger on an unprecedented scale. What went wrong? Or, rather, what hasn’t gone right?
The Millennium Development Goals were designed to avert the kinds of scenario portrayed in the film. In 2000, 191 United Nations member states committed to halving extreme poverty – defined as living on less than $1.25 per day – by 2015. Most of the focus was on Africa, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa, which was to receive $165 billion in development aid.
The MDGs were only partly realized. Extreme poverty was halved ahead of schedule, but largely because China’s real (inflation-adjusted) per capita income grew by a stupendous 10 percent per year between 2000 and 2015. With around 18 percent of the world’s........