Hunger & poverty

Abolishing debt slavery

06-01-2019 by Julian Creme

Recent studies indicate that some 800 million people in the world today, many of them living in parts of Asia and Africa, have an inadequate food supply. But the figures are rising and the picture is worsening, due to recent stock-market falls and currency crashes in Southeast Asia (as in Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia). In these countries thousands of companies are going bankrupt and millions of people are losing their livelihoods. This catastrophe was brought on in part through imprudent lending and borrowing, much of it on a short-term basis, partly through lax supervision of these activities, further aggravated by the flight of foreign investors when confidence was lost.

The international community now worries about a possible currency devaluation in China, suddenly in an unfavourable position because other countries in the region are exporting goods at much lower prices to try to climb out of their disastrous situation. A currency devaluation in China could spark further devaluations in neighbouring countries, plunging them into ever more debt. There are also concerns about Japan, where banks are carrying billions of dollars in bad loans, many of which may ultimately be unpayable. Many of these banks have loaned considerable sums to Southeast Asian countries and are now further exposed. Current estimates of bad loans carried by Japanese institutions amount to as much as $600,000 million. Were major Japanese banks to crash, the panic engendered could cause a world-wide stock-market crash.

Compared to the many billions promptly found through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to shore up ailing Southeast economies (which some fear may not, in any case, be sufficient), the initiatives required to help the very poorest countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, do not amount to much. Despite a World Bank initiative launched with much fanfare and upbeat press releases at the end of 1996 to help the so-called HIPCs (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries), very few have benefited. To date, only four countries (Burkina Faso and Uganda in Africa and Bolivia and Guyana in South America) have become eligible for debt relief.

The requirements for debt relief are stringent: countries must undergo a three-year economic, administrative and policy restructuring (the so-called Structural Adjustment) to qualify. Greater transparency and accountability are all to the good, but lowering trade barriers and making already vulnerable economies more open have had mixed results in many countries, where there is some evidence that the poor have become even poorer. This is one variant of the familiar ‘winners and losers’ recipe, which may achieve currency stability and other benefits at the price of further impoverishing a significant proportion of the population. In many countries, basic foodstuffs have become more expensive compared to the salaries of the average low-paid worker. It is estimated that the landless poor have to pay as much as 80 per cent of their income to feed themselves.

This stark picture contrasts with a recent, upbeat report, The World Food Outlook, compiled by two World Bank officials and an Australian academic. This report rightly refutes alarmists who predicted shortages of world food supplies several years ago. Remarkably, although the population of the world continues to rise, so the capacity to feed ourselves has also foiled predictions of doom and has kept pace with the demographic explosion. However, there is not a single word in this report about how we can deal with the abject failure to redistribute efficiently from surplus areas to needy areas. It has been pointed out by some analysts that dumping cheap food on Third World markets can depress food prices local farmers rely on. This is true, but the stark fact remains that current market mechanisms lead to the absurd situation that, although there is enough food in the world, many millions go hungry because they cannot afford to buy it.

Poverty and hunger are now understood to have multiple causes, but these are not beyond the reach of our understanding. For example, structural reform of land tenure in many Third World countries could improve the situation. Major international lenders impose profound change on societies around the world but are strangely mute on land-tenure issues.

By the early 1980s, 4 per cent of the world’s big landowners controlled half of the world’s cropland. In 83 poor countries, 3 per cent of the landholders own or control four-fifths of the land. In Asia, between a third and half of the rural population own no land at all. Yet, in terms of food productivity, most small farmers produce more food per acre than larger ones. In Brazil, Chile and Argentina small family farms produce over 8 times as much to the acre as the largest farms. In Colombia, the small-farm production is 14 times greater. But 58 per cent of small-holders have to make do with 8 per cent of the world’s cropland. The obvious conclusion is that land redistribution can increase food security and self-sufficiency and halt the drift to the cities, where the poor lead precarious lives with no or only casual employment.

Perhaps no tangible benefits for the West are at stake here. Multinationals, particulary those which are attempting to command every process in the food chain, from planting and harvesting to ‘adding value’ through food processing and packaging to selling, do not look sympathetically at proposals that make the rural poor more self-reliant. The current free-market economic models also create situations which make many farmers reliant on cash crops for export only (a feature of some international bank loan programmes). This lack of local diversity not only diminishes self-sufficiency, but also makes farmers vulnerable when prices of agricultural products (primary commodities) suddenly drop on the world market. In the last few years, commodity prices have been falling. Excessive reliance on any one export, the plight of many Third World countries, also makes them vulnerable to world recessions, changes in exchange rates and new technologies. Diversity in both local production for self-sufficiency and in exports is necessary yet often resisted by major power brokers in wealthy nations, who seem to want a pliant, compliant and dependent Third World.

Floods, droughts, crop-destroying plagues and civil wars also play their part. But civil wars are also often the result of severe socio-economic imbalances which some policies perpetuate or aggravate.

People also remain impoverished and vulnerable in part because of inappropriate or inadequate credit instruments which avoid the development of adequate ‘micro-credits’. These are very small and therefore repayable loans which effectively spur development but which are often ignored in the thinking of major lenders and banks with no instruments in place to develop them. The non-governmental organizations (such as major and accountable development charities) can play a role. The extension of credit in this way (which benefits the rural and urban poor most directly) needs to happen on a much larger scale than at present, and heads off the complaint, so often heard, of corrupt officials in any country pocketing a percentage of the loans or grants. In India, it is significant that as much as 25 per cent of all foreign assistance is channelled through non-governmental organizations.

Development policies and loans structured to ignore the crucial role of women in Third World farming also delay the development of self-reliance and food security in various countries.

Finally, a modern form of slavery, namely debt slavery, plagues many countries. This is the focus of the British-based charity Christian Aid, which is linking with 50 other charities, community and church groups and writers in various countries in a ‘Jubilee 2000’ campaign for debt forgiveness for the world’s poorest countries. Drawing on the humanitarian traditions of slavery abolitionists such as William Wilberforce, the groups who form part of the Jubilee 2000 campaign have called themselves the ‘debt abolitionists’. They cite a United Nations Development Programme estimate that 21 million children could be saved by the millenium through cancellation of external debt owed by the world’s poorest countries.

Tanzania, for example, is one among several countries which has had to spend over a third of its wealth simply to service its external debt. Most sub-Saharan African countries have merely struggled to pay interest without ever succeeding in reducing the debt itself. The international lending institutions in the West seem to benefit by judicious application of the debt tourniquet, not allowing countries to collapse altogether, ensuring interest repayments keep coming, but ensuring also that the debts can never be repaid either. This, on a country-wide scale, replicates the ‘bonded labour’ situation in Third World countries where workers owe their loans all their lives and have to keep working merely to keep alive, without earning anything other than their food. You can never make headway simply by servicing a debt to pay off interest rather than reducing the debt itself. Yet this is the situation in some of the 40 countries of sub-Saharan Africa.

Growing public awareness through campaigns such as Jubilee 2000 can persuade the world’s richest countries (the so-called G-7 countries comprising mainly European countries, the Unites States and Japan) to write off the crippling debts of the poorest countries. Other initiatives in this regard, have come to nothing or proceed too slowly. One plan was that the IMF should sell its gold reserves; this plan was opposed by both Japan and Germany. Leadership from the United States has also been strangely lacking. Some of the ