“Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet”
With a weekend of events centered on the Nobel Peace Prize awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, it was fitting that economist and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University Jeffrey Sachs began his session by applauding Norway and its commitment to peace. Throughout a satellite videoconference from his office in New York, Sachs spoke with host John Ydstie of National Public Radio about the economic factors necessary to create a world without poverty and how this would be a lot easier if we could just follow the Norwegian example.
“If the world were a little more like Norway, this problem would have been gone a long time ago,” he said.
Sachs commended Norway for allocating more than the United Nations target of 0.7 percent of its gross national income to official development assistance (ODA). Norway has been a leader in providing development aid to fulfill the first Millennium Development Goal, which aims to reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day and reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger by 2015. He spoke of providing tools to help communities lift themselves from poverty as a more effective means to meet this goal than a simple handout of international aid.
“We need a development solution,” Sachs said. “Not just a peacemaking solution.”
While Sachs thinks it’s “weird that in the 21st century extreme poverty exists,” he’s optimistic that we will soon see an end to poverty. He argued that the solution, where poverty in Africa is concerned, requires investments in education, agriculture, all-weather roads, power, Internet, connectivity, and things as small as mosquito nets to help prevent malaria. He said that Africans are aware of what they need to develop their communities and they are ready to make partnerships with us in order to empower destitute villages. Sachs has seen firsthand how giving fertilizer vouchers to replenish depleted African soils helped produce a crop two-times the size of two years previous. He is optimistic about this type of development solution as a means for an escape from extreme poverty.
“It’s like watching communities come back to life,” he said.
Even with the critical challenges of environmental sustainability, population growth and conflict, Sachs applauds the dramatic success stories we have seen in the seventh year of the Millennium Development Plan, but says that there is “too little Norway,” and we can still do a lot more.
“I believe we can still see this happen and make this happen,” he said. “We will get to the summit of ending extreme poverty.”
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