[Comment] The digital war on poverty

from the Guardian

Thanks to market forces, even the world's poorest people are beginning to benefit from the flow of digital information

by Jeffery Sachs

The digital divide is beginning to close. The flow of digital information – through mobile phones, text messaging, and the internet – is now reaching the world's masses, even in the poorest countries, bringing with it a revolution in economics, politics, and society.

Extreme poverty is almost synonymous with extreme isolation, especially rural isolation. But mobile phones and wireless internet end isolation, and will therefore prove to be the most transformative technology of economic development of our time.

The digital divide is ending not through a burst of civic responsibility, but mainly through market forces. Mobile phone technology is so powerful, and costs so little per unit of data transmission, that it has proved possible to sell mobile phone access to the poor. There are now more than 3.3 billion subscribers in the world, roughly one for every two people on the planet.

Moreover, market penetration in poor countries is rising sharply. India has around 300 million subscribers, with subscriptions rising by a stunning eight million or more per month. Brazil now has more than 130 million subscribers, and Indonesia was estimated to reach 120 million. In Africa, which contains the world's poorest countries, the market is soaring, with more than 280 million subscribers.

Mobile phones are now ubiquitous in villages as well as cities. If an individual does not have a cell phone, they almost certainly know someone who does. Probably a significant majority of Africans have at least emergency access to a cell phone, either their own, a neighbour's, or one at a commercial kiosk.

Even more remarkable is the continuing "convergence" of digital information: wireless systems increasingly link mobile phones with the internet, personal computers, and information services of all kinds. The array of benefits is stunning. The rural poor in more and more of the world now have access to wireless banking and payment systems, such as Kenya's famous M-Pesa system, which allows money transfers over the phone. The information carried on the new networks spans public health, medical care, education, banking, commerce, and entertainment, in addition to communications among family and friends.

India, home to world-leading software engineers, hi-tech companies, and a vast and densely populated rural economy of some 700 million poor people in need of connectivity of all kinds, has naturally been a pioneer of digital-led economic development. Government and business have increasingly teamed up in public-private partnerships to provide crucial services on the digital network.

In the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, for example, emergency ambulance services are now within reach of tens of millions of people, supported by cell phones, sophisticated computer systems, and increased public investments in rural health. Several large-scale telemedicine systems are now providing primary health and even cardiac care to rural populations. Moreover, India's new rural employment guarantee scheme, just two years old, is not only employing millions of the poorest through public financing, but also is bringing tens of millions of them into the formal banking system, building on India's digital networks.

On the fully commercial side, the mobile revolution is creating a logistics revolution in farm-to-retail marketing. Farmers and food retailers can connect directly through mobile phones and distribution hubs, enabling farmers to sell their crops at higher "farm-gate" prices and without delay, while buyers can move those crops to markets with minimum spoilage and lower prices for final consumers.

The strengthening of the value chain not only raises farmers' incomes, but also empowers crop diversification and farm upgrading more generally. Similarly, world-leading software firms are bringing information technology jobs, including business process outsourcing, right into the villages through digital networks.

Education will be similarly transformed. Throughout the world, schools at all levels will go global, joining together in worldwide digital education networks. Children in the United States will learn about Africa, China, and India not only from books and videos, but also through direct links across classrooms in different parts of the world. Students will share ideas through live chats, shared curricula, joint projects, and videos, photos, and text sent over the digital network.

Universities, too, will have global classes, with students joining lectures, discussion groups, and research teams from a dozen or more universities at a time. This past year, my own university – Columbia University in New York City – teamed up with universities in Ecuador, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, France, Ethiopia, Malaysia, India, Canada, Singapore, and China in a "global classroom" that simultaneously connected hundreds of students on more than a dozen campuses in an exciting course on global sustainable development.


Link to full article. May expire in future.

Click here to read more.

[comment] Jeffery Sachs on the G8

from the Guardian

Jeffery Sachs calls on the G8 leaders to honor their commitments. - Kale

The G8 summit in Japan earlier this month was a painful demonstration of the pitiful state of global cooperation. The world is in deepening crisis. Food prices are soaring. Oil prices are at historic highs. The leading economies are entering a recession. Climate change negotiations are going around in circles. Aid to the poorest countries is stagnant, despite years of promised increases. And yet in this gathering storm it was hard to find a single real accomplishment by the world's leaders.

The world needs global solutions for global problems, but the G8 leaders clearly cannot provide them. Because virtually all of the political leaders that went to the summit are deeply unpopular at home, few offer any global leadership. They are weak individually, and even weaker when they get together and display to the world their inability to mobilise real action.

There are four deep problems. The first is the incoherence of American leadership. While we are well past the time when the United States alone could solve any global problems, it does not even try to find shared global solutions. The will to global cooperation was weak even in the Clinton administration, but it has disappeared entirely during the Bush administration.

The second problem is the lack of global financing. The hunger crisis can be overcome in poor countries if they get help to grow more food. The global energy and climate crises can be overcome if the world invests together to develop new energy technologies. Diseases such as malaria can be overcome through globally coordinated investments in disease control. The oceans, rainforests, and air can be kept safe through pooled investments in environmental protection.

Global solutions are not expensive, but they are not free, either. Global solutions to poverty, food production, and development of new clean energy technology will require annual investments of roughly $350bn, or 1% of GNP of the rich world. This is obviously affordable, and is modest compared to military spending, but is far above the pittance that the G8 actually brings to the table to solve these urgent challenges. The British prime minister, Gordon Brown, has made a valiant effort to get the rest of Europe to honor the modest aid pledges made at the G8 Summit in 2005, but it has been a tough fight, and one that hasn't been won.

The third problem is the disconnection between global scientific expertise and politicians. Scientists and engineers have developed many powerful ways to address today's challenges, whether growing food, controlling diseases, or protecting the environment. And these methods have become even more powerful in recent years with advances in information and communications technology, which make global solutions easier to identify and implement than ever before.

The fourth problem is that the G8 ignores the very international institutions – notably the United Nations and the World Bank – that offer the best hope to implement global solutions. These institutions are often deprived of political backing, underfinanced, and then blamed by the G8 when global problems aren't solved. Instead, they should be given clear authority and responsibilities, and then held accountable for their performance.

President Bush may be too unaware to recognise that his historically high 70% disapproval rating among US voters is related to the fact that his government turned its back on the international community – and thereby got trapped in war and economic crisis. The other G8 leaders presumably can see that their own unpopularity at home is strongly related to high food and energy prices, and an increasingly unstable global climate and global economy, none of which they can address on their own.

Starting in January 2009 with the new US president, politicians should take the best chance for their own political survival, and of course for their countries' wellbeing, by reinvigorating global cooperation. They should agree to address shared global goals, including the fight against poverty, hunger, and disease (the Millennium Development Goals), as well as climate change and environmental destruction.

To achieve these goals, the G8 should set clear timetables for action, and transparent agreements on how to fund it. The smartest move would be to agree that each country tax its CO2 emissions in order to reduce climate change, and then devote a fixed amount of the proceeds to global problem solving. With the funding assured, the G-8 would suddenly move from empty promises to real policies.

Backed by adequate funding, the world's political leaders should turn to the expert scientific community and international organisations to help implement a truly global effort. Rather than regarding the UN and its agencies as competitors or threats to national sovereignty, they should recognise that working with the UN agencies is in fact the only way to solve global problems, and therefore is the key to their own political survival.

These basic steps – agreeing on global goals, mobilising the financing needed to meet them, and identifying the scientific expertise and organisations needed to implement solutions – is basic management logic. Some may scoff that this approach is impossible at the global level, because all politics are local. Yet today, all politicians depend on global solutions for their own political survival. That by itself could make solutions that now seem out of reach commonplace in the future.

Link to full article. May expire in future.

Click here to read more.

[comment] How to solve the growing global food crisis, in three steps

from the New York Daily News

Bono's guru finally weighs in on the global food crisis. - Kale

BY JEFFREY SACHS

The surge of world food prices this year came like a bolt out of the blue, but warning lights were in fact flashing. Imbalances of global food supply and demand had been building for years beneath the public view.

It's our job now to restore a balance of food supply and demand, and to defuse the long-term factors that can still come back to haunt us.

To date, American policy has been part of the problem, not the solution. In a mix of misguided energy policy and brazen special interest politics, the U.S. adopted a bio-fuel boondoggle. Taxpayers pay billions of dollars each year to subsidize large grain companies to covert corn to ethanol. Yet on balance, corn-based ethanol saves little if any oil and natural gas, since the production of corn and its conversion to bio-fuel uses enormous amounts of energy. Meanwhile, ethanol drives up world food prices, especially considering that as much as one-third of the total corn crop this year is destined for the gas tank.

