Chekhov’s Mistess

A Thought on U.N. Week

It’s U.N. Week here in New York City and the streets are packed with police cars and limos. That may not mean much to anyone not effected by the traffic, but the truth is that all these diplomats swirling around can have a great impact on the world around us, so I take a moment out from talking about books to point out an issue that goes on day-to-day without enough progress.

If you were to read just one book that might change, or perhaps support, your thinking on issues like global poverty, I would recommend Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty. He has a “blog” this week over at the Financial Times’ site, commenting on some of the meetings going on around the U.N. meetings.

Sachs is a director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He has spent years advising governments on global development issues and for some of his advice he has become a controversial figure. His role at the Earth Institute is admirable though and he has taken it on with the zeal of a convert. I’ve seen him speak before and I can tell you I’ve never seen a more passionate economist (and they’re a far more passionate bunch than you might think). And with good reason. Sachs is a strong voice pressing on governments, particularly ours, to step up development aid to decrease global poverty.

This is why I thought it a good time to mention Professor Sach’s work (from the The End of Poverty site):

Public perceptions reflect support for higher levels of aid. When asked what percentage of the federal budget they think goes to foreign aid, Americans’ median estimate is 25% of the budget, more than 25 times the actual level. Only 2% of Americans give a correct estimate of 1% of the budget or less. When asked how much of the budget should go to foreign aid, the median response is 10%. Only 13% of Americans believe that the percentage should be 1% or less. Over 60% of Americans believe that contributing 0.7% of national income to meet the Millennium Development Goals is the right thing to do.

As you might have guessed, the United States is on the low end of giving relative to our vast wealth:

In 2003, total aid from the 22 richest countries to the world’s developing countries was just $69 billion—a shortfall of $130 billion dollars from the 0.7% promise [from the 2002 Monterey Summit]. On average, the world’s richest countries provided just 0.25% of their GNP in official development assistance (ODA). The United States provided just 0.15%.

If you’re tempted to say, “yeah, but we give more in actual dollars than anyone else and we support countries with our military and expertise.” I say to you that it is not enough and we can do more with our wealth and that money spent on helping the poorest people in the world is money well spent, not just on a moral basis, which should be enough, but toward mitigating future terrorism and political strife.

Here are some figures on poverty from the U.N. Millennium Project:

More than one billion people in the world live on less than one dollar a day. In total, 2.7 billion struggle to survive on less than two dollars per day. Poverty in the developing world, however, goes far beyond income poverty. It means having to walk more than one mile everyday simply to collect water and firewood; it means suffering diseases that were eradicated from rich countries decades ago. Every year eleven million children die-most under the age of five and more than six million from completely preventable causes like malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia.


In some deeply impoverished nations less than half of the children are in primary school and under 20 percent go to secondary school. Around the world, a total of 114 million children do not get even a basic education and 584 million women are illiterate.


Following are basic facts outlining the roots and manifestations of the poverty affecting more than one third of our world.


Health


Every year six million children die from malnutrition before their fifth birthday.


More than 50 percent of Africans suffer from water-related diseases such as cholera and infant diarrhea.


Everyday HIV/AIDS kills 6,000 people and another 8,200 people are infected with this deadly virus.


Every 30 seconds an African child dies of malaria-more than one million child deaths a year.


Each year, approximately 300 to 500 million people are infected with malaria. Approximately three million people die as a result.


TB is the leading AIDS-related killer and in some parts of Africa, 75 percent of people with HIV also have TB.



Hunger


More than 800 million people go to bed hungry every day…300 million are children.


Of these 300 million children, only eight percent are victims of famine or other emergency situations. More than 90 percent are suffering long-term malnourishment and micronutrient deficiency.


Every 3.6 seconds another person dies of starvation and the large majority are children under the age of 5.



Water


More than 2.6 billion people-over 40 per cent of the world’s population-do not have basic sanitation, and more than one billion people still use unsafe sources of drinking water.


Four out of every ten people in the world don’t have access even to a simple latrine.


Five million people, mostly children, die each year from water-borne diseases.



Agriculture:


In 1960, Africa was a net exporter of food; today the continent imports one-third of its grain.


More than 40 percent of Africans do not even have the ability to obtain sufficient food on a day-today basis.


Declining soil fertility, land degradation, and the AIDS pandemic have led to a 23 percent decrease in food production per capita in the last 25 years even though population has increased dramatically.


For the African farmer, conventional fertilizers cost two to six times more than the world market price.



The devastating effect of poverty on women:


Above 80 percent of farmers in Africa are women.


More than 40 percent of women in Africa do not have access to basic education.


If a girl is educated for six years or more, as an adult her prenatal care, postnatal care and childbirth survival rates, will dramatically and consistently improve.


Educated mothers immunize their children 50 percent more often than mothers who are not educated.


AIDS spreads twice as quickly among uneducated girls than among girls that have even some schooling.


The children of a woman with five years of primary school education have a survival rate 40 percent higher than children of women with no education.


A woman living in sub-Saharan Africa has a 1 in 16 chance of dying in pregnancy. This compares with a 1 in 3,700 risk for a woman from North America.


Every minute, a woman somewhere dies in pregnancy or childbirth. This adds up to 1,400 women dying each day-an estimated 529,000 each year-from pregnancy-related causes.


Almost half of births in developing countries take place without the help of a skilled birth attendant.

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  And lastly, here’s a sample from Sach’s “blog” at the Financial Times. This post is from Tuesday:

While the governments negotiate to find a least common denominator on which they can agree, the 2005 World Summit is being flanked by an impressive number of commitments from businesses and private philanthropists to take action on their own, indeed to lead their own governments in the fight against extreme poverty. The call for individual responsibility in the fight against global poverty – in which private citizens, businesses, foundations, and scientists act even when their governments don’t – is catching on. And like other great movements of the past, including the fight against slavery and the fight for civil rights, it may very well prove to be the case that governments are the last to act, following the lead of private trailblazers.


The Clinton Global Initiative is surely the most visible of these efforts, drawing upon former President Bill Clinton’s ability to mobilize friends from in and out of government and industry. Clinton seems intent on achieving practical actions, following the path set by America’s great former President, Jimmy Carter, who has proved what post-Presidential leadership can mean in the fight against disease, hunger, and tyranny. If President Clinton takes a page from President Carter’s playbook, the results could be spectacular.


President Carter himself has teamed up with a group of universities, private philanthropists, and celebrity-activists in a new effort, serving as Honorary Co-Chairman of Millennium Promise, a new initiative launched yesterday on the occasion of the Summit. This effort, which teams up with the UN Millennium Project, which I direct, will be a broad-based partnership of universities, non-governmental organizations, and private individuals, to spur private action on the Millennium Development Goals. President Carter and I are joined on the Board of Millennium Promise by corporate leaders, heads of major Universities and foundations, and leading voices in the fight against poverty including Angelina Jolie.


The centerpiece of the effort will be the Millennium Village concept, in which communities of around 5,000 people in rural Africa and Asia are encouraged and enabled to take the lead in fighting poverty, through an integrated strategy that focuses on agriculture, health, education, and infrastructure. The early examples of such integrated efforts are remarkable. A Millennium Village in western Kenya was able to quadruple food production this past year by helping farmers in the community to get access to improved seed varieties and fertilizers. This help came at a cost of a few dollars per capita, with benefits in higher food yields that are multiples of that. The village has also been able to build a clinic, step up the fight against malaria, and provide school meals for all of the children in the community.


Other business meetingsaround the Summit are seeing leading companies pledging to make their technologies available on a mass basis to impoverished regions. It’s often the case that the marginal cost of supplying these cutting-edge technologies is very low compared to patent-protected prices in rich-country markets. The market prices of drugs, software, and communications technologies are often much higher than cost, with the margin reflecting the returns to earlier research and development. It often costs just pennies (or less) for a company to provide its software and medicines to impoverished communities for products that sell for tens or hundreds of dollars in the rich-country markets. The companies know that they recoup their R&D outlays in the rich-country markets.


Much of the attention in the fight against poverty has been directed at what rich and poor-country governments will or won’t do. The answer, too often, is that they won’t do much, or not enough. Despite all odds, the fight against extreme poverty is transforming itself from an official aid effort to a broader-based movement. Government remains critical – particularly to providing the large-scale financing that is needed. But in much of the world private initiatives are likely now to lead the way, in terms of innovation, proof of concept, and mobilization of public awareness and support.

If you’ve read all this, thanks for indulging me. If you would like to do something, you can make a donation to my friend Amy Maglio’s organization, Women’s Global Education Project that sends girls in Africa (right now, Senegal) to school.

comments

Wow, Bud. Very sobering, very well-done post.

    – Mike (09/15  at  01:10 PM)

Thanks for posting this, Bud.

    – MG (09/15  at  03:19 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: September 15, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Dismal/Dismaler: Econ/Politics

• Comments:2
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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