Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee (SOCHUM)

do provide hope that an improvement in the situation
of indigenous peoples is possible.
The impoverishment of indigenous peoples is not a
problem that is confined to the developing world. The
united States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand
also have small indigenous populations that exhibit
developmental indices well below those of the nonindigenous
populations. in terms of unemployment,
indigenous rates are two to three times higher in these
countries than the non-indigenous rates. As of 2009 in
New Zealand, for example, 7.7% of indigenous peoples
did not have meaningful employment, as opposed to
3.8% of the rest of the population. 176 Income levels
for indigenous populations are significantly lower
than those for non-indigenous groups; in the United
States, Native Americans earn approximately half of
what the general population makes. In Canada, 60%
of the indigenous population in cities live below the
poverty line, including 80% of indigenous peoples
in Winnipeg. 177 Of these countries, Australia has the
worst record in terms of indigenous poverty, with
only 34% of indigenous peoples owning their own
In developed countries, like the United States, Canada, Australia,
and New Zealand, indigenous peoples comprise a large proportion
of the poor population
homes and half of all indigenous communities lacking
access to a safe water supply. 178
As mentioned in the introduction to this topic, the
need to diminish the impoverishment of indigenous
peoples can be thought of as an aspect of the first
MDG: to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
worldwide. The specific subgoals of the first MDG
are to halve the proportion of people living on less
than $1 a day and the proportion of people who suffer
from hunger and to achieve decent employment for
women, men, and young people. The twelve years
since the establishment of the MDGs have seen mixed
overall progress toward these targets. Only slight
progress has been made in reducing hunger; while
the percentage of people that are undernourished
has dropped from 19.8% to 15.5% between 1990
and 2008, the overall number of undernourished
individuals has remained stagnant at around 850
million, and rates of undernourishment are still
around 20% in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern
Asia. 179 A similar situation is evident with the target of
achieving decent employment, with a decrease in the
working poverty rate but not in the absolute number
of employed people living beneath the poverty line.
The vast majority of progress in the area has been
made in eastern Asia, meaning that the situation
remains grim for the poor in other regions. 180 On a
more positive note, however, the first subgoal of the
first MDG, halving the number of people living on less
than $1 per day, has likely already been achieved on a
global scale. According to a United Nations progress
report on the MDG, the portion of people living on
less than $1.25 (inflation-adjusted) per day dropped
from 47% in 1990 to 24% in 2008; a preliminary World
Bank report has this figure even lower for 2010, which
would put the poverty rate at less than half of the
1990 baseline. 181
While the global progress on poverty reduction
is laudable, it masks the fact that many indigenous
populations are not enjoying the same reductions
in impoverishment and hunger. Most countries will
likely reach the benchmark set out in the Millennium
Declaration of halving the number of proportion of
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