To add insult to injury, for decades the U.S. and Europe lectured Africa, Haiti and other poor countries not to subsidize their own farmers - even for farmers so deep in poverty that they can't afford to buy the most basic inputs of fertilizer and high-yield seeds in order to get started as commercial farmers.

That bad advice is only now ending, but as a result of it, Africa's and Haiti's peasant farmers have remained stuck with the world's lowest grain yields, roughly one third or one fourth of what they'd get if they planted with fertilizer and improved seeds. Matters have gotten worse over time, as soils have been depleted of nutrients because of the failure to replenish the depleted tropical soils with a proper mix of chemical and organic fertilizers. In our misguided and lobby-driven politics, we wait for food disasters to strike, and then ship emergency food aid.

We have the opportunity to start fixing things, for our own good and the world's, if we do three things fast.

First, the U.S. and other rich countries should increase funding for the World Food Program so that it can cover the rising costs of its urgent programs to feed the world's hungriest and most vulnerable people. The WFP needs around $2 billion in the coming year, which comes to around $2 per each person in the U.S., Europe and Japan.

Second, we need to cut drastically the misguided U.S. bio-fuels program. This will save billions of taxpayer dollars, lower food prices and help to relieve the crisis hitting the poorest of the poor. We should focus instead on developing a second generation of bio-fuels using woodchips and other nonfood biomass rather than corn.

Third, let's truly help Africa, Haiti and other impoverished countries end the cycle of famine and emergency food aid, by helping the poorest farmers get started with fertilizer, improved seeds and small-scale irrigation equipment where applicable. Africa could double its food production within five years. There's already one success story: the southern African country of Malawi, which has roughly doubled its food production since 2005.

Doubling grain production in sub-Saharan Africa would mean roughly 100 million tons more of cereal grains, more than enough to replace its current imports of around 35 million tons. The cost to the rich countries would be around $10 per person per year, one of the great bargains on the planet. Food prices would ease worldwide.

Link to full article. May expire in future.

Click here to read more.

Rocking the world

from the Sydney Morning Herald

Jonathan Pearlman spoke to the "rock star economist" Jeffrey Sachs on the eve of his Australian visit.

In a career that has spanned three decades and more than 100 countries, Jeffrey Sachs, perhaps the world's most famous macroeconomist (and certainly the economist with the most famous friends), has never come across a problem he thought could not be solved.

Known for his boundless energy and furious work-rate, his non-stop quests have included boosting Mongolian trade, cutting Polish inflation and ending world poverty. Along the way, he has been likened to the British economist John Maynard Keynes, urged to run for the US presidency by the Sachs For President group, and described by Angelina Jolie as "one of the smartest people in the world".

On his first foreign assignment in Bolivia in the mid-1980s, Sachs, a prodigy who had been made a tenured professor at Harvard at the age of 28 (he is now 53), gained international recognition after helping to reverse the country's soaring inflation.

He was given this task after attending a campus meeting with a small group of Bolivian students, who believed the country's 24,000 per cent inflation rate could not be fixed without a recession. Sachs disagreed. "If you think you can do it," said one member of the group, "come to Bolivia and prove it."

And so he did, eventually working as an adviser to the Bolivian president, Victor Páz, and recommending a series of tightly disciplined measures - including privatisation, debt cancellation, huge cuts to government spending - that later became known as shock therapy. This work earned him the nickname "Dr Shock" - a title he kept for 20 years until Bono described him as "my professor, my teacher, my rock star", prompting a flurry of new nicknames that included "Bono's guru" and "rock star economist".

After Bolivia, Sachs spent the early 1990s advising Eastern bloc countries on their switch from communism to capitalism. This included a controversial attempt by Sachs and his Harvard colleagues to apply shock therapy to Russia - which some critics say led to the country's social and economic collapse. Sachs describes the charge as absurd and has blamed the then US government for failing to assist with Russia's transition.

But Sachs's most enduring and ambitious campaign - to end world poverty - did not begin until 1995 with his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa, where he saw children dying of malnutrition and disease. Typically, his contact with extreme poverty sparked a quest for a solution. But he had discovered a different sort of problem, which stretched beyond questions of market economics and could not be solved on a whiteboard or a computer.

"The things that work best in this world are markets, but markets do not solve problems of the extreme poor," Sachs told the Herald before his arrival in Australia today.

"If I were dealing with market forces alone, it would be simple. The wonderful thing about markets is they self-organise. You don't really have to do very much. You turn a couple of dials and the whole national economy changes … You can sit in a finance ministry or a central bank and make tremendous progress for a whole economy. But these kinds of issues - children dying of malaria or mothers dying in childbirth or impoverished peasants not being able to grow enough food - are actually not solvable at the first instance by markets."

For more than a decade, Sachs has been travelling the world, marshalling support for efforts to fight the spread of disease and poverty in the world's poorest countries. He has written books, made countless speeches, advised the United Nations, the World Health Organisation and governments across Africa. He has travelled to Kenya with Jolie - their trip was made into a show for MTV - and with Madonna to Malawi - their work featured in her documentary about Malawi's children orphaned by AIDS. He worked with Bono on a six-year campaign to promote debt relief for the world's poorest countries, which led to billions of dollars of debt being written off by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Bono later wrote an introduction to Sachs's best-selling book, The End of Poverty, predicting: "In time his autograph will be worth a lot more than mine."

For Sachs, who has been accused of being a "celebrity sycophant", his work with celebrities, governments, international bodies, social workers, activists and academics is all part of his job of being "a pest".

"The biggest obstacle to action is simply the lack of awareness of the things that can be done," he says. "When the world wakes up to these issues you find that a lot more action can occur than anyone was dreaming of because we have quite powerful technologies and simple packages of things that can be done with big effect. Trying to help people see the linkages of why they should invest a small amount in these solutions - a small amount is enough - is the biggest challenge of all of this … The resources needed to address these problems are not vast, which has been my whole point for 25 years. It does not take a lot to solve these problems."

When I spoke to Sachs by phone, he was at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris on a stopover between Mali - where he had been working with the Mali Government on its food and malaria crises - and Cairo, where he was part of a UN delegation to a meeting of African leaders. His Australian visit will include speeches to the Australian National University's annual conference on China, and Sydney University's newly formed Institute for Sustainable Solutions, an institute partly based on Columbia University's Earth Institute, which he directs.

He is also due to meet the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, and will press the Government to stand by its commitments to international aid and tackling climate change. "I am very happy to be coming at a time of political change that I find very good for Australia and very beneficial for the world," he says.

"The Rudd Government has taken on two of the challenges that I think are most important in the world - climate change and the fight against poverty. Australia under the Howard government really fell away from both these issues. It was sad to see.

"The drought and the Murray Darling Basin are suffering under the pressures of climate change. Australia has a big stake in this and a big role to play given its [position] as a major energy producer and leading technology country."

Sachs, a special adviser to the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, was head of the UN's project to advise governments on reaching a set of targets on health, education, poverty and the environment by 2015, known as the Millennium Development Goals. He has set up and runs the Millennium Villages project, which is trying to help about 80 villages across Africa lift themselves out of poverty, a concept that has been floated for parts of the Asia-Pacific and indigenous Australia.

Sachs believes that global poverty can be eradicated, as long as the developed world abides by its commitment to increase aid levels to 0.7 per cent of gross national income. In its first budget this year, the Rudd Government lifted aid levels slightly to .32 per cent; it aims to reach .5 per cent by 2015 - though these levels remain behind most developed countries.

"Australia needs to ramp up its development assistance," says Sachs.

"If Australia does this, it can really play a very major role in its own neighbourhood - in countries like Papua New Guinea and poorer parts of South Asia … If we drop those commitments, the world will become considerably more dangerous. The biggest disappointment for me has been that after the debates and arguments, commitments have been taken, but then the commitments for increased financing for practical solutions have not yet been forthcoming. You don't give up on this."

Sachs never gives up. His belief in "practical solutions" seems a peculiarly American conviction that stems back to the can-do commitment to human endeavour of the country's 19th century Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau. Jet-lagged on a Saturday morning and speaking into his mobile phone, Sachs does not see the tarmac and terminal at Charles de Gaulle as signs of modern decay, but of hope and unfulfilled promise.

"The amazing thing is that our world has the mix of this stupendous wealth and 10 million children dying every year of poverty," he says.

"That is the paradox of our world … I am sitting in an airport, looking out at aircraft landing, at sparkling buildings, at technology all around me, at all of the appliances and computers that people are using.

"Humanity has created an extraordinarily sophisticated society with unbelievable ingenuity. So how can one not believe that we could get a bed-net to each sleeping site in Africa, or we could help people infected with HIV to get the pills they need? Of course we can do these things. It does not take irrational optimism or blinding insights to see that."

