Jeffrey Sach's White Paper

All the 2006 Principal Voices are submitting a White Paper to the Web site, explaining their views at length.

Here, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and head of the UN Millennium Project, explains how he believes global poverty truly can be defeated.

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy warned that too many Americans had defeatist attitudes towards peace. They viewed war with the Soviet Union as inevitable. Yet, said Kennedy, "We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again."

Defeatism is the biggest obstacle to ending extreme poverty on the planet. Too many people around the world assume that the problems of extreme poverty are too big and complex to solve. Yet we already have the tools to solve the planet's remaining challenges of famine, malaria, AIDS and economic isolation.

Africa's farmers could triple their food production through extensive use of high-yield seed varieties that have already been developed. Malaria deaths each year could be cut by a million or more through the widespread use of anti-malaria bed nets and village-based access to effective medicines.

Excessive population growth could be slowed decisively by voluntary reductions of fertility rates. Hundreds of thousands of mothers dying in child birth each year in impoverished countries could be saved through access to emergency obstetrical care.

Yet these solutions will require leadership. The poorest of the poor are too sick, too impoverished, too hungry, too economically isolated, to pull themselves out of the trap of extreme poverty by themselves.

Just as the U.S. once championed and supported India's Green Revolution of food productivity, so too the U.S. should provide leadership for an African Green Revolution. Recent steps by the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations are indeed pointing the way. And just as the U.S. once successfully championed the eradication of smallpox, and as Rotary International helps to complete the eradication of polio, the U.S. can now champion the control of malaria.

The U.S. and all other nations in the world actually set the way to meet these objectives at the start of the new millennium, when world leaders endorsed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These goals call for a decisive rollback of extreme poverty, hunger and disease by the year 2015. As I suggest in my book The End of Poverty, the MDGs should be viewed as a midway station to the complete end of extreme poverty by the year 2025.

Yet most Americans are still unaware of the Millennium Development Goals, and even less aware that such goals can be met through low-cost and highly effective steps. Americans do sense, however, that if such objectives can be met, they would constitute a major step towards a safer world.

It is time, therefore, for our leaders, in the White House, Congress, industry, the arts and academia, to recognize that bold global goals to end extreme poverty can be met, and must be met out of fairness, compassion and security for the entire world. Progress can occur much faster than is recognized today, if we are willing to put our resources and knowledge behind the effort. The world welcomed the new millennium with great hopes for human progress; those hopes can still be fulfilled.

What do you think?

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I totally agree with the solution to the problem, and I admire your deep faith in mankind to deal with the problems confronted, some as a result of nature and some as a result of human behaviour. Humans have an almost miraculous way of collaborating, as the experience after the tsunami showed. Still there are not only the political hindrances that are the main problems, but there is the social movement towards resolving this issue. I think a lot of their unwillingness to deal with these issue comes from fear of being reminded that they have overseen this issue for so long.

I admire professor Sachs' sublime ambition and firm confidence in solving the big and complex problem of worldwide poverty. But I think poverty is more of an issue of domestic politics than foreigner's compassion and sympathy. Poverty in poor countries can only be completely solved through political reform and improvement by establishing a proper and smooth social order. So what we should do is really challenging and comprehensive. A more profound and underlying mission than economic and technological help is education, to provide people enough knowledge to help them build a more desirable social order.

The people of Africa lack a constituency. The (U.S.) Founders anticipated that there would be various factions (interest groups) represented in our system of government.

The people of Africa have no such interest group representing them in the U.S. Congress. I propose that the U.S. and Canada take the lead in developing a grass roots program based in secondary schools that would have individual communities here adopting African communities.

These local interest groups would become intimately acquainted with their adopted community's problems as well as possible solutions. They could raise money locally and pressure Congress/Parliament to take action.

The absence of infrastructure has a pervasive influence on poverty, but is by no means a free-standing factor in keeping poor people poor. Poverty can be caused by the lack of basic infrastructure to attend school, access health care, or to sell goods at the market.

Low income is not a free-standing predicament. An exclusively income-centered view of poverty cannot but miss many important features in the causation of deprivation. Poverty can be seen as deprivation of a person's effective freedom to live the way he or she has reason to want to live,

Making Infrastructure Work for the Poor draws three main conclusions: that small-scale, community-based infrastructure has significant, direct impact on various aspects of human poverty and security; that local communities feel a greater sense of ownership of these small projects; and that small-scale projects and large-scale national or cross-border infrastructure development are mutually reinforcing.

The role of infrastructure in gender equality was another recurring theme. The report brings out the connection between small-scale infrastructure, on the one hand, and gender equity and women's empowerment, on the other.

No, I disagree, because of our innate human flaws in:
1. Group mind. We are only willing to help people in our church or club.
2. Greed.
3. Our moral beliefs divide people into friends and enemies.

The world already has enough materials to keep people from extreme poverty. But the haves don't want to share them to the don't haves.

The falling of communism/socialism embracing capitalism is the expression of the human attitude towards the disadvantaged classes.