Jeffrey Sachs interview: How to Save One Billion People

[muriel_volestrangler]

But isn't all this - as right-wingers like to shrug - the result of corrupt, incompetent governments? "Malawi actually put together one of the earliest and best conceived strategies for bringing treatment to its dying population. It was incredibly thoughtful. They had structures for drug delivery, patient counselling, community outreach, everything. They used these plans and appealed to the international community for the means to treat a third of the total infected population - 300,000 people - with anti-Aids drugs.

"And you know what the international community said? The plans are 'too ambitious'. Cut them. So the government in Malawi cut their plans to saving 100,000 people. Still it was too much. The international community told them to cut another 60 per cent from the plans. In the end, only 25,000 people were saved. That's not a failure of African government. That's a failure to give enough aid to a good African government."
...
"So your poverty literally traps you. There is no margin of income above survival that can be invested for the future. When people say Africa needs 'trade not aid', they miss the point. They need trade plus aid, or they will never get out of the poverty trap. We have calculated you actually need a small amount to end all of them, just $15bn, a 30th of what the US spends on the military - and then you have trade.
...
"Let me give you another example. I was recently in northern Ethiopia, where I saw for myself the effect of the drastic changes in weather patterns that are now happening across the world." The people there have depended for millennia on two seasons when they could grow crops: the short rains in March and April, and the long rains in the summer months. "But now the short rains are gone entirely, and the long rains have become erratic," he says. "The result? Hunger is omnipresent. Half of the children are severely underweight. That's where climate change meets poverty."

http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/story.jsp?story=648256

[oscar111]

1. exactly where is malawi? good post

liked the post.

good point trade and aid both.

unclear.. 15 bn would end .. all what? .. all poverty? all aids?

we must have a decent living standard for EVERY human on earth.

EVERY ONE OF US.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. South east Africa

A relatively small country, ex-British colony.

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/mi.html

I think he's saying that $15 billion would end the situations that hold the people in poverty - it would pay for decent malaria prevention, and so on. After that, if the countries could participate in fair trade (no dumping of products on them from developed countries, no protectionist tariffs on importing their goods into developed countries), and the developing world was allowed to manufacture anti-AIDS drugs without paying royalities to the pharmaceutical companies, then they'd be able to stand on their own two feet, and get into the position that countries like, say, Malaysia have.

[Strawman]

3. Good article

Posted in my "bathroom blog." I leave behind little articles like this in the bathroom stall for all the freepers here at work in the hopes they might read them and possibly rethink some of their assumptions.

How are humane, common sense ideas like Sachs' at all controversial? I will never understand it.

[Captain Hilts]

4. Sachs contributed to mass misery in Russia.

He now avoids issues relating to Russia like the plague. I can understand why he does.