Link to full article. May expire in future.

Click here to read more.

[Book Review] World poverty addressed in new book

from Middle East Online

Jeffrey Sachs discusses global situation in relation to poverty in his latest work ‘Common Wealth’.

Book review of: “Common Wealth – Economics for a Crowded Planet” by Jeffrey D. Sachs (Penguin Press, NY, 2008).

Reviewed by Jim Miles

Economists some so intent on their money, not able to truly release themselves from their fundamental neoliberal values, afraid to admit that many of the policies they are advocating fall squarely into the rubric of ‘socialism’. That of course is a very sweeping definition, a rather broad paint stroke colouring them all with the same brush, but for Jeffrey Sachs it is suitable. While working at an eminently prestigious foundation, the “Earth Institute” at Columbia University, obviously intelligent enough to gather major resources around himself and use them effectively, and an able writer whose style is generally clear and not filled with incomprehensible economic jargon, Sachs recent work “Common Wealth” has enough significant errors to render it – well incomplete. That is because they are - for the two major errors - those of omission that take away the basis of his logic.

Sach’s essential thrust is how to eliminate poverty, indeed a noble goal, and to do so with our most “important responsibility [being] a commitment to know the truth as best we can, truth that is both technical and ethical.” One needs to add complete, for in discussing the global situation in relation to poverty, the distribution of wealth, the unequal relationship between the haves and have-nots, he covers much valid territory but no work on global economics can be fully valid, can fully argue about poverty and its causes, effects, and cures without including to a fairly large degree significant information on two parameters: militarization and corporate power.

Major faults of omission

Certainly Sachs discusses the military and its huge budget, repeating the now well known information that the US spends more than all other countries combined on its military/defence budget, (twenty times per capita more than the world average), that the military itself contributes significantly to global warming, and that the invasion of Iraq is a big mistake. But when it comes to the militarization of society, its ideals, the use of the military to maintain the empire (Why then over 750 military bases in over 130 countries around the world?), an empire that serves the wealth extraction of the elites, Sachs remains silent. As an obvious intelligent man, he must have – and if he did not, should have – read works by other significant American authors that describe the enormous influence that the American military has on global economics, foreign policy, and foreign domestic policies, and the seeming necessity of that military to support the commercial wealth of the US (the oft repeated ‘hidden fist’ as postulated by Thomas Friedman). [1]

That runs squarely into the ideas – or ideals of – corporations, those legally invisible entities that seem to have more rights than a person and whose main function is to make profits. The corporate world, which is the majority of global economics by most measures, is supported in its enterprises by the military, from well before the ‘banana wars’ of Central America to the military conflagrations that seem to follow the chase after extractive natural resources, oil being the most significant currently.

Even larger than the corporations are the organizations supported by the corporations as an upper level of government, a level fully non-democratic and hardly understood or even known by most citizens, the governance of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and other smaller and lesser known organizations - lots of ‘think tanks’ and ‘policy institutes’ that are nothing more than fronts for the corporations.

Sachs on occasion mentions these various organizations in passing but only the World Bank receives a spot in the index, with four mentions that are nothing more than passing references and have no influence on his arguments. The WTO, OECD, and IMF receive no index listing and only minimal passing mention in the text, an error of such huge proportion for the knowledgeable reader that it essentially destroys his arguments and perspectives however logical and rational they might seem at first.

To ignore the effects that the WTO and IMF have had in restructuring global economies by their imposed rules of engagement (while not necessarily ‘forced’ onto the countries involved, there is much in the way of coercive threats that can be intimated or stated to make ‘compliance’ much easier) with the result of large agricultural losses (consider Haiti and its loss of rice production, similarly in Mexico with its loss of corn production – with other factors involved to be sure) as the involved countries are forced to pay back huge debts at the expense of their own people. That includes the loss of community social services, education, health and welfare, job safety and other factors that Sachs argues for in his presentation.

Wealth Extraction

To not account for this entwinement of the military-corporate power and then its extension into the world of politics, all leading to the imperial concept where currently there is a huge extraction of wealth from the global hinterland to the imperial heartland is fully misleading. Sachs presents confusing arguments on extraction. At the end of the book he does say clearly that “The worst abuses have come – and continue to come – from the extractive industries, especially hydrocarbons (oil and gas)…where it is easy for companies to make a fortune by extracting high-value resources at a rapid rate without care for the local communities or the physical environment.” All true, but what about the ‘finance economy,’ the global market of pure speculation on money, banking, and corporations that when freed up by WTO and IMF intervention creates a huge vacuum of money heading towards the first world from the developing world, as experienced by the Asian ‘tigers’ that were halted in their tracks by global financial manipulations.

Sachs tries to deny that the rich are rich because the poor are poor, according to him a “failed Marxist notion”. He argues that if that happened “then the world income would be roughly constant”….except that he presents no arguments or statistics (economist love statistics when they support their point of view and change to ‘perfect market conjecture’ when it does not) to support that. Quite in contrast, it is evident from looking at the various statistics in other sources that the wealth of the first world is predicated upon extraction of that wealth from respective imperial hinterlands.

He even provides his own examples – taking on the white man’s burden of imperialism helping the down trodden poor: Korea’s performance economically was “built on foundations laid by Japanese investments during the colonial era”; Taiwan was assisted with “a good communication network...laid down, designed not with the narrow prupose of extracting some primary raw matieral but with the aim of increasing production of smallholder rice and sugar, both wanted in Japan;” and India was blessed with a railway system, entirely non-extractive of course. Well, okay maybe not primary resources in Taiwan, but we sure want to extract your agricultural resources; Korea (with Manchuria) was certainly utilized to extract raw materials for Japan’s rising industrial strength; and India suffered famines while food and other products were shipped overseas to Britain, using those same rail lines that were also convenient for moving militaries around.

More questions

There are more questions than answers arising from this book.

While speaking of wealth and its extraction, Sachs also ignores the huge debt pattern of US finances that is used to support its economy of mass consumption. An economy based on mass consumption can hardly be useful in any effort to curb global warming or ending poverty in other countries. The US is no longer a major producer of consumable items, but needs to import ‘stuff’ to keep the economy percolating along, and they have run out of the ‘savings’ that Sachs says are required to get out of poverty by using it for investments. Why nothing on the huge domestic and foreign global debt that has developed over the past decade?

The definition of “state failure” is tied to poverty and the poverty trap. Sach’s poverty trap is simplistic at best. There is no accounting for factors other than poor people have more kids because they are poor, and they are poor because they have more kids. Surely there is more to it than that. Let’s see: military intervention, CIA intervention, WTO, IMF, World Bank regulations, resource extraction, elitism and cronyism, racial barriers, lack of social services and education as caused by the preceding.

So this poverty and all the poor youth it creates leads to “state failure”. But now look at the main failed states that are presented: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan - oh my gosh; all the countries that have been invaded, attacked, occupied, and otherwise abused by the United States and earlier imperial powers! For ending the poverty trap he then has the audacity to use Afghanistan as the example, as it “exemplifies the end of the line for desperately poor countries when poverty, overpopulation, and environmental degradation are allowed unchecked for decades.”

For a supposedly intelligent man, this is an incredibly stupid statement!

What does he not see? I guess the British and Russian excursions into Afghanistan count for nothing, the American manipulation of the Pakistanis by the Americans to create the Taliban to get rid of the Russians in Afghanistan counts for nothing, the ongoing American led NATO occupation counts for nothing…no, it is there own fault for having too many kids! Incredibly, incredibly ignorant! How many exclamation points am I allowed to use? Should I write it all in capital letters? No, I guess the correct academic word would be exasperation that someone who should know better can make such clearly misleading statements.

Other problems arise within the book as well. There is no recognition of tariff barriers as fully described by other authors as significant factors in a developing countries successful progress by keeping out undesirable foreign competition – predation might be a more accurate word. [2] Japan maintained tariff barriers against foreign products after WW II to protect its renewing economy. Korea did the same as to protect its re-established and new industries. The same applies to all other wealthy countries at the beginning of their rise to power/wealth (the US and Britain included) – the protection of local industry by using tariffs, export taxes, and subsidies for protection.

Accompanying this is the lack of democracy in many of these state enterprises. Sachs does provide a one liner in support of the neoliberal ideal that wealthy countries are democratic and then do not go to war with each other. Except that Korea was a dictatorship up into the 1980s. Britain and the US were democracies but in the very limited sense of early forms that disenfranchised nearly everyone but the wealthy landowners. Further, all empires have never hesitated to support non-democratic autocratic, dictatorial, monarchical states as long as those states remained within their economic-ideological range otherwise.

