THE END OF POVERTY
HOW WE CAN MAKE IT HAPPEN IN OUR LIFE TIME
JEFFREY SACHS
PENGUIN BOOKS 2005
PART VIII
Chapter 11: The Millennium, 9/11, and the United Nations
The new millennium opened on a hopeful note. The world survived the widely feared Y2K computer crisis without incident. Celebrations the world over went off without a hitch. The US economy continued to surge ahead. Economic progress in China, India, and finally even Russia gave the sense that globalization might yet fulfill its promise. The IT boom was still in its full glory. We marveled at the dizzying progress of the new Internet age, the new global interconnectivity, and the seemingly endless flow of new products, new ways of organizing business, and new ways of linking people and production systems around the world. Although Africa remained a place of unrelieved crisis, even there the spread of democracy and the possibility of mobilizing new technologies to fight AIDS, malaria, and other diseases gave hope.
Perhaps the most vivid geopolitical reflection of this hope was the Millennium Assembly, which took place at the United Nations in September 2000. It was the largest gathering of world leaders in history. One hundred forty-seven heads of state and government came to New York, and did more than create a colossal traffic jam. At their historic UN meeting, the world leaders convincingly expressed a global determination to end some of the most challenging and vexing problems inherited from the 20th century. They conveyed the hope that extreme poverty, disease, and environmental degradation could be alleviated with the wealth, the new technologies, and the global awareness with which we had entered the 21st century.
For the occasion, Secretary-General Kofi Anna presented the world with a remarkable document. We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century reflected the secretary-general’s strong conviction that the UN represents not only its 191-member governments but also the peoples of the world as individuals, who are endowed with rights and responsibilities that have a global reach. We the Peoples laid out a discerning view of the great challenges facing global society: extreme poverty, pandemic disease, environmental harm, war and civil conflict. The document moved from a panoramic view of these great challenges through a powerful diagnosis of their root causes to a set of recommendations on how these challenges could be met through global cooperation and action.
The document became the basis for an important global statement, the Millennium Declaration, adopted by the assembled leaders. It is worthy and important reading for all of us. Despite our travails in the intervening years, the Millennium Declaration still inspires hope that the world, complicated and divided as it is, can come together to take on great challenges. The Declaration, like the secretary-general’s report, surveys the issues of war and peace, health and disease, and wealth and poverty, and commits the world to a set of undertakings to improve the human condition. Specifically, it sets forth a series of quantified and time-bound goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and deprivation. These goals were subsequently excerpted from the Millennium Declaration to become the eight Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs.
Table 1 lists the 8 goals and 18 targets that are commitments to achieve sustainable development for the world’s poorest people. The first seven goals call for sharp cuts in poverty, disease, and environmental degradation. The 8th goal is essentially a commitment of global partnership, a compact of rich and poor countries to work together to achieve the first seven goals. The MDGs wisely recognize that extreme poverty has many dimensions, not only low income, but also vulnerability to disease, exclusion from education, chronic hunger and undernutrition, lack of access to basic amenities such as clean water and sanitation, and environmental degradation such as deforestation and land erosion that threatens lives and livelihoods.
Table 1: The Millennium Development Goals
- 1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than one dollar a day
Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger
- 2. Achieve universal primary education
Ensure that by 2015 children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling
- Promote gender equality and empower women
Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and to all levels of education no later than 2015
- Reduce child mortality
Reduce by two thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate
- Improve maternal health
Reduce by three quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio
- Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS
Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases
- Ensure environmental sustainability
Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs and reverse the loss of environmental resources
Halve by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation
By 2020 to have achieved a significant improvement in lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers
- Develop a global partnership for development
Develop further an open, rule-based, predictable, nondiscriminatory trading and financial system. Includes a commitment to good governance, development, and poverty reduction – both nationally and internationally
Address the special needs of the least developed countries. This includes: tariff- and quota-free access for least developed countries’ exports; an enhanced program of debt relief for HIPC and cancellation of official bilateral debt; and more generous ODA for countries committed to poverty reduction
Address the special needs of landlocked countries and small island developing states (through the Program of Action for the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States and the outcome of the twenty-second special session of the General Assembly)
Deal comprehensively with the debt problems of developing countries through national and international measures in order to make debt sustainable in the long term
In cooperation with developing countries, develop and implement strategies for decent and productive work for youth
In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable, essential drugs in developing countries
In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communication
The MDGs could, no doubt, engender some cynicism as well as hope. In many cases, the goals repeated long-held commitments of the international community that had not been fulfilled in the past. After all, one of the famous commitments of the past century was the international community’s 1978 pledge of “Health for All by the Year 2000.” Yet the world arrived in 2000 with the AIDS pandemic, resurgent TB and malaria, and billions of the world’s poor without reliable, or sometimes any, access to essential health services. At the World Summit for Children in 1990, the world pledged universal access to primary education by the year 2000, yet 130 million or more primary-aged children were not in school by then. The rich world had famously committed to the target of 0.7% of GNP devoted to official development assistance (ODA), direct financial aid to poor countries, yet the share of financial aid as a proportion of rich-world GNP had actually declined from 0.3% to 0.2% during the 1990s.
Still, when the world leaders adopted the Millennium Declaration, and the MDGs within the Declaration, there was a palpable sense that this time – yes, this time – they just might be fulfilled. The world felt that with the strength of the ongoing economic boom, the vast new power of modern technologies, and the uniqueness of our global interconnectedness, this time we would follow through.
How quickly that optimism was shattered. There were small things that dented the optimism – the US trauma of a tied national election, the end of the stock market boom, and a spate of high-profile corporate scandals – but these look insignificant now in the shadow of September 11. Much changed that day, partly because of the unwise ways in which the US government reacted. More than ever, we need to return to the purpose and hope of the MDGs.
- One of the leading journalists in the United States, Thomas Friedman, immediately declared that September 11 was the start of World War III.
The ease with which pundits talked about World War III stunned me deeply. They were playing with fire, or much worse, with the destruction of our world in a new conflagration. Were they not aware, I asked myself, of the way World War I had destroyed globalization a century before? In that case, too, the pundits had been only too happy to see soldiers march off to war, sure that that tidy affair would be wrapped up in a month. The demons unleashed by that war, however, stalked the planet until the end of the 20th century, having their hand in the Great Depression, World War II, the Bolshevik revolution, and much more.
- Terrorism is not the only threat that the world faces. It would be a huge mistake to direct all our energies, efforts, resources, and lives to the fight against terrorism while leaving vast and even greater challenges aside.
- 10,000 Africans die needlessly and tragically every single day – and have died every single day since September 11 – of AIDS, TB, and malaria. We need to keep September 11 in perspective, especially because the 10,000 daily deaths are preventable.
The appropriate response to September 11 was therefore two tracks, not one. Civilized nations needed surely to take up the challenge to cripple the networks of terrorism that carried out the attacks. The financial controls and direct military actions against Al-Qaeda were a necessary response, but hardly sufficient. In addition, we needed to address the deeper roots of terrorism in societies that are not part of global prosperity, that are marginalized in the world economy, that are bereft of hope, and that are misused and abused by the rich world, as have been the oil states of the Middle East. The rich world, starting with the United States, needed to commit its efforts even more to economic development than to military strategies.
- Analytical deliberation – the process of finding a cooperative approach to complex problems by building a consensus around a shared vision and understanding of the challenges – lies at the core of the UN Millennium Project.
No sooner had I begun the UN assignment than I received another call from New York, this time from Columbia University. Columbia President George Rupp and colleagues had heard about the UN work and were interested in exploring whether I might simultaneously take on the leadership of a major institute devoted to the challenge of sustainable development, Columbia’s Earth Institute. Upon meeting with Rupp, I learned more about Columbia’s bold and innovative initiative linking many major scientific departments at the university to take on the interconnected challenges of climate, environmental management, conservation, public health, and economic development.
- Incoming President Lee Bollinger later shared with me his vision that Columbia University would lead the way in the United States to become a truly global university
All of the UN Millennium Project work has depended utterly on the Earth Institute. Fundamentally, progress on the MDGs rests on thorough scientific understanding of the underlying challenges of disease, food production, undernutrition, watershed management, and other related issues. These, in turn, require specialized expertise. Modern science has given us technological interventions, or specific techniques for addressing these problems, such as antimalarial bed nets or antiretroviral drugs. To name just a few examples, the Earth Institute is
v Pioneering the use of geographic information systems (GIS) in rural Ethiopia to monitor, predict, and respond to malaria epidemics
v Using specially programmed cell phones in remote rural Rwanda to provide real-time health data to the Ministry of Health
v Introducing new agroforestry techniques to triple food crops in the nitrogen-depleted soils of Africa
v Designing new efficient and low-cost battery devices to power lightbulbs in villages too poor and remote to join a power grid in the near future
v Demonstrating how high-tech forecasting of El Niño fluctuations can be put to use in impoverished countries in the timing of crop planting and harvesting, the management of water reservoirs and fisheries, and in other ways
v Applying state-of-the-art hydrology, geochemistry, and public health to devise solutions to the crisis of arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh’s water supply.
The Earth Institute provides a unique academic base for garnering the science-based, cross-disciplinary understanding needed to confront the practical challenges of sustainable development. The institute is built on five clusters – earth sciences, ecology and conservation, environmental engineering, public health, and economics and public policy. By joining these disciplines under one roof, the Earth Institute can better connect the sciences with public policy to find practical solutions to problems at all scales, from local villages to global UN treaties. Bringing these five clusters together makes possible the kind of rigorous thinking about the challenges of the MDGs that otherwise rarely takes place, even in partial perspective. One of the remarkable and deeply heartening aspects of directing this unique institute has been the enthusiasm with which the scientists have rallied to the cause of fighting extreme poverty. Their eagerness to use cutting-edge scientific knowledge to solve some of the most pernicious problems facing the most vulnerable people on the planet is inspiring.
Chapter 12: On-the-Ground Solutions for Ending Poverty