| Jeffrey
Sachs was one of the youngest professors at Harvard
University to have received tenure. He is world
renowned for his strong views of economic development.
He recently became head of Columbia University's
Earth Institute. The folowing are excerpts from
an interview:
There
is an impression that the PrepCom in Bali for the
World Summit was very unsuccessful and that there
is not the kind of support for the summit that people
would like to see. Is that the correct impression?
I think that no doubt the stakes are very
high and the results of the summit still hang
in the balance. This summit is taking place
in the backdrop of 10 years of substantial
failures to implement the agreed agenda of
the Rio summit and Agenda 21. And what that
means in practical terms is that despite very
high expectations raised a decade ago, the
prospects for sustainable development on the
planet in many ways darkened over the past
decade in both sides of that sustainable development
concept. On the sustirainability of environmental
side, a lot of hopes for heading off the loss
of biodiversity, the continuing massive devastation
of the critical ecosystems which support life,
of coming with to grips with global climate
change, have certainly not been realized. And
at the same time, on the development side of
the equation there is no doubt that the world's
poorest people, roughly the poorest billion
people on the planet, have suffered the continuing
worsening of the already shockingly impoverished
conditions during the past decade. So Johannesburg
has come not at a time of triumph for the world
community but at a time of continuing failure
to come to grips with fundamental issues that
we face. Add on all of the anxieties of the
world holding together peacefully after Sept.
11, with all of the other urgencies of a world
economy that is hardly dynamic and where there
are enough crises to go around. I think that
there is tremendous sense, a realistic sense,
of worry whether this summit can rise to the
occasion and help set the global community
on the right path.
What would you hope it would accomplish?
I am hoping to see some practical commitments
that are bold enough to give a sense of hope,
direction, purpose and measurable success for
the frequently enunciated shared goals of the
world, but the goals that have certainly not
been achieved in practice. The world community
many times in the past 15 years has adopted
bold objectives for ending or reducing poverty,
for slashing hunger, for helping the world's
poor gain basic access to health services,
to water and sanitation, or a safe physical
environment. We have made grand goals of preserving
nature, biodiversity, the functioning of our
global fisheries, our other vital ecosystems.
We have committed ourselves to address global
man-made climate change. We all know and understand
the profound risks for the entire planet and
yet we do not really see the kind of scaled,
systematic, sustained response at the international
political level, with the financing that would
be needed, and with the plans of action that
would be needed. And so what I am hoping to
see is some results in the critical areas.
Secretary General Kofi Annan has identified
five priority areas--for example water, meaning
both the access of the poor to safe, clean
water and sustainable protection of our freshwater
resources, which we know are going to be under
tremendous stress. Energy--helping two billion
people outside of the world energy system,
other than burning of biomass, gain access
to modern energy, which they need for their
basic economic development--and at the same
time having that energy come in a clean way
which does not further upset the ecosystem
and further propel climate change. Secretary
General Annan noted that the millions of people
are dying each year because they live in a
simply unacceptably unsafe physical environment.
Children who die of indoor air pollution by
the millions. Children who succumb to basic,
easily preventable diseases of waterborne illness
because they lack access to safe water. Agriculture--the
fact that one to two billion people are living
as peasant farmers at the edge of subsistence
with such unproductive agriculture that they
can hardly feed their families, much less support
their societies, their urban environment and
so forth. And in many of these impoverished
world regions the soils are being rapidly depleted,
erosion is proceeding tremendously fast, deforestation
is continuing at a shocking pace, so agricultural
productivity that is both sustainable and gets
to the core of the hunger problem for hundreds
of millions of people is a fourth priority.
And finally biodiversity and ecosystem protection--that
great commitment to sustainability which we're
good at enunciating as a general principle
but very poor at putting it in the practice--is
the fifth area where the Secretary General
has identified the need for real action. I
can say that despite the thousands of pages
and millions of worlds that are enunciated
every year, there is no plan of action that
addresses any of those problems in a realistic
way. There is no global plan of action that
addresses any of those five problems in a realistic
way right now. There is no blueprint. There
is no plan in a World Bank desk drawer, or
UN desk drawer, or WHO desk drawer, that says:
Here is what we are going to do, here is how
we are going to proceed, here is what will
it cost, here is how we get engagement at the
local level.
Reality check. How do you get that?
First we have to recognize that unless we
realize that we need strategies, we are not
going to get them, because all of those areas
that I mentioned and that I could mention will
not take care of themselves. These are not
problems that will be solved by market forces
alone. In some cases, market forces--certainly
under current arrangements--were very much
in the wrong direction. But we know that market
forces by themselves will not address urgent
needs of the very poorest, who have no votes
in the market, who have no voice in the market,
who have no command over market-based resources.
So this is not the kind of problem that we
generally deal with in our society. We think
that the decentralized actions of millions
of people operating according to their self-interest
is somehow going to bring about the results
that we need. We need coherent action. Second,
we need action at a larger scale. These are
not problems that are going to be solved by
a few private projects or by the US feeling
good and helping create a school in the world
district in Tanzania or helping in one particular
environmental project.
These are problems of a very large scale affecting
hundreds of millions of people at the minimum,
and in some cases affecting all 6.2 billion
people on the planet, and therefore they require
a strategic view. Third, since a lot of these
problems affect the very poorest people on
the planet, they cannot be solved out of the
resources that those people have on their own.
These problems will be solved only if there
is substantial degree of cooperation between
the rich, who have resources beyond imagining,
and the very poor, whose lack of resources
is beyond the imagining of the rich. The rich
cannot understand how the poor in the world
live. They do not know. Fourth is the huge,
huge operational problem, which is that every
problem that I mentioned--water, energy, health,
agriculture, biodiversity--requires solutions
that are tailored to the local specific conditions
of thousands of different places around the
world and where the actual solutions are going
to be carried out by people living in the villages,
in communities, in urban environments, in different
places, not by a SWAT force that moves in and
solves the problem form outside. So, while
we need global conceptions and global financing,
we need local solutions. That requires a degree
of imaginative organization and the ability
to cooperate, the ability to listen across
cultures and to work across in networks, that
does not exist for most problems in the world.
Who are the leaders?
So far there have been no leaders in this.
I think our most important voice of leadership
in the world is the Secretary General of the
United Nations, one of the unique individuals
who speak for the world, and whom the world
admires and listens to. He commands very few
resources. He could not conceivably have a
mandate to solve these problems on his own.
We have had, in my own opinion, a dearth of
leadership from the United States on these
critical issues for the last generation. And
that is a major problem. That is a bipartisan
problem, by the way. This is not picking on
any one administration, or on the White House
as opposed to Congress. This is a neglect by
the American political class of issues that
go beyond our borders. We were shocked when
we were hit from the outside, because there
is so little appreciation in the United States,
among those who could make a difference, of
what the real situation in the rest of the
world is. And this is something that I have
been bemoaning my whole professional career.
I have to say until I myself started working
in Bolivia, in Poland or other places, where
I had the good fortune to work on the ground,
I also did not have a clue. I thought I knew
everything, understood everything. One day
I walked off an airplane into a real setting,
already a tenured professor, quite convinced
that everything was under control, that I knew
what I was doing, and then I started giving
advice. But I came to understand that unless
you are on the ground and unless you are making
a phenomenal effort to understand, you really
cannot appreciate from the United States the
realities that most of the world lives with
in their day-to-day struggles. Now, given that
and given that those people do not vote, the
United States is flying blind even if we are
the most power country in the world, the technological
leader with wealth and capacity to address
these issues as no other country has ever had
in the history in the world. And yet we have
not decided yet, even until now, to get engaged
with the intensity that would be necessary
to provide part of the leadership that would
be necessary.
Do you think that there is a chance of seeing
this summit become a summit of reduced expectations?
The United States might seek to turn it into
a summit of small but more realistically applicable
goals. Do you think this could be expected
from this kind of administration?
I think the United States would like to talk
in those terms, but if the goals are small
then they are not realistic. So, I do not personally
believe in small realistic goals. I believe
that we face huge problems, and therefore we
need large and realistic goals. So it takes
imagination and commitment to get some action.
It takes immediate action, but not in the sense
that we are going to solve all of the problems
overnight. It takes the decision to face the
global-scale problems at a global scale, and
that we have not done. We have believed that
our main issues are essentially traditional
foreign-policy issues of military security,
of diplomacy, of perhaps governance in other
countries, but not the great bio-physical challenges
of having now a world society of 6.2 billion-interconnected,
growing to eight to nine billion people in
the next half century. We need to find ways
for all of us to have the chance for prosperity
and peace when the stresses are in front of
our eyes and are not pure hypotheticals but
are the actual facts of daily life of most
of humanity. It is common to say in the United
States, among those with their eyes open, if
we are not careful we are going to have an
emergent virus that could sweep the world.
And I say we have an emergent virus, we have
AIDS, and it has already infected more than
60 million people. It is the largest pandemic
in world history. We do not have to talk about
hypotheticals. We just have to talk about the
fact that we have, for 21 years now, been living
through a pandemic of the most ferocious proportions
while doing almost nothing outside our borders
to this moment.
What would it take for any global body to
become convinced that an epidemic like AIDS
needs to be tackled? What would it take to
go against companies whose very interests are
actually served by the spread of the virus?
Pharmaceutical
companies are not the problem right now.
They are not the missing piece.
The missing piece is quite simply the scale
of help from wealthy countries in the context
where the epidemic is ravaging the world's
poorest places. That is the basic problem right
now. If you look at the situation on the ground,
as I recently did in Malawi, where the country
is being torn to pieces by AIDS, hunger, drought,
environmental stress, where the average income
is about 60 cents per day, $200 per year. Villages
have become mass orphanages because the working-age
population is left to die because they do not
have the access to the life-saving drugs and
where we are, to this moment, telling the government:
Do not ask for so much help; it is not really
available. We would like you to start really
slowly and realistically--small goals, "realistic" quote-unquote--and
just do not get upset with your problems. We
will help you get treatment for a few thousand
people for treatment. Which is what they are
literally being told, when they have millions
of HIV-infected people in a pandemic of rising
ferocity in the midst of a more general ecological
crisis. The [US] administration was a founder
of the fund, but then turned around and asked
American people to contribute 70 cents per
American per year in fiscal 2003. So we say
this is a great problem and then the sacrifice
that we ask ourselves is 70 cents from each
of us. Two hundred million dollars. That is
called getting the scale wrong. That is getting
the order of magnitude wrong. It is simply
a misunderstanding, for whatever reason, of
the real problem that we face. I have pleaded
with the administration, the White House, the
Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Health
and Human Services, Secretary Powell to formulate
a plan of action. To write down on a piece
of paper what they think it would take to actually
address this, rather than putting a finger
up in the air and finding which way the wind
is blowing. There is no plan of action inside
the United States government. I know that absolutely
for a fact.
How do you know?
I
will give you a "for instance," but
I could tell you from 10 different directions.
I testified a couple of months ago in the Senate's
Foreign Relations Committee. I was preceded
by the USAID chief staffer in charge of HIV/AIDS,
Dr. Anne Peterson. A professional, I have no
doubt. This is not a personal observation;
this is a systemic failure that I am talking
about. She was asked by Senator Feingold, What
is the US policy on treatment since the US
to this day has not given, through our aid
program, a single penny--a single pill, I should
say--in an impoverished country to get a single
day of anti-retroviral treatment? She said,
Senator, we are starting some programs this
year. He said that is very good, I am happy
to hear it. Now I want to ask you how much
would it cost to actually scale up such coverage
for the whole country? She said that is a very
interesting question, Senator, but we have
never addressed that question. I followed by
observing, since I was the next to testify,
that it was a shocking testimony to the systematic
neglect by the United States of this pandemic
that, 21 years and more than 60 million people
into the pandemic, there truly is no plan of
action yet. Now I checked that out again with
the White House, with NIH and with other leaders
in the US government just last week because
the issue arose again when the president announced
another very modest step with great fanfare,
$500 million over several years, and I called
around and said that is fine, but where is
the blueprint? There is no blueprint, Professor
Sachs. It is not just this issue. It is the
concept of addressing issues like this at a
scale that is more than a show or more than
a placeholder or more than a feel-good measure,
a scale that is commensurate with the challenge.
We have not acted that way in the world for
quite a long time. When Secretary Rumsfeld
was asked about the assault on Tora Bora mountains
in Afghanistan few months ago, and he was asked
do we have enough troops going in, He said,
I cannot be sure, but I will tell you one thing.
We are going to send more and more until we
get the job done. You can be sure of that.
We do not here that kind of approach to any
of the problems that Johannesburg is going
to address. All we hear is placeholder solutions--a
few cents spent on this problem and 70 cents
per American on that problem--but nobody in
the US government can present you with a plan
of action to address health pandemics that
are killing millions this year in the poorest
countries, to assess the increase in water
stress and environmental degradation that is
hitting large parts of the planet and, as we
know, to address long-term climate-change issues
where there has been a consorted desire to
avoid formulating such a plan of action.
What are likely to be the consequence of 9/11?
I
think the 9/11 tragedy and shock may turn
out to be
an alarm bell which actually changes
things in a positive direction, from the point
of view of our alertness as a nation, to the
kind of world that we are living in. I believe
we will use the proverbial expression of "sleepwalking
through history" for the last 20 years
on a lot of issues. Nine/11 was a shock of
the first order, but it is not a surprise of
the first order. I published two papers in
the summer of 2001 saying this interconnected
world that we live in, with the amount of state
failure and state collapse, is absolutely prone
to the spread of terrorist risks to the United
States, not to mention health risks and other
risks. By nature, being in an interconnected
world, we are going to find that there is no
a part of the world that cannot come back and
haunt us in a serious way. I was arguing that
these are not humanitarian issues alone. These
are issues of first-order security for the
American people, and I think that they would
really like to know that they are being addressed.
And we seem to have the capacity to mobilize
a tremendous amount of resources in short order
within our own borders. We have a really hard
time understanding that the risks are coming
from the outside. We responded to bioterrorism
threats with billions of dollars newly appropriated,
but we have not really responded to the real
public-health risks in the world in a sound
way at all. We barely assessed them. So, anthrax
triggered tremendous responses because we cannot
move. But AIDS triggered a shadow of the same
response, even thought anthrax killed a handful
of people and AIDS has already killed 25 million
people and it is on its way to killing 40 millions
more. And that is supposedly not a crisis.
What do you think the World Summit can do
in helping to address these problems that you
described that are very threatening? What can
the summit do to get some action moving?
When
the Secretary General convened his top advisers
in spring
and early summer to discuss
the summit and what could be achieved, and
when he outlined these areas of primary focus--the
ones that I mentioned before: water, energy,
agriculture, health and biodiversity--I rather
hoped that I would discover, thank goodness,
given the immensity of the problems, the fact
that we have known about them for quite a long
time and their seriousness, that we would quickly
be delivered with that plan of action. But
I have learned, as the chairman of the commission
for the World Health Organization in the last
two years, that there was no such a plan of
action for the global health crisis of AIDS,
malaria, TB and other killer diseases, and
I urge, as chair of a commission on microeconomics
and health, that we get such a blueprint in
place. When it came to energy or water or other
areas, I hoped of course that work had be done
and that we could use the remaining months
before Johannesburg to help get commitments
to the implementation of these plans. What
I have found is such plans do not exist and
there is no global-scale plan for any of these.
There are lots of treaties. Many of these extremely
good and well thought-out. There are thousands
of pages of text from Agenda 21 at Rio onward.
And these are solid, scientifically sound serious
pieces of work. So I am not bemoaning the level
of analysis, but they are not operational plans
of action that say, Here is how we get from
here to the next step to the next step and
here is how we pay for it. Because, the truth
be told, things in this world. And this is
often the bottom line. It is not the only part
of the story, but it is the major part of the
story. I have found to my own satisfaction
that despite wonderful scientific knowledge,
great breakthroughs in understanding, communities
of the most serious and committed people all
over the world, good intentions, there really
are no operational plans of action at a global
scale in these areas. There is no time to put
such a fully elaborated plans of action into
place in Johannesburg. So, what can happen
at Johannesburg is a decision to make and implement
such a plan of action by creating at least
framework initiatives in these critical areas.
We need global-scale initiatives in those areas--with
funding mechanisms, with operational and scientific
review, and especially with ways to link the
global goals and global finance with local
initiatives and local needs. This is operationally
one of the hardest and most challenging parts
of actually solving these problems. Impoverished
communities that will have to take care of
their own forestry but cannnot do it on their
own right now--and somehow we need to make
the reach from the global objective of protecting
the forest ecosystems, from global finance
where the US and other rich countries can mobilize
real support, down to the village in Antroprodesh,
where the community council is going to be
charged with the healthy and sustained management
of its local forestry resources. These are
possible to do because we have many examples
of success, but not in general in places which
have been relative low-cost and, in general,
where a donor or private-public partnership
has come along to push the agenda. So we have
been able to do this when it comes to polio
eradication, because Rotary International cannot
be in the cause at a global scale. They did
not say, Let's get polio down at bit in some
places. They said, Let's eradicate polio and
get in control of African river blindness.
Merck had a product which it was ready to donate,
WHO and the World Bank were ready to be partners,
and this was an operation taken to scale. Jimmy
Carter helped to champion a large partnership
to address this. These are the examples of
how you reach from the global down to the local
at a scale to really address the problem. The
proof of principle, in a way what a mathematician
would call a constructive existence proof,
you can do these things. But we do not have
it in the many areas that Johannesburg needs
to focus on right now.
Are such conferences really useful?
Two points. Since Rio 10 years ago, there
has been a continuum of conferences, all of
which fall under the rubric of sustainable
development. Each of them came up with a plan
or a program of action. Each of those conferences
suggested, if not a way out, some way to tackle
the fundamental issues, and those conferences
clarified what the problems were. Secondly,
those conferences came up with an X dollar
figure that it would take. The problem seems
to be that the donor countries seem extremely
dubious about what came out of those conferences.
At some level they would say there is not really
this kind of money available or, even if it
were, how do we know that it is going to be
managed well? The food security crisis is a
good example of mismanagement. So therefore,
people are actually turning to Jeffrey Sachs
at Johannesburg to be that one clear voice
to untangle this mess. So how are you going
to be at Johannesburg and basically say to
them, Boys and girls, your hearts may be in
the right places but your hands are not or
your wallets are not. Given what has been already
achieved, are we talking about starting from
ground zero here or do you want them to develop
a new course of action and this is what is
going to have to be? They are really looking
to you for a realistic way out of this mess.
But can the participants help make a difference?
I
personally think that these international
meetings have
incredible merit. In recent months
I had occasion to go back and read a voluminous
amount of material from these earlier summits.
First, a lot is known about these problems.
So I do not want to be misunderstood that we
have to re-invent approaches. A lot is known.
The goals that were adopted at these summits
are bold and appropriate. The general lines
of recommended action are wise, in my view.
One can quibble on the margin. One can even
argue within the margins in some cases. These
have been serious endeavors by a lot of serious
people around the world, but they have not
led to implemented actions or even to the stage
of real plans of action. Now, why is that?
Up until very recently we have lived in a period
in which the dominant philosophy of the dominant
power, the United States, is that if there
are problems, the problems are basically bad
governance by the poor. They want to get out
of their poverty, let them govern themselves
better. And so governance became the code word
for our era and structural adjustment became
the phrase for how to implement improved governance.
Good governance counts a lot. There is no question
about it, but it also can become an excuse
when it is taken to extremes, as it was in
the past 20 years. Not as a diagnosis of part
of the problem, but as a way to blame the poor
for their suffering, and to absolve the rich
from any role in overcoming those problems.
And we went too far in these ideas that problems
are all remediable through self-help actions
whether is belt tightening or privatizing the
next sugar mill or some other recommendation
that would come from the IMF or the World Bank.
That era has ended. It failed. It did not produce
results. It ended Sept. 11 also in terms of
the concepts in the United states when at least
the wake-up call said the world is too dangerous
to go on drifting as if we can live well enough
alone and the problems of the poor world, if
really not being solved, are not our problems
anyway. So it failed as a socioeconomic approach
and it failed as a foreign-policy approach
of the United States. That is why we actually
get a turn to something different in Monterrey,
when the United States announced for the first
time in a generation an increase in foreign
assistance. But of course it is not enough.
It is still a finger in the air. What will
the local political traffic bear? How much
can we ask for after a generation of cuts in
foreign aid? How much can we ask for and, in
a sense, get away with it? Not what it is really
going to take to address these problems. So
I think we have a chance now to rethink the
issues, not by throwing out 10 years of summits,
certainly not by mocking those summits, as
is being done with great frequency in the capitals
of the major cities. It happened again last
month when the World Food Summit ended as a
debacle, actually because the rich countries
did not show up and many of the rich countries
laughed at the summit as if this was some pitiful
display of poor countries or of the United
Nations, rather than a reflection of their
own lack of viable leadership on this issue.
If these summits did not produce, well they
have a lot to share in our failure to move
to real progress on these issues. I think that
we need therefore to take the best of what
has happened, to understand that the goals
that have been set are the very goals that
we are living with in the world, that there
are no others to replace them. These are the
Millennium Goals that we as a world community
have repeatedly endorsed, but we have not backed
up with the kinds of systematic and scaled
actions that will be needed. I think that it
is overwhelmingly reflected in the evidence
and I do not think that there is any other
way. But for the mobilization of the US leadership,
together with Europe and Japan and other rich
countries, to say, Yes, we are not going to
mock these meeting. We are going to get behind
them to make sure that they are successful,
because the stakes for us are too vast to stand
on the sidelines and watch a continuing downward
slide.
What will turn the tide?
Two things are going to turn the tide. Of
course, I am an optimists, but I actually believe
in actual discourse to problems like this and
rational solutions. What I see are two overwhelming
facts which are simply not understood. First,
the cost of addressing these problems is extraordinarily
modest, both relative to our means in the rich
world and relative to our stakes. And this
is simply not understood. Second, the means
to approach these problems are known, but because
of a lack of a systematic will to solve them,
there has not been the synthesis of approach
which is ready for us to grab. Let me illustrate
this. On the question of foreign assistance
and the scale of the cost, we are living in
a house of mirrors and we have to find a way
out of it. There are so many distortions about
this issue and sometimes you just feel paralyzed
as in those crazy houses where you cannot get
to the next hallway. Americans believe we are
giving vast amounts of aid, when we are not.
Most people in the rich world think that the
cost of solving these problems is so vast that
if we start down the road we are never going
to get out of this, when in fact the real costs
are extraordinarily modest compared to our
wealth. We have grown up and evolved, I am
convinced, in a mindset where our capacity
to cooperate is deeply hampered by our struggle
for our own survival. So we do not easily share
food. We do not easily share our beneficence.
We are programmed to survive first or to share
food with our kin, but it is extremely hard
for us to get cooperation that crosses a town,
a state, much less a continent or the hemisphere,
or with another race or ethnic group. I do
believe that there is a fundamental lag in
our cultural understanding of how rich we are
because I still observe us as fighting for
every morsel when we have more than enough
for ourselves and more than enough capacity
to share with others, but we are so programmed
to struggle.
Can you give some instances of meaningful
interventions?
Within
our commission at WHO we did the most systematic
costing of the essential life-saving
health interventions that the developing world
needs and asked very hard-headed questions
of who can pay, who could not pay, what is
the gap of those who have needs but cannot
pay on their own. We have arrived at a realization
that the poorest people in the world cannot
afford their own life-saving health interventions.
They are simply too poor to pay for the doctors,
the nurses, the medicines out of their own
resources, no matter how well they are governed.
It is not a matter of good governance, it is
a question of extreme impoverishment. When
we added up the price tag, we found that to
close the gap on 41 life-saving essential health
services, that would save around eight million
people per year from death, 20 thousand people
per day, that would cost the rich world one
penny out of every $10 of our annual income.
One needs about $25 billion per year to close
that gap. That may sound a lot of money until
you realize we are $25 trillion rich-world
economy right now. That is the GNP of the donor
world. So if we set aside only one penny out
of $10, not only can we fight the AIDS pandemic
and win, but we could triumph over malaria,
we could make absolutely dramatic breakthroughs
in the control of tuberculosis, we could ensure
children being vaccinated, we could get diarrheal
and the acute respiratory infections under
control. We could save a substantial proportion
of the 500,000 mothers every year who die in
childbirth because they do not have access
to skilled attendants. So we could do marvelous,
thrilling things at a cost of one penny out
of every $10. Of course, from the perspective
of the poor, it is any way that resources can
come. In terms of practice there is no doubt
that the bulk of this has to come from the
public sector. The private sector has a very
important role to play as partner, but not
as philanthropy on the scale of $25 billion
a year. And they have a role to play in ensuring
that their wonderful technologies are actually
available to the poor. They have a role to
play in making sure that their anti-viral drugs
are available at the cost of production, not
at the patent-protected prices. I do not think
we want to turn the corporate world into a
corporate philanthropy. There is a role for
corporate philanthropy, but that is not the
solution to these problems. That is part of
the solution, but not the real way to get a
sustained, scaled approach to the problems.
If you go from health to water, to agricultural
productivity to biodiversity preservation,
you can find working models under a similar
approach where help is targeted at the poorest
of the poor who cannot afford it out of their
own resources, where science is mobilized,
where global corporations are partners in the
delivery of new technologies that can make
breakthroughs to address these problems in
the same way. That is what I have been examining
over a number of years for the Secretary General
in a project that I am directing for him--not
in time for Johannesburg, but our millennium
project under the Secretary General's lead
is specifically devoted to following through,
as in the health study, in the other global
dimensions of need, to ask systematically what
can be done, where, how, with what priorities,
and with what financing mechanisms. But a preliminary
look tells us something very basic. We may
need $50 billion a year more. You could perhaps
need $75 billion a year more, but as a $25
trillion rich-world economy, we are talking
about sums that are considerably below 1 percent
of our income. I would guess below the 0.7
percent of our income that has long been pledged
to addressing these problems. So we are talking
about very modest sums. Interesting to remember
why that is, by the way. First, the rich world
is so rich now that we live at a measure of
material well-being that was unimaginable even
a generation ago and certainly unimaginable,
we think, back a few decades. We have made
it. This is a great triumph of science, technology,
market economy and democracy. This is a wonderful
triumph. But we are still feeling that evolutionarily
built-in desperation that we have got to fight
our neighbor, that we have got to fight the
other side of the world to protect our own.
We do not, because we are not living on the
edge by any means. That is number one. Secondly,
the poor are so incredibly poor that a modest
amount from us makes a huge proportionate difference
for them. And third and very important--and
not understood by the anti-globalization movement--a
very significant part of the developing world
is achieving economic progress right now. We
do not have to save China from starvation or
from material disaster. China is making it.
It is saving itself. India is making tremendous
progress. It is achieving sustained economic
growth at a significant rate. I believe it
could achieve it at an even faster rate and
I am trying to help in that. It is achieving
tremendous progress. In other words, the proportion
of the world that is most urgently in need,
where they cannot address the problems on their
own, has been the shrinking proportion of the
world.
Where is Africa right now and what is the
difference that made China and India able to
move forward?
Development is very complex, so there is not
ever a single factor to explain success or
failure. There are historical, geographic,
cultural and many other phenomena at play.
When I look at the difference between Korea
and Ghana, where it is famously told that they
were at nearly similar levels in the 1960s,
I know that Korea never had to grapple with
the endemic malaria problem that Ghana did
and that has been the killer in Ghana for thousands
of years and a major barrier to economic development.
I know that Korea had the great benefit of
being a short shipping distance from Japan.
And because Korea was under the US strategic
umbrella and had tremendous access to our markets,
had tremendous benefit of US and Japanese technology,
it therefore had a leg up in being able to
move forward. Ghana had none of those because
it was far away. It was the whole sub-Saharan
desert away. It was under nobody's strategic
umbrella. Nobody cared, basically. It was close
to no major market. It faced trade discrimination
of an intense variety where it was allowed
to export its cocoa beans to Europe but not
its finished chocolate. The finished chocolate
was to be produced by Switzerland--can you
imagine: the most tropical product in the world
being produced by one of the Alpine economies
of the world? That is because of the trade
distortions. Not the natural course of things.
If you have to pay 27 percent duties on finished
chocolate exported from Ghana to Europe, you
are going to make it with the beans that come
in duty free and with the chocolate that is
produced behind the tariff barrier. And you
think, Why isn't Ghana making the T-shirts
that were the stepping stone for Korea? Because
the barriers to trade were intense.
Is that the only reason?
Often there is no simple explanation. There
are usually many explanations and many pieces
of the story, so one needs to take a serious
look right now and ask what measures could
help poor Ghana, given that Ghana faces the
AIDS pandemic, given that Ghana faces the malaria
now, given that Ghana is living in a globalized
economy where its doctors are leaving by thousands
because they are attracted by higher wages
elsewhere. Given the climatic and other ecological
problems that Ghana faces. In that context,
what should we do? You might decide after serious
analysis that, Well, yes. Ghana too can make
it on its own. When I looked at the issue,
I reached the conclusion that Ghana may need
significant help and that the pretense that
it can make it on its own is one of the reasons
why Ghana has had such a difficult time in
the last 20 years, making that breakthrough
to high rates of economic development. It needs
help in market access. It needs help with technology.
It needs help with disease control. It needs
help on the ecological front. None of it is
impossible. None of it is of huge cost to any
of us if properly done. But it requires a plan
of action, a mechanism of funding, a strategy,
and a partnership with Ghana to make it happen.
You made such a reputation at Harvard through
the Harvard Institute for Development that
a number of people were surprised when you
made the change to Columbia. The Earth Institute
itself suggests kind of a green institute,
but clearly, given your own reputation, you
intend to make it so much more than ecology
and environment. As you take over the institute,
can you tell us what your expectations are,
what your leadership is likely to be, and the
framework of your general thinking on sustainable
economic growth for the world economy? How
do you expect the Earth Institute to play a
role of leadership?
I feel like I am the luckiest man so I could
not be more thrilled to be coming to Colombia
and combining that with my position as special
adviser for the Secretary General for the Millennium
Development Goals. I see both activities, the
Earth Institute and the United Nations role,
as the most amazing chance to pursue the goals
of sustainable development in the truest, deepest
and interconnected way. Sustainability and
development together.
Addressing
the urgent needs of the poor, but doing it
in a way which bequeaths to future
generations a planet and living conditions
that meet our aspirations. The Earth Institute
is a unique institution in American academia--I
would venture to say in the world community
right now. Colombia has assembled remarkable
institutions, all interconnected and all focusing
on different aspects of the Earth's systems.
So, there is Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory,
which is now a decades-old world leader in
the physical Earth environment, from seismology
to plate tectonics to ocean systems. There
is the International Research Institute on
Climate Predictions, which is making use of
the scientific advances in forecasting the
El Niño to try to give help to all of
those impoverished places in the tropics that
are so heavily impacted by these climatic cycles.
There is the Goddard Institute on Space Studies,
which is NASA's only urban-based institute,
right on 100th street and Broadway, which is
one of the world's leading modelers of long-term
climate change, headed by Jim Henson, a world
renowned scientist in climate change. And there
are many more I should add. One other that
is critically important is the Center for Environmental
Research and Conservation, which is an amazing
consortium, which brings together Colombia
University, the New York Botanical Gardens,
the American Museum of Natural History, the
Conservancy Trust and other institutions of
this city into an incredible amount of knowledge
and operation on ecosystem functioning, genetic
diversity on a global scale and biodiversity
science and preservation.
What purpose will your presence fulfill?
It is just an amazing thing for me to sit
at the feet of these masters and soak up as
much knowledge as I can, but I am also being
brought in for a purpose, and that is to help
bring into the mix economic development and
what I call the human ecology side of the equation,
which is how humans relate to their physical
environment. How does the physical environment
help shape the economic dynamics, whether success
or failure? I have made a big theme of this
in my own research in recent years. The difference
of economic performance between temperate and
tropical zones, where it is quite clear that
the tropical diseases such as malaria or the
problems of humid tropical agriculture--where
you have long dry seasons, drought and other
threats to agriculture--pose problems that
we just do not face in the temperate world.
So I am hoping to tie together four different
thematic areas: the physical sciences, the
biophysical sciences, the engineering capacities--which
are remarkable at Columbia--and the human ecology
dimension, both the economic development issues
and poverty alleviation issues and the public
health issues, which have also been a big focus
of my own attention and where I am partnering
with the Mailman School of Public Health to
create a new institution as part of this overall
Earth Institute. If you take that tremendous
scientific capacity and research capacity and
outreach capacity of the Earth Institute, which
I do believe is unique in the world, and connect
it with the ambitions of the United Nations
to help propose and put forward workable solutions
on a global scale for these problems, I think
that it is a combination that simply is unmatched
anywhere in the world. And when these two invitations
came nearly simultaneously, the truth be told,
when I came down to speak with Columbia, after
the first hour of discussion I said if all
of this checks out--the story you are telling
me--I am on my way over here. You do not have
to do anymore convincing. And that is what
I told them, that I wanted to make that work
because it was so thrilling--all of these pieces.
In terms of the agenda, let me just add a couple
of dots. First, as a university institution
in the service of not only the university but
the world, I think that all of the institute
ties together three functions. Most importantly
I would say is the scientific research, because
if you do not know what you are doing it is
hard to do anything else that is useful. Second
is the teaching and training of our students
and our policy makers, leaders and many other
groups. It is absolutely a teaching facility
with three PhD programs and one more to be
added, by linking departments in the university
in this grand mix. And third is the outreach.
The idea that science and technology and ideas
can be brought to bear for the good of humanity.
And I must say a lot of universities are shy
about that. You know, if we do any good, it
is kind of a spillover from our research and
teaching. But Columbia is not shy about it
at all. Columbia says that the university as
a social institution has a social function
that is fundamental, and I have to say that
this view of the university is actually a very
deeply ingrained view of America and American
universities from the land-grant colleges to
the establishment of MIT to others. These are
not, despite the image, ivory-tower institutions.
That has never been the American tradition.
And Columbia, I think ,is putting forward a
proposition in a very bold and grand way deeply
steeped in our national tradition that the
university is to help get service to the world,
not only through research and teaching but
for what it can mean for the broader human
community.
How do we proceed?
In every area that we have discussed today,
whether is health or access of the poor to
water or protection of the ecosystems, we already
know a tremendous amount about what to do and
we already can think through pragmatic yet
bold solutions to the problem. In every area
we know a lot about what needs to be done and
what can be done. It is also true in every
area. We need to bring new science. We need
to find more effective approaches to malaria
control. Maybe a vaccine against malaria, which
looks scientifically promising. A vaccine against
AIDS. We need to understand ecosystem functioning,
because, as our biologists tell us, we have
perhaps mapped one tenth, if not much less,
of the world's species, so we do not really
understand how some of our critical ecosystems
even function. We need fundamentally new approaches
to energy use if we are going to be able to
run modern societies with all their benefit,
yet at the same time not simply succumb to
the profound uncertainties and risks of man-made
climate change through our current ways of
using fossil fuels. For all of this there is
both an organizational, political and economic
set of issues as well as basic scientific and
technological issues, and the Earth Institute
also brings together this incredible mix of
basic scientists, the engineering and the social
sciences and the policy approaches, which give
us this chance of creating a more holistic
and therefore more effective framework for
action.
When you were at Harvard you were involved
in the development efforts of the newly emerging
states of the Eastern Europe--not just to patch
up economies but to give them the shot of dynamism.
Is that going to be doing more of that at Columbia
Is there an effort to put Columbia on the geopolitical
map at a time of increasing globalization?
I will certainly be continuing my efforts
at Columbia. I came to understand, not immediately
but over the course of the two last decades,
that in a sense what I was doing, among many
others, is trying to find ways to make globalization
work. As I went to different parts of the world
and advised different leaders in those regions,
they were all grappling with the basic problem
of how do we relate to the world, how should
be trade with the world, how do we relate to
the global financial system, how do we relate
to the global ecosystem--question that come
up, of course, with more and more urgency.
So I found that even though I may be working
in places 12 thousand miles apart and in different
ecological zones, and in different hemispheres,
the kinds of questions that were posed from
these societies were similar because they were
all joining the same world. And given the crucial
and unsolved and still unresolved nature of
that struggle to build a globalization that
works, I am certainly myself utterly engaged
with large number of countries around the world
in that process and I will continue to do that
because that is my life's work as I come to
Columbia. The Chinese government is looking
to us for ideas on certain critical aspects
of their development. I will be spending much
of August before Johannesburg in southwest
China trying to understand the specific challenges
of what China calls the western development
problem because the coast is dynamics but the
interior is much less so. That is the standard
phenomenon of economic development, but they
have asked me to have a look and give them
some strategic ideas. I have been in continuous
and intensive dialogue with the Indian government
and with state governments in India for many
years, and I certainly find that incredibly
rewarding and I hope that the Indians do also
on their side--but they continue to call and
I continue to be grateful for that. Many African
governments have been calling frequently, especially
with the health crisis, but more broadly right
now with the hunger crisis in southern Africa
and with basic ideas about economic development.
I will be meeting with a number of African
leaders to talk about some strategic approaches
to more sustained economic development on the
continent. The Indian countries are working
with a program--that I began at Harvard and
which will come to Columbia--on the special
issues of Indian development. I have learned
over the years that mountain environments in
general have very specific problems in terms
of ecology, transport cost, often the mix of
populations, ethnicities, the politics of inland
versus coastal regions. So I have been working
with the Indian government for a couple of
years because that is one of the crisis regions
in the world. That is the development hotspot
where there has not been the kind of sustained
economic development that one hopes for, and
that work will certainly come to Columbia.
So, all in all, I cannot imagine a better place
to do all of that--with the United Nations,
with the Council on Foreign Relations down
the block, I think the capacity to engage with
these governments in a very rich and fruitful
dialogue and research program and often advisory
role will certainly be at the center of my
activities here.
|