The biggest avoidance of democracy arises from the very omission of the WTO, IMF, and World Bank, all directed by corporate personnel of some kind. Corporations themselves are not democratic, and the global governance bodies created by them are definitely not democratic, especially considering they have described themselves previously as “colluding” to form a new world governance.

Anything good?

To counter that with a positive note, Sachs almost redeems himself in a chapter discussing social welfare, or the welfare state. Previous to this point there are many ideas presented to assist the poor achieve some form of wealth, many of which, while coming under the social welfare rubric, are not described as such: education, health, worker safety, working conditions, agricultural training, empowerment of women through education and financial support. All these are part and parcel of a true ‘social democracy’ a true socialism. Somehow Sachs cannot quite admit to himself or his compatriots that his arguments are very much socialistic.

In Chapter 11, “Economic Security in a Changing World,” Sachs examines several levels of social democracy, starting with the Scandinavian countries (that are conveniently forgotten in most economic treatises trying to debunk socialism), passing through the slightly less socialist levels of Europe (called ‘mixed economies’), to those of us on the right that are mainly ‘free market’, at least at the government-corporate level if not at the level of the people. His conclusion is clear: “…uniquely among the world’s high-income countries [the US] has carried on a decades-long assault on social insurance in a manner contrary to the evidence, and with increasingly adverse results.” In other words, democratic socialist policies do provide benefits to the poor and the over-all economy of the countries they live in.

Almost redeems himself, but not quite, as he then turns to “Rethinking Foreign Policy” and on into “Achieving Global Goals” where – although some of his ideas are sound – there again is no recognition of militarism and corporate power. Without addressing those problems, the other ideas and proposed solutions are purely academic.

This is a very frustrating work as it could have so much more potential. Jeffery Sachs sits on the edge of the truth, never quite wanting – or able - to identify it for what it is, except for the one quick chapter on social welfare, not quite willing for some reason to look at the complete picture that includes the military-corporate ties, keeping blinders on that prevent a truly global view of “Common Wealth”. Because his writing and arguments are clearly presented as far as they go, I would hope that he re-addresses these issues in light of the above arguments. While everyone has biases of interpretation, there cannot be a bias on something that is simply omitted – it is just not there - and because of that, the work fails.

Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for The Palestine Chronicle. Miles’ work is also presented globally through other alternative websites and news publications.

Notes:

[1] There are many works on this topic, far too many to list here, but among the main authors to review are Andrew Bacevich, Chalmers Johnson, James Carroll, Joseph Stiglitz, Howard Zinn, Alex Cockburn, William Blum, Greg Grandin, Amy Chua, William Greider, Noam Chomsky.

[2] some of the note [1] authors cover this especially Stiglitz, but see also Walden Bello, Bruce Cumings, and Ha-Joon Chang.

Click here to read more.

Poverty eradication a priority for the Grand Coalition Govt

from the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation

President Mwai Kibaki at his Harambee House Office met and updated Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, the Special Advisor to UN Secretary General, on the steps the Grand Coalition Government was taking to attain the millennium development goals.

President Kibaki said despite the heavy investments required, the Government was giving priority to Health and Education sectors which were key to poverty reduction in the country.

The President Thursday outlined achievements in the five-year-old free primary education programme and the progress so far made in implementing phase one of the free secondary education that was introduced in January this year.

The Head of State outlined the measures being taken to boost food production including resettling the internally displaced persons back to their farms.

"The Government fully appreciates the challenges posed by the rising international food and oil prices which may seriously compromise food sufficiency goals," President Kibaki said.

He thanked Prof. Sachs for rolling out the millennium villages round the world including Kenya and urged him to consider inaugurating more villages around the country.

In response, Prof. Sachs commended President Kibaki for his decision to form a Grand coalition Government with Prime Minister Raila Odinga noting that the unity of purpose among the coalition partners would assist the country in overcoming some of the challenges hindering attainment of the millennium development goals.

Click here to read more.

Humanitarian Greg Mortenson and Economist Jeffrey Sachs Chat with Howard Schiffer

from the Santa Barbara Independent

Real Answers to the World’s Biggest Questions

By Howard B. Schiffer

Earlier this year, I traveled through India with Howard Schiffer, founder of Santa Barbara’s nonprofit Vitamin Angels, which was featured last week on the cover of The Independent (independent.com/india). As we discussed, literally, how to save the world, Schiffer kept referring to economist Jeffrey Sachs’s book The End of Poverty. So when it came time to find someone to interview Sachs and humanitarian Greg Mortenson in anticipation of their May 13 talk at UCSB’s Campbell Hall, the obvious choice was Schiffer, whose globe-trotting work for the past 14 years gives him a unique and powerful perspective on the work of these two men. I think you’ll agree. What follows are the extended interviews that Schiffer conducted with each man, the condensed version of which were published in The Santa Barbara Independent on Thursday, May 1. — Matt Kettmann
Jeffrey Sachs and Greg Mortenson

Greg Mortenson

In 1993, mountain climber Greg Mortenson got lost after failing to reach the summit of K2, wound up in a small Pakistan village, and ended up discovering his life. He founded the Central Asia Institute, which is responsible for building 70-plus schools and teaching 26,000 children in Pakistan and Afghanistan under the mission statement: “To promote peace by educating children, especially girls, who, because of poverty, isolation, gender discrimination, corrupt governments, and religious extremism are denied the right to learn.” That experience led to his writing the book Three Cups of Tea. I spoke on the phone with him recently for more than two hours.— Howard B. Schiffer

You came down from K2 in 1993, emaciated, exhausted, and disoriented after failing to reach the top, and were taken in by the people of a remote village called Korphe [in Pakistan] who nursed you back to health. After you recovered, you saw an outdoor school with 84 children sitting in the dirt. A girl named Cho-cho asked you to build a school and you immediately promised to do just that. The power of that impulse, what some might consider a “rash decision,” has had a profound impact on who you are today. What prompted that conviction?

Greg Mortenson: I grew up on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania from the time I was three months old until 14 years old [1958-1972]. So I had seen abject poverty and disparity — this wasn’t new to me. My father started a hospital and my mother started a school in Africa. It took my father a decade to raise six million dollars in the 1960s to build Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center (KCMC).

When it came time to inaugurate KCMC, my father gave a speech and said that in 10 years, all the department heads would be local Tanzanians. The ex-pats and Westerners scoffed at my father for having the audacity to say that. My father died in 1981, but a decade after KCMC opened, all the department heads were from Tanzania and still are today 35 years later.

When a brave girl named Cho-Cho, sitting in the dirt, writing with sticks in the sand on a cold autumn day, asked for help to build a school, it was the most natural thing in the world for me to promise her I would.

It has now been 15 years since you first arrived in Korphe. How has the village changed?

The Braldu valley in the Karakoram mountain range has kept many of its ancestral ways. There is still no electricity, internet, TV, or phones in Korphe, but the community is not in a rush to get there. Wheat is still milled in centuries-old water mills, and yak dung is dried on walls to use for fuel. The communities have a deep sense of ecological harmony with their land. There is no garbage other than a few candy wrappers and cigarette boxes that Westerners have brought in. A newspaper does show up every few days, which is the highlight of the week.

Health care has improved, especially through a nutrition, hygiene, and sanitation program we introduced in the school about a decade ago. When I first visited Korphe, one in three babies born died before the age of one. The infant mortality rate now has been reduced by over 30 percent. The literacy rate has gone from under 10 percent up to 40 percent.

There have also been a few unforeseen results over the last fifteen years. When the children learn to read and write, they often teach their parents. We now have adult literacy programs.

The second thing is that one of my elder mentors in Pakistan, Haji Ali, warned me that when literacy increased, the people would lose their oral history. We have oral history programs now in our schools where elders come in and share their traditions, culture, and heritage with the grandchildren in school. This is an incredibly popular class.

The third unexpected result is that women write letters to their maternal families, which is a significant and empowering experience. Up until now, once a woman got married she essentially had no contact with her family.

I sometimes see women who are returning home from the market carefully unfold newspapers that their vegetables or produce are wrapped in and start reading the news. Korphe has a good Iman [village mullah], but some of the mullahs use illiteracy to control the people. When women have access to the outside world, hear the news, and read opinions, they can see it sometimes conflicts with what the mullah has told them.

Are you still in touch with Cho-cho?

Cho-cho is now married to Ibrahim, one of our first male graduates. He owns a local store and she helps tutor children. They have three children and the older one is in first grade at the Korphe School which we built.

Have the people there now read Three Cups of Tea?

I’m working on translations in Urdu, Pashto, and Farsi, so it can be printed cheaply in Pakistan and Afghanistan so the masses can buy it to read. It’s a slight challenge with legal releases, but it will happen.

The media in our country seems to focus on the “volatility” of this region. What is your view on this concern from the village level in Pakistan and Afghanistan?

Americans are largely naïve and misinformed about what people in Pakistan are like and how they think. If you ask a woman in a rural village about 9/11, the Twin Towers, Iraq, TSA, Homeland Security, B52s, she will not know what you are talking about. But she will be able to tell you that one in three babies dies before the age of one and she wants her children to get an education.

We work in really remote areas, some places where the Taliban is still operating. Our military is also there, the units are called FOB (Forward Operating Bases). I get one to two dozen letters every month from military people who are in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Lt. Col Chris Kolenda wrote me and said, “Without education nothing will change.” Everyone who is in this region knows that the most important thing for peace is building relationships. Chris wrote saying, “The thirst for education here is palpable. After 30 years of war, the people want a better future.”

What is amazing is that it is easy to get the Army to approve a $100,000 smart bomb to try to kill four Taliban soldiers, but they’ll deny a $2,000 request for a bridge that might serve an entire region and help make it much easier for the people to get their goods to market.

I’ve been speaking for the past 16 months probably to about 150,000 people. I always ask the same question: “Raise you hand if you are aware that today, in 2008, there are six million children going to school in Afghanistan and one-third of them are girls, and that, in 2000, there were only about 800,000 children going to school and almost all of them were boys. This is a seven-time increase in eight years.” And so far only about 35 to 40 people have raised their hands.

The publisher pushed for your original book to be subtitled “One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations, One School at a Time.” Is the fear of terrorism the only thing that sells in America?

This was a big disagreement with my publisher. The original 2006 hardcover did not do well and sold only about 25,000 books the first year. When it went to paperback in 2007, the new editor Paul Slovak pushed for a subtitle change to, “One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace, One School at a Time,” and won. When the paperback book came out, it was immediately number four on the New York Times bestseller list and has stayed there ever since. This month it is number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Everyone has been surprised that it keeps selling. We haven’t really received much major TV, no national NPR, or even book reviews in big city papers. It all make sense to me though. It’s about people in this country who are hungry for peace, and new solutions to the perpetual cycle of violence and “war on terror.”

After 9/11, you felt amazing sympathy throughout Pakistan — village army commanders, village chiefs, children, and women embraced you. You tell the story of meeting little old ladies who brought you eggs to bring back to give to the widows whose husbands had died in the World Trade Center. Then you returned to the States and received death treats and hate mail. Were you shocked at the contrast and the lack of information on who the terrorists really are?

I was in Pakistan for three months before and after 9/11. After it happened, the State Department and U.S. embassy advised me to go home immediately. I called up my wife, Tara, and she encouraged me to stay. She said, “The people love you, your work is important, and you need to stay.”

I finally came home on Halloween, October 31st. I landed in Denver airport and there were American flags everywhere. I called Tara and said, “What’s going on? It looks like the 4th of July?” She said, “Greg, our country has changed. Be careful, take time to understand what has happened, and don’t say much.”

I had never spoken out against the war, and only had said we should use restraint instead of lashing out in retribution and retaliation without knowing who we were striking at. This was a very complex situation that could not be answered in six-second sound bites.

Someone called my house and spoke to my daughter, Amira, who was six at the time and said. “I’m going to kill your Daddy.” It was upsetting for her. It was the only time I thought about quitting this work.

The real enemy, whether it is in Afghanistan, Africa, or America, is ignorance. And it is ignorance that breeds hatred. Fighting terrorism is based in fear. Promoting peace is based in hope.

You were kidnapped in Pakistan in July 1996, held for eight days, and were finally set free. The shocking thing to me is that you returned to this tribe and showed them photos of your family. How were you able to do this?

I made a mistake. I wandered into a tribal area, the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) on the Afghan border, alone and without permission. I was put in a dark earthen room and feared that I would be executed anytime with a bullet through my head. Two men with AK-47s who were smoking hashish guarded me day and night. After three days of getting depressed, I realized I needed to befriend my captors, and asked them to read the Koran and teach me about their Islamic faith.

After six days, I told them my wife was going to have our first baby — a son (not accurate, it was really a daughter) — and they started to warm up to me, and offer better food. The birth of a first born son is life’s greatest event for Pathan tribal men and cause for great celebration. On the eighth day, they freed me.

A couple of years later, they wrote me, apologized, and asked me to come back — they also wanted to build a school. I decided to revisit Waziristan, even though it was a little frightening. Under centuries-old traditions, I returned under their code of Nenawatay, or right of refuge. They lavished incredible hospitality on me, and fired hundreds of rounds of bullets in the air to celebrate when I showed them photos of my family. Even though they realized I actually had a daughter, it was fine.

Do your children travel with you in Pakistan?

My wife and children travel with me to Pakistan. They don’t go everywhere with me, but they love it there. My daughter Amira teaches children in the school, and my son is adept in local children’s games.

You are involved in long-term solutions. The United States talks about “nation building,” but the real interest looks like a rush to hang up the “Mission Accomplished” sign. What does the long-term investment and commitment in these communities look like?

Ultimately, the only way to peace is to have dialogue and build relationships. Politicians will never bring peace, but people will. Many Americans want to briefly foray into Pakistan and Afghanistan and do a little good work. Unless it’s a long term commitment, nothing changes on the ground in rural villages.

An example is that we helped an eye doctor and team come to Northern Pakistan in 1998 to do about 60 cataract surgeries. It cost us about $26,000. Then we realized there was the need for more surgeries and preventative care, so slowly over the next four years we helped a local doctor, Niaz Ali, get extensive opthamalogical and surgical training in Pakistan and Nepal. His total training cost $4,000. Since 2002, he has done over 4,000 cataract surgeries which cost less than $10 per procedure.

Did you have any heroes when you were growing up?

I grew up without TV or movies. Albert Schweitzer was my hero. At around seven, I read about his philosophy called Reverence for Life, which says that all living things are sacred. That really stuck with me.

Another childhood hero was Mother Theresa, who helped set up an orphanage in Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania, which I once visited. I mostly admired her humility and was blessed to touch her hand before she was buried in Calcutta in 1998. What struck me most was how tiny her hand was, how such a small person is one of the greatest visionaries and examples of our time.

What do you want to be written on your tombstone? What is your hope for this world your children are growing up in and what do you want your legacy to be?

I’ve told my wife Tara to put “He loved all beings, and died a happy man.” What I want most for our children and the world is peace and that the perpetual cycle of violence, wars, nuclear arsenals, terrorism, abuse, and disregard for our planet will cease.
Jeffrey Sachs

Perhaps best known as the person who inspired Bono to focus on global health, Jeffrey Sachs has long been playing a key role on the world’s stage, helping countries such as Bolivia and Mongolia revitalize their economies, directing the Earth Institute at Columbia University, advising the Secretary General of the United Nations, and heading up the U.N.’s Millennium Project. Considered the leading international economist of his generation, the very busy Sachs also authored The End of Poverty and, most recently, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. I caught up with him over the phone as he was in a taxi on the way to the airport. — Howard B. Schiffer

Last month, World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned that 33 countries are now on the verge of social upheaval because of rising food prices [the price of rice has doubled since the start of 2008]. Was this predictable and could it have been avoided?

Jeffrey Sachs: I don’t think that the specific timing of the increases was predicted by very many people — certainly, I didn’t predict it. What is predictable is the fact that there are a lot of very vulnerable people whose vulnerability could be reduced. We should have been acting well before the crises to address the problems of hunger and greater food production. When you look at what’s happening right now you, can understand it even if you can’t predict it.

What specifically could have been done so that we’re not responding to a crisis? How can we be proactive so people are not so vulnerable?

I think the main thing is that we know that there are nearly a billion people in the world who are in chronic hunger — not just when food crises happens, but who are hungry day in and day out because their food systems in the countries where they live are just not productive enough to be providing the food supplies robustly. There are also extremely poor people who just live on the margins in the cities as well.

What we ought to be doing as a very general matter is helping the poorest of the poor escape from the poverty trap, as well as helping poor farmers to become more productive, both to the feed themselves and thereby get out of the poverty trap themselves, but also to be able to feed their countries more effectively. Both of these things are possible. We can break the poverty trap through a variety of actions and we certainly can help low-production farmers, especially in Africa, to grow more food, earn more income, and break this cycle of impoverishment.

President Bush, recently talking about the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, stated that the military “can have all the time they need.” You’ve stated that one day of the U.S. military budget could supply Africa with mosquito nets [to fight malaria] for five years. What could have been accomplished with the one trillion dollars we’ve spent in Iraq to date?

It’s almost unbelievable what we could be doing. We could be fully funding our own health systems. We could be addressing the scourges of malaria, AIDS, tuberculosis, water stress, food production in Africa, and we could be paying down our national debt so we weren’t in such a ferocious financial crisis. The money that we are squandering on this war is simply mind-boggling and the idea that we have all the time in the world to waste — all of the blood and money in the world — is shocking.

You keep focusing on 0.7 percent — the amount of the Gross National Product (GNP) each country in the developed world would have to donate to eradicate extreme poverty. This equates to only $34 per person. Can we motivate governments to come forward to do the right thing or are we better off going directly to the people?

I think we have to do both things. I see three ways to do this. One is to engage the general public. That’s happening now, it’s starting to increase, and a lot more can be done. But people are excited all over our country to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Second, we could go just to the billionaires of the world. These 1,100 individuals have $4.2 trillion of net worth. They certainly could set aside a small percentage of their wealth and form foundations. This could generate $100-200 billion a year, enough to solve the problem.

A third way would be for us to end the war in Iraq and end the Bush tax cuts for the rich and use some of these savings, which would be over $450 billion a year, to reach a 0.7 percent commitment. This would be enough to get the job done and we would be so much more secure in the end — a more prosperous world and a much safer world.

Is part of the problem people not being willing to commit to the long-term solution? It’s interesting in the movie Charlie Wilson’s War that many people forget that the last part of Charlie Wilson’s fight was advocating for schools to be built in Afghanistan. Are we often stopping our efforts in developing nations before the real work is done?

It’s a great point because when the Afghan war with the Soviets ended with the Soviet retreat, there was an opportunity to help rebuild that country. The U.S. said, “Nah, we’re not interested, let’s get out of there.” And that opened the way for the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and 9/11 and returning in this very expensive, NATO-led war and continuing bloody occupation. We don’t follow through.

We always think that development is the soft thing and somehow the military is the hard real thing. But the military approach doesn’t result in long term solutions. We don’t invest in ways that will get to the core of the problem: addressing the needs of ending extreme poverty, helping to create jobs, having kids in school, having adequate water, and safe sanitation — essentially helping people be able to meet their own basic needs and be empowered enough to have economically productive lives.

After World War II, the Marshall Plan helped rebuild a modern Europe and generated enormous goodwill for the U.S. Many have said that after 9/11, we were in a perfect position to assume global leadership. Given our poor image abroad today, is there a new Marshall Plan, a new opportunity for US leadership?

I’m even looking for something a little more modest. Not even U.S. leadership, but just U.S. partnership. Let’s find partners around the world who are ready to work with us, who are desperate for the U.S. to be back in the problem-solving mode rather than in the military mode, so that we can cooperate and solve these problems.

I’m not even pitching the idea that the U.S. should finance this like we did in the Marshall plan. The world today is multi-polar; there’s a lot more wealth around. I think China should put up some of the money, Europe should put up some of the money, along with the United States and other countries.

The problem isn’t our lack of leadership — it’s that we aren’t meeting the standard of being a basic partner with the poorest of the poor. [The world is lacking] our collegiality, our readiness to say, “Yes, we understand your vulnerability, your hunger, the risk of your children dying and we’re ready to work together with you.” Because that would not only solve problems, it would buy us security and goodwill around the world. The world would be so relieved to have the U.S. back in a constructive approach.

You’re one of the only people on the planet who is not afraid to ask for billions — the real cost for turning this world around.

I’m a macroeconomist, so my specialty is knowing how many zeros it will take to solve a problem and how much our spending is. Let me give you an example. This year we will spend more on the Pentagon than the entire world, in all of modern history, has spent in aid for Africa. One year’s Pentagon spending is greater than all the aid in the history of Africa.

People say, “Oh, we throw money down the drain in Africa.” They say that because they don’t know. They have certain preconceptions. They say, “If these people are poor, it must be because they squandered all the money.” It’s kind of doubly blaming Africa. First you don’t give them help and then you blame them for wasting the money they never got.

I’m trying to remind people that we spend $1.9 billion every single day on the Pentagon. So if one asks for $1.5 billion dollars for five years mosquito net coverage [to prevent Malaria] for all of Africa, that’s not outlandish, that’s less than one day’s Pentagon spending. You could ask for a few hundred million dollars for something and keep in mind that we spend $1.14 million every minute at the Pentagon. We’re taking a military approach that isn’t working and then complaining that we have no money to solve the problems of people dying of extreme poverty. I think there is a much better way.

Many of the models for relief and humanitarian work follow a “push” [top-down] model, whereby a program is developed at the top and then “pushed” down to the village level. This is common to health care systems around the world, yet your Millenium Villages seem to be following a different strategy. Can you talk about these different models?

Let me say that I believe in top-down and bottom-up. If you want to eradicate smallpox, we succeeded by using a top-down model and a very worthy one. Right now, I’m arguing that we need a top-down malaria control model. Everybody living in a malaria transmission zone ought to have a bed net and have access to very fine medicines called Artimisinin combination therapy. With these medicines and the bed nets, you could bring the malaria deaths down by about a million a year.

Bottom-up models are a different matter. If you want to improve farming, there are some general principles, but what do you grow? What crops work? How can you make the land more productive? How to manage the water? That has to be bottom-up because it’s different in every place. How will the local culture work effectively to support the education of children?

Whether it’s receiving bed nets top-down or whether it’s getting children into school from the bottom-up, you need communities engaged. You better have the communities understanding why the bed nets are so important and how they can be used. It’s a mix of strategies that reflects the local needs and the scientific reality.

Within the Millennium Villages, you are bringing multiple resources to improve conditions, not just bed nets, but water, improved agriculture technology, medicines, and education. How is this working?

We’re seeing something very thrilling, which is communities that were without hope are now being returned to vibrancy and fullness, partly because they’re better fed. They’re growing more food through specific interventions that are being done on food productivity. We’re seeing healthier people because they have malaria bed nets and medicine.

Yesterday, in our project meeting, we reviewed the conditions on school feeding programs. It was just wonderful news how across the Millennium Villages, the kids are getting mid-day lunch at school. This is tremendous because it’s good for nutrition, good for energy at school, and good for their attendance. It’s really happening.

The idea is a holistic approach whereby you approach health, education, agriculture, and infrastructure. You give hope to these communities because you empower them enough so that they can break out of poverty.

Why don’t most people in the U.S. even know about the Millennium Development Goals? Is this just poor marketing on the part of the U.N.?

I don’t blame the U.N. The U.N. has a hard enough time just operating with all of these countries squabbling and with the U.S. often disempowering the U.N. I think that the President of the United Sates might have done a better job explaining to the American people that we are signatory with the rest of the world to reach objectives to fight poverty, hunger, and disease and we just have not been at the table. These goals were set in September 2000.

I know of only one time in the whole Bush administration where President Bush even refers to the Millennium Development Goals: September 14, 2005 at the United Nations because I happened to be there. He’s probably said “the war on terror” thousands of times, and he only said “Millennium Development Goals” once, so how can people know?

Of course, I want people to know despite the diversion of attention in Washington. I’m trying through my books to nudge that process along, but I think it would be good if we had national leadership that helped the American people to understand what has been signed in our name, what could be done, and what we are not doing. I’m hoping to see the Millennium Development Goals in the inaugural address of the next President. That to me would be a marker that we are back in the real partnership process.

Click here to read more.

Facing a food crisis, optimist finds hope in the dismal science

from The Globe and Mail

Jeffrey Sachs's ‘yes we can' attitude has its fair share of supporters – and detractors

SINCLAIR STEWART

NEW YORK — More than two decades ago, long before ambition and optimism conspired to make him the Man Who Would Save the World, Jeffrey Sachs was merely the Man Who Would Save Bolivia.

As a precocious 28-year-old, already a tenured professor in Harvard's economics department, Mr. Sachs attended a lecture on the South American country's growing financial crisis. After listening to one speaker enumerate a host of ills, chief among them a crippling rate of inflation, he stood up and confidently declared, “I can fix that.”

Mr. Sachs might be seen as the Barack Obama of the economics world, a self-appointed saviour who, no matter how seemingly intractable the problem, is there to smilingly reassure us that “yes we can.”


Not long after that Harvard seminar, he was on a plane to La Paz, where he counselled the Bolivian government on a program of “shock therapy” that dramatically reduced its hyperinflation. That success, in turn, led to similar advisory roles in Poland and Russia after the fall of communism, transforming him into perhaps the world's most high-profile economist (he was twice named one of the most 100 influential people in the world by Time magazine).

In recent years, as Mr. Sachs has become a special adviser to the UN Secretary-General, and shifted his attention to the more expansive and complex issues of extreme poverty, climate change and AIDS, this rock star appeal has continued to grow (Bono, of U2 fame, has become a vocal acolyte).

But so too have the doubters, who question whether Mr. Sachs's “yes we can” prescription of more government intervention and improved co-operation among the global community isn't more than a little rose-tinted.

“Even though there is a lot of confusion, a lot of inertia, a lot of normal negativity coming from powerful groups, a lot of vested interests – all of this I believe can still be surmounted by good information understood by the public,” Mr. Sachs, now 53, explained during an interview recently at his Manhattan home, near Central Park. “They would like to see solutions to problems.”

This conviction lies at the heart of his latest book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, a blueprint of sorts for navigating both the perils of a burgeoning population, and the corresponding strain it is placing on our natural resources.

Philosophically, his proposed remedies are more closely aligned with the left-leaning John Maynard Keynes than they are with Milton Friedman, but Mr. Sachs, who is also director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, has clearly been influenced by both.

Like Mr. Friedman, he believes in market solutions for many economic issues – he just doesn't think that unfettered markets, left to their own devices, will lift Africans out of abject poverty or stamp out environmental degradation. These crises, he insists, require strong public policies to align private interests with the goals of sustainable development.

Mr. Sachs, who is a diminutive man with boyish looks, a ready smile and a helmet of implacable hair, has an academic's tendency to lecture on these subjects, rather than converse.

And while his diagnosis is undeniably grim, he never succumbs to Malthusian pessimism. Quite the opposite. He is exhortative rather than shrill, hopeful rather than plaintive, even as he ticks off a list of calamities ranging from the collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery, to the more than one billion people trapped in extreme poverty, to the AIDS pandemic in Africa and the looming possibility of massive species extinction.

“You might ask why I'm cheerful and optimistic,” he acknowledged. “What I can tell you is that eight years ago, not one single African was being treated for AIDS with antiretroviral medicines. Bed-net distribution was at a standstill. The use of old and ineffective medicines for malaria was still rampant, and it looked pretty much like this food situation right now, where the international community was giving speeches – and doing essentially nothing.”

The spiralling cost of food, which has already sparked riots in poorer regions of the world, will provide an immediate test of Mr. Sachs's optimism.

The UN's World Food Program has made an impassioned plea for $775-million (U.S.) in emergency funding, saying it cannot afford to buy enough grain at these inflated prices. Even if it is successful, the cash would be little more than a Band-Aid: The long-term solution, Mr. Sachs believes, is multifaceted, and involves putting the brakes on the U.S. ethanol industry, creating a $5-billion fund for agriculture, and financing better research and development for crop technologies in the developing world.

The obvious glitch here – and it's one that underlies each of Mr. Sachs's main objectives, whether it be eradicating extreme poverty, curbing population growth, or fighting environmental degradation – is the need for a new spirit of global co-operation, one in which political leaders with differing agendas can be mobilized in the pursuit of shared goals. These ambitious goals require much more collaboration, not to mention cash, than handing out malarial bed netting.

“Sustainability has to be a choice, a choice of a global society that thinks ahead and acts in unaccustomed harmony,” he states matter-of-factly in the book. “Governments will have to be restructured for such twenty-first century problems,” he declares at another point.

Mr. Sachs believes the cost of inaction is too great for governments to ignore; yet critics fasten upon these statements as fanciful, proof of a well-intentioned naiveté.

Take the food example. The ethanol industry, despite fierce criticism from many around the world, soldiers on, fuelled by the powerful U.S. corn lobby. Several countries have recently imposed export bans on key crops, choosing a path of self-interest rather than co-operation. Agricultural research budgets for Africa are in the process of being slashed, rather than augmented. And the United States continues to direct most of its spending at the war in Iraq, making it more difficult to solicit more food aid from the world's wealthiest nation.

But Mr. Sachs, optimist that he is, shrugs off the criticism as little more than defeatist cynicism, pointing out that not long ago it was a struggle merely to convince corporate interests that climate change was real.

“My experience in life over many, many issues is that in the end, the truth comes out,” he said. “It usually takes longer than I think, but it also usually is more relentless than the short-run political analysis allows for.”

He insists that the path to salvation lies in a multidisciplinary approach; private players must work with willing governments, academics, scientists and non-governmental organizations to create sustainable technologies.

These technologies are where he places a great deal of faith – not merely in their ability to help contain some of the environmental damage (carbon capture sequestration is an example he's fond of citing) but to improve agricultural yields with more resistant, bountiful seeds.

One of the biggest challenges, he concedes, is reversing the course of U.S. foreign policy. Throughout his book, he discusses a rebalancing of economic power that will soon find its centre of gravity in Asia, rather than the United States. Such monumental transitions have been the bedfellows of political hostility and even wars in the past – all the more reason, he says, that the United States must jettison its unilateralist approach on the world stage and become a better global citizen.

Click here to read more.

Q&A | Energy and food problems need global solutions, says Sachs

from the Seattle Times

By Kristi Heim

Any one of the problems that economist Jeffrey Sachs takes on would be daunting by itself: finding sustainable energy sources to avoid environmental destruction; stabilizing world population; ending extreme poverty and creating a new system for global cooperation.

Yet Sachs, who directs the Earth Institute at Columbia University, tackles all four in his new book, called "Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet."

He argues that finding solutions to these interconnected problems is not only possible, it's inexpensive, and would take just 2 to 3 percent of the world's annual income. He talked about a few of his ideas during a visit to Seattle. Below is an edited transcript.

Q: How dangerous a point has the world reached?

A: We're unprepared for the changes that are taking place in the world; the soaring energy prices and food prices are an example of this. We have economic systems and strategies inconsistent with how fast the global economy is changing, how interconnected food and energy systems are. We're way behind the curve in terms of the sustainable development challenge. The chances for crises are very high because we haven't been thinking ahead.

The odd thing is the Bush administration says we need to wean ourselves off oil dependence, but they've done absolutely nothing to get the technologies in place. The amount we're spending, $200 billion a year on the Iraq war, dwarfs the $3 billion a year we're spending on alternative energy. It's not a question of money but how we're allocating it.

Q: Is the appetite for fixing global problems diminished when people in the U.S. see our own systems failing?

A: I think when you think about energy and food prices soaring, those are things that can't be fixed by ourselves. Food prices reflect a worldwide imbalance of supply and demand. We're going to have to do this globally.

Q: The more successful developing countries such as China, India and Brazil will have a greater impact on climate change than we will. Even if the U.S. changes its policies as you suggest, these countries play a deciding role.

A: It's like a chicken-and-egg problem. The Chinese say they're waiting for us. On the first day of the next administration, I think the president ought to send an envoy around the world to say we're back at the negotiating table on climate change. There's no solution for any of us unless we're solving it all together.

I think the key is, start with the goals we've already agreed to. We're already signatories to a lot of international agreements, like the Millennium Development Goals, like the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. They're unknown to American people but very much in the minds of other people around the world. We'll find leverage if we say, "We will work together with you on the goals the world has agreed on." There's a lot of hunger in the world to cooperate.

Q: In bringing about global cooperation, is the U.S. still in a position to lead?

A: We haven't even tried. They see us as doing the preponderance of harm so far. They're saying they will get started when we get started. China has 22 percent of the world's population and only 6 percent of its safe water supply. They are enormously vulnerable to environmental stresses; therefore they take this problem very seriously. They don't know what to do about it, but there's no lack of interest.

The prime minister of India wants help to develop carbon capture sequestration. I've been talking with China on water issues. My feeling is there's absolute receptivity to serious approaches.

Q: What will motivate the public to push leaders into action?

A: $110-a-barrel oil, food prices at an all-time high and a trillion dollars and 4,000 lives down the drain in Iraq.

American people want a different course. More than 80 percent say the country is on the wrong course. We need to turn the demand for change into a broad strategy of innovation, investing in our peace, security and economic future by focusing on sustainable development.

There are huge reasons why we need to make that investment. We will hit barriers of energy and food and so forth if we don't invest. Whoever invests most effectively and becomes the technological leader will have the advantage in the global marketplace. That's what GE is doing as a company and we should be doing as a country. The big markets ahead are in the developing countries. We ought to be selling automobiles to China, but our automobiles can't meet their standards right now. China's automobile-efficiency standards are more demanding than the U.S.

Q: In your talk, you urge the next president to create a Cabinet-level Department of Sustainable Development. Would that replace the U.S. Agency for International Development?

A: It would eliminate USAID and subsume it. USAID is deeply flawed for many reasons. It's been a neglected agency, gutted of a lot of expertise. Its mandate is defined far too narrowly, an economic development unit at best, with some health care. It's been bypassed on issues of climate, energy, water, and we need a Cabinet-level position that pulls together these interconnected challenges.

Q: How can institutions like the Gates Foundation, other nongovernmental organizations and the private sector work with government to make those efforts more effective?

A: What the Gates Foundation is doing, needs to do and uniquely can do is to innovate. It can create innovation in new kinds of medicines and vaccines, innovate in the way that public health is delivered and poverty alleviation. Even though it spends billions of dollars per year, solving problems requires hundreds of billions per year. It can only be a piece of the puzzle. It can identify directions for change and technological solutions and work with the U.S. government, which needs to provide scaling up of funding.

Click here to read more.

UN worker speaks out against poverty

from the Daily Cardinal

By: Caitlin Gath

Students watch a live web cast from Jeffrey Sachs, UN director of the Millennium Project, about economic disparities across the globe.

Jeffrey Sachs, a prominent economist and director of the United Nations Millennium Project, spoke to students Tuesday via a live web lecture regarding his plans to eradicate poverty.

Sachs spoke on behalf of Project 40/40, an awareness and fundraising campaign for the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative. The project’s goal is to connect UW-Madison’s 40,000 students with 40,000 HIV positive Ugandans who are in desperate need of funding for their AIDS medication.

Members from Project 40/40 said they tried for over a year to convince Sachs to speak to UW-Madison students.

“He’s like a rock star. He’s basically Bono,” said Jesse Ayala, a UW-Madison sophomore and Project 40/40 member.

Ayala said Sachs’ dedication to his work is always his top priority. According to Ayala, when a reporter asked Sachs if he ever takes time for himself, he responded, “In case you haven’t noticed, people are dying. This is an emergency.”

Sachs direct works on the Millennium Project, an initiative whose primary goal is to accomplish Millennium Development Goals through implementation of infrastructure, agriculture and education. The initiative seeks to, among other goals, eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education and combat HIV/AIDS and malaria.

Sachs focused his speech on countries that are plagued by economic hardship and his experiences with fieldwork abroad.

“I began working with countries in economic crisis … like a doctor making house calls for a sick economy,” Sachs said.

He said when he was invited to travel to Bolivia as an economic advisor to their government in 1985, he found it so exhilarating that he wanted to continue with similar work. Since then he has divided his time between fieldwork and teaching at Columbia University.

Sachs stressed to students that public health issues are an ongoing problem.

“Natural selection is always at work … we have to proceed on two tracks—mass application with what we have and basic science to develop yet more tools,” he said.

Click here to read more.

Economic ideas Sachs appeal

from the Economist

From The Economist print edition

IF GILBERT AND SULLIVAN were looking for the very model of a modern intellectual, they would surely pick Jeffrey Sachs. He is so “right on” that when Time magazine featured him in its global list of people who influence the world, his profile was written by Bono, a rock singer. His job titles—director of the Earth Institute and special adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals—seem almost tailor-made to get up the noses of conservatives.

Nor is Mr Sachs lacking in ambition. His previous book was called “The End of Poverty”. Now he has moved on to tackle a wide range of other challenges facing the planet, from climate change through to disease eradication. His goals include stabilisation of the world's population, a move to sustainable energy use and “a new approach to global problem solving”.

If the above makes Mr Sachs sound like an impractical dreamer, that would be rather unfair. This densely written book is packed with statistics and carefully worded arguments. Nor is the author a left-wing ideologue. He recognises that the private sector and market-based solutions have a vital role to play. He cites, for example, the success achieved by public-private sector initiatives in tackling acid rain and chlorofluorocarbon emissions.

On population control, he makes the good (if counter-intuitive) point that improvements in infant mortality are an important part of the solution. When families know that more of their children will survive into adulthood, they have fewer kids. Reduced fertility in turn leads to improved living standards and, eventually, by cutting the numbers of idle and impoverished young men, reduces the potential for conflict and terrorism. As he remarks, this makes the Bush administration's negative attitude towards family planning even more difficult to understand.

Courageously, Mr Sachs does not ignore costs. He reckons the bill for tackling the issues he raises will come to a total of 2.4% of rich-world economic output (about one year's growth). That seems a reasonable price to pay, provided of course that you are not paying it. Indeed, the book's rather jaunty tone plays down some of the hard choices that will need to be made if the world's problems are to be tackled. On climate change, Mr Sachs is very enthusiastic about carbon capture and sequestration, a technology that is unproven on a large scale and will be difficult to adapt to existing power plants. One must also doubt whether all the world's cars could really be converted into gas-electric hybrids by 2026, as he suggests.

This brings us to the main problem with the book: it is unremittingly worthy and expects other people to be so too. When the author writes that a post-Kyoto agreement on climate change “should include all actors, not just the rich ones, and not just the rich ones who are willing to reduce emissions”, one wonders how many real people would vote for that. Similarly, he says blithely that “in order to combat poverty and inequality, it is also essential to combat racism and intolerance.”

If everyone in the world were as reasonable as Mr Sachs, his solutions would be easy to implement. However, if everyone were that reasonable, there would not be so many problems in the first place.

Click here to read more.

Jeffrey Sachs Discusses Poverty with Jon Stewart

Click here to read more.

[Comment] The Democratization of Aid

from All Africa

Public Agenda (Accra)

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

The outpouring of aid in response to the Indian Ocean tsunami brought hope to a troubled world. In the face of an immense tragedy, working class families around the world opened their wallets to the disaster's victims. Former US President Bill Clinton called this response a "democratization of development assistance," in which individuals lend their help not only through their governments but also through their own efforts.

But, while more than 200,000 people perished in the tsunami disaster, an equivalent number of children die each month of malaria in Africa, a disaster I call a "silent tsunami." Africa's silent tsunami of malaria, however, is actually largely avoidable and controllable.

Malaria can be prevented to a significant extent, and can be treated with nearly 100% success, through available low-cost technologies. Yet malaria's African victims, as well as those in other parts of the world, are typically too poor to have access to these life-saving technologies. A global effort, similar to the response to the Asian tsunami, could change this disastrous situation, saving more than one million lives per year.

Herein lies the main message of the new report of the UN Millennium Project, which was delivered in mid-January to then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The Project, which I direct on behalf of the Secretary General, represents an effort by more than 250 scientists and development experts to identify practical means to achieve the Millennium Development Goals to cut extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by 2015. Our new report, entitled Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals (available for download at www.unmillenniumproject.org ), shows that these goals can be achieved.

The key to meeting the Millennium Development Goals in poor countries is an increase in investment in people (health, education, nutrition, and family planning), the environment (water and sanitation, soils, forests, and biodiversity), and infrastructure (roads, power, and ports). Poor countries cannot afford these investments on their own, so rich countries must help.

If more financial aid is combined with good governance in poor countries, then the Millennium Development Goals can be achieved on time. In short, our new Report is a call to action. Rich countries and poor countries need to join forces to cut poverty, disease, and hunger.

The reason that the Millennium Development Goals are feasible is that powerful existing technologies give us the tools to make rapid advances in the quality of life and economic productivity of the world's poor. Illness and deaths from malaria can be reduced sharply by using insecticide-treated bed nets to stop the mosquitoes that transmit malaria, and by effective medicines when the illness strikes. The total cost of battling malaria in Africa would be around $2 to $3 billion per year.

With around one billion people living in high-income countries, it would thus cost just $2 to $3 per person per year in the developed world to fund an effort that could save more than one million children annually. When child mortality is reduced, poor families choose to have fewer children, because they are more confident that their children will survive to adulthood. Thus, paradoxically, saving children's lives is part of the solution to rapid population growth in poor countries.

Malaria is an important example where specific investments can solve the problems of disease, hunger, and extreme poverty. Our report makes dozens of such practical recommendations.

Investments in soil nutrients and water harvesting could help African farmers double or triple their food yields. Anti-retroviral medicines can help save millions from death due to AIDS. Rural roads, truck transport, and electricity could bring new economic opportunities to remote villages in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. School meal programs using locally produced food could boost attendance by poor children, especially girls, and improve their ability to learn, while also providing an expanded market for local farmers.

These investments are an incredible bargain. Rich countries have long promised to increase their aid levels to 0.7% of national income (from around only 0.25% today). The promise of 0.7% means that the rich world would give developing countries a mere 70 cents out of each $100 of national income.

In recent weeks, many European countries have pledged to honor the 0.7% commitment, and five European countries (Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden) already do so. It's up to the US and Japan to follow through on their promises as well. Moreover, with the "democratization" of aid now underway, we can look forward to increased private efforts alongside official development assistance.

Of course, not all developing countries are sufficiently well governed to use an increase in aid in an honest, effective way. The world should therefore start this bold effort by focusing on the poor countries that are relatively well governed and that are prepared to carry out needed investments in an efficient and fair manner. Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia are on that list. It is urgent that we get started in these and similarly well governed poor countries this year.