Jeffrey Sachs stresses economics to reduce poverty

from The Brown Daily Herald

Irene Chen

Speaking as part of a World AIDS Day symposium Saturday, Jeffrey Sachs and Sonia Ehrlich Sachs outlined ways to improve conditions in countries around the world that have been devastated by poverty and infectious disease.

Several speakers addressed a crowded Smith-Buonanno 106 as part of "Voices from the Front Line: Global Economics, Health Disparities, and the AIDS Pandemic," which was sponsored by several organizations, including the Brown University AIDS Program.

Sachs, an economist who heads Columbia University's Earth Institute, delivered the keynote address with his wife Sonia, a senior health scientist at the institute.

Sachs began his speech with a single image: malaria-stricken children from Malawi, several of whom were in coma-like states. "It's unbelievable to see this, I certainly never expected to see so many children dying (of malaria) before my eyes," Sachs said. "It's a violation of our hopes and our promises. It's also a violation of common sense: it is $5 for a bed net, and three days of pills only cost $1. And yet, we haven't figured out how to (fund this). It ain't so hard."

Part of the problem, Sachs believes, is that people do not focus enough on the ecological problems relating to disease and poverty. "The core is to understand the underlying epidemiology of the situation," Sachs said. "We spent a lot of time trying to understand why Africa's disease burden was so high. Poor people die of everything, but the excess disease burden is concentrated in the infectious disease burden."

Sachs applauded Brown's contributions to HIV/AIDS research and treatment around the world stating that, "I think there are a few places in the world, few institutions in the world, that can do what Brown is doing, (that) can accomplish what Brown is doing," Sachs said.

"The world is our classroom and we'll never know what to say in the classroom if we aren't out there in the world," Sachs said.

Still, Sachs noted the lack of a global response in addressing issues of poverty and inequality. "Never before have we had so much and so many powerful tools and the means to take on this challenge," he said.

Sachs presented a chart of the disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) affecting several countries around the world. DALYs "are the sum of the years of life lost due to premature mortality in the population and the years lost due to disability," according to the World Health Organization Web site.

In poor and rich countries, DALYs are comparable in cases such as cancer, accidents and cardiovascular diseases. The striking disparity is in three categories: AIDS, infectious diseases and infant mortality.

Sachs presented the startling differences in diseases that are commonly thought to have been eradicated. "There are 8,000 children dying of measles (in poor countries), while essentially no children die of measles in the rich countries."

Sachs spoke briefly about his book, "The End of Poverty," which, according to a March 2005 press release from the Earth Institute, explains "why wealth and poverty have diverged and evolved as they have and why the poorest nations have been so markedly unable to escape the cruel vortex of poverty."

Sachs criticized the way "help" has been given to countries in Africa in the past. "The farm yields are a third or a quarter of the yields achieved by farmers around the world, because African farmers do not have the basic tools needed," Sachs said. "We're not paying attention to the more important fact that Africa needs help growing crops, not the occasional dribble of food from Western farmers."

Sachs stressed that the root of all these problems is poverty. "It's not a lack of caring or focus," Sachs said. "It is an extreme poverty from the village up to the government. It is poverty, not corruption that is a fact of life, except for maybe in Washington."

Sachs argued that instability in poor regions is also due to poverty. "Poverty is the core instigator of war," Sachs said. Illustrating his point, he noted that only two countries come close to Africa's mortality rate of children under 5: Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sachs also called for more research to figure out why Africa is the epicenter of the AIDS pandemic, saying, "Little work has been done to disentangle the reasons."

He also suggested a beginning for the eradication of poverty as well as disease. "This is where the economist comes in. We've got plenty of money in the world," Sachs said. "What would it take to ensure public access to services? About 40 bucks (per) capita in Malawi."

"For less than 1 percent of the income of the rich world, all those basic needs could be met, and this could unlock the economic barriers," Sachs said. "The evidence is that economic development kicks in after these barriers have disappeared."

Ehrlich Sachs works with her husband on the Millennium Village Project, a group seeking to alleviate poverty worldwide that is part of the Earth Institute.

Ehrlich Sachs's speech described how the Millennium Villages Project works. "We've chosen 12 different sites in 10 different countries in Africa, which comprised about 95 percent of different means of livelihood," Ehrlich Sachs said. "We chose one small area which is the sentinel village, studied very closely by monitoring and measuring … before we help communities with interventions."

In villages across Africa, the Millenium Villages Project provides fertilizer that increases nutrient levels and crop returns decreasing cases of malnutrition in African children.

"This increased harvest enables people to have the problem of storage. They no longer have a problem of hunger," Ehrlich Sachs said. "They have enough for themselves, enough for their children and a surplus to create an income which will help them get into other cash-creating opportunities."

This surplus has far-reaching benefits. "From the surplus of their harvest, they donate 10 percent of the excess to the schools, which can offer school lunches. Often the one meal the kids get a day," Ehrlich Sachs said. "The attendance has sky-rocketed, and there has also been a measurable difference in school performance."