The Millennium Goals--Dream or Reality?
At the turn of the new millennium, the world looked forward to an end to absolute poverty, avoidable disease, oppression of women and children without education. The United Nations embodied these hopes in a series of eight targets - the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These Goals were agreed by all 189 UN member states in 2000 – targets for everyone to meet by the year 2015. These eight goals are the subject of this new series of eight Life programmes. This first programme is a review of the MDGs and an assessment by various leading figures of their value and likely outcome.

 

Brazil's Land Revolution
In Brazil, almost half of the agricultural land is owned by just one per cent of the population. The government estimates that land reform would benefit some 4.5 million families - both agricultural workers and city slum-dwellers. Although the policy has been backed by successive governments, political opposition has so far prevented any meaningful progress. Now Brazil's President, Luiz Ignazio Lula da Silva, has announced plans to resettle more than 100,000 landless families this year, and promised an extra US$500 million towards agrarian reform over the next two years. Life visits the Northeastern state of Bahia to report on an initiative which encourages the landless to club together to buy up land, with low-interest government loans.