One out of six people lives in extreme poverty
But Jeff Sachs thinks we can change that, within a generation.
Columbia University’s Earth Institute Director Jeffrey D. Sachs advises United Nations Secretary–General on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. In March 2006, Dr. Sachs spoke with Earth & Sky’s Eleanor Imster about the twin goals of eradicating extreme poverty and working towards a sustainable planet.
Imster: How many people live in poverty today?
Sachs: Well, it depends on how you define it, of course. But, extreme poverty, the kind of poverty that puts people at risk of dying every day, affects about one out of every six on the planet. That’s roughly 1 billion to 1.2 billion people.
Imster: As world population grows, is a greater percentage of the population living in poverty?
Sachs: The great news is that in most parts of the world, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has been declining. In Asia, it’s been declining significantly. But in Africa, almost half of the population is in extreme poverty. And that proportion has not been coming down in Africa, a region of rapid population growth, utterly extreme duress and very little economic progress.
Imster: Since the beginning of human history, people have lived in poverty. I understand that you’re an optimist – you think that we can eradicate extreme poverty. What tools or abilities do we have today that will enable us to do that now?
Sachs: Economic progress is real. It’s been dramatic and nearly universal since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Almost every part of the world has experienced some economic benefit Roughly five–sixths of the world’s population has escaped from extreme poverty, even though many of those – billions of people – are in conditions that from the perspective of the United States, would still be considered very poor. But they’re not at risk of death from their poverty.
What I believe strongly is that we have the tools, whether it’s the science of modern agronomy to grow more food, or hydrology to manage water supplies, or information technology to manage connectivity, or health and medicine to manage disease and fight infection and keep mothers alive in childbirth.
With all of those powerful techniques and medicines and tools that we have, we are capable of ending the extreme poverty that remains on the planet, within our generation, by the year 2025.
Imster: This year’s State of the Planet conference is about creating a sustainable Earth. What’s the relationship between a sustainable planet and an end to extreme poverty?
Sachs: It’s a great and complicated question, the relationship of poverty and sustainability. To some extent, I regard it as climbing two summits. The first is to conquer the summit of extreme poverty itself, to stop this horrendous death and despair that’s still afflicts so many people on the planet.
But if we get to that mountaintop, which I believe we can and should within this generation, we would see another massive summit to climb ahead of us, and that is the challenge of the environmental sustainability of the entire global economic system. Even if we solve the extreme poverty problems, we have not solved the problems of how fossil fuels are threatening the climate system, how over–fishing in the world is threatening marine ecology, how the pressures on food supply on the food supply, on the global food supply, is still leading to massive deforestation. Most of the ecosystems of the world are under great threat. In part, sometimes, because of poverty itself, but mainly because of the levels of economic well–being, coupled with technologies and policies that don’t give adequate protection to those ecosystems.
The key, of course, is to square this circle, to enable the poorest of the poor to escape from their affliction, to allow those who are still relatively poor to have the real prospect for economic progress, to enable the rich to look forward to improvements of their own, but to do it all in a way which respects the physical constraints of our planet, which are very real, and which are tremendously abused right now.
Imster: What do you mean by “sustainability” in connection with eradicating poverty? Do you mean that poor people would not be simply dependent on generosity of rich, but would be self–sustaining?
Sachs: Sustainability has two senses that are distinct, that are both important. One is that the poor sustainably get out of the poverty in the sense that they earn their way in the world, rather than depending on handouts or emergency food supplies. That’s one sense of sustainability. And when I speak about the end of extreme poverty, I certainly mean to include that sense of economic sustainability.
But sustainability has a second sense as well. And that means to sustain the life–support systems of the planet – the water cycle, the climate, the carbon cycle, the fisheries, the terrestrial ecosystems, the forests, the biodiversity – to live in much better harmony for the long term with the natural systems of the planet.
We are not doing that right now, even at our current levels of economic activity. And when China and India and other parts of the world become richer, those natural systems are going to come under even increased stress unless we’re a lot smarter about how we manage the physical environment together with our economic systems.
Imster: What’s the best place to start in the fight against extreme poverty? Hunger, disease, sanitation?
Sachs: Well, we say that you wouldn’t ask a farmer, “Do you care about your soil, or your seed or your sunshine, or your water?” Because he needs all of them – or she needs all of them. We say that when you’re looking at the villages in the Africa, don’t force a choice between basic health, food supply, safe drinking water, children and school. All of those can be done in a more holistic and integrated manner.
That’s why Millennium Promise is championing an approach which we call Millennium Villages. It’s the idea of an integrated approach to the real lives of the poor, so that the poor are empowered to be more productive and escape from poverty on their won energies, but with the help and the tools that we can make available.
Imster: How can I help? How can regular people know what’s the best way to make a difference?
Sachs: I think people do need to find out more. An organization called Millennium Promise, has information about the nature of extreme poverty and how people can get involved.
I recommend that people make a contribution within their means, maybe it’s $10., to make sure that an impoverished child in Africa can sleep under an insecticide treated bed net to protect the child from malaria. My view is that if we each make a contribution is some meaningful way, we’ll find ourselves drawn into this story so that we learn more , we follow more, we understand more. And better understanding is going to create even more creative and ingenious ways for the rich world and the poor world to work effectively together to put an end to this blight.
