[Michigan] Research against poverty

from The Michigan Tech Lode

By: Matthew Norman

Today, half the world’s population is living on the equivalent of two dollars or less a day. More than a billion people are living on half of that. In any country, these amounts are insufficient for anything but the most basic subsistence. And it doesn’t help that the world’s poorest are also, by and large, inhabitants of the most disease and natural disaster prone areas on earth. The result is tens of thousands of deaths from hunger, lack of access to clean water, and easily preventable illnesses every day. Such desperate circumstances also breed war, terrorism, environmental degradation and dangerous new strains of disease.

For decades now, the other half of the world has been trying to do something about this obvious injustice. We have had little success, but have at least been able to rest secure that we were doing all in our power. In recent years however, a new group of economists has begun to expose the fact that we really haven’t been doing all in our power. The amount of aid given to the world’s poorest countries is paltry by comparison to other expenditures, amounting in the U.S. to roughly a thousandth of the total federal budget. Most of this, moreover, comes in the form of excess grain production dumped on the poor countries, often crippling their own agricultural sectors.

Until recently, it seemed there was good reason for aid to be kept minimal. After all, most of it went either directly into the Swiss bank accounts of corrupt third-world autocrats or to construction companies from the rich nations for ill-conceived infrastructure projects. But with improved understanding of the unique economics of poor countries has come a multitude of innovative new approaches for using first world wealth to combat third world poverty.

Among the most promising of these new approaches is also among the least intuitive – the funding of certain lines of research at the world’s top universities. New technologies have led to major improvements in the lives of the world’s poor in the past – the green revolution technologies being the prime example. Still, many important technologies, from advanced aids drugs to mechanized plows have been notoriously slow in making their way to the world’s poor - partly because the poor simply can’t afford them and partly because they are often ill-suited to application in poor country conditions.

Currently, the lesson that aid really can help the poor if used in innovative ways is reshaping world efforts at attacking poverty. Many of the wealthy nations are stepping up funding for a wide array of development-related initiatives – and research that is immediately applicable to improving the lives of the poor is among the most important of these.

This is the very kind of research that several MTU departments have been pioneering for several years now. The development of inexpensive new building materials that utilize locally available materials won the students and faculty of the Sustainable Futures Institute the recently formed Mondialogo Award last fall. And the Mondialago is just the tip of a fast-growing iceberg, as reward and funding opportunities for such work has grown exponentially in just the last year. Clearly, Michigan Tech’s research strengths make it ideally positioned to take advantage of this trend. Just as importantly, the Michigan Tech community has demonstrated a remarkable enthusiasm for work that has a broader significance. This enthusiasm has put it at the forefront of current efforts – with a very real opportunity to play a lead role in their exciting future.

With this fact in mind, several faculty members recently brought a proposal before the faculty senate that is deceptive in its simplicity. The proposal concludes, “In order to acknowledge the international efforts already underway and to encourage more of the same, Michigan Technological University should include in its revised Strategic Plan a commitment to the international community, and this commitment should become a part of the new image being developed by Michigan Tech Marketing and Communications.” The proposal goes on to suggest a Presidential Task Force be formed to coordinate and advance the school’s efforts in this regard. According to one of the proposal’s architects, professor Craig Waddell, “ This proposal acknowledges what we’re already doing and urges us to do more of the same.”

The potential immediate rewards to the university are real and significant – a chance to imprint the university on national, and international, consciousness as a driving force in one of the most important effort’s in human history. Poverty has been shown in a recent Gallup poll to outrank war, terrorism, and the environment as the most important issue to people in every part of the world. The public support is there for a major effort – and perhaps more importantly, world leaders and policymakers have finally come to something of a consensus about how to go about it. All signs point to a massive and concerted effort over the next decade or more to end poverty once and for all. As a result, development technologies looks poised to become a major field in its own right – and one that will depend on the broad, interdisciplinary technological skills of MTU students. It seems then, that there may be clear advantages to giving poverty-related research an important place in the university’s mission. Whether or not the proposal is adopted however, it seems that the shift in focus that it advocates has already begun of its own accord in the Michigan Tech community. The great achievements made already have served to underscore the fact that ending poverty is a real and attainable goal.

And, as Waddell points out, it is a challenge that must be taken on. “A tragedy isn’t a crisis until we have the power to do something about it. We have the power to do something about this. We don’t have to live in a world where a quarter of all children die before their fifth birthday. This isn’t a tragedy, it’s a crisis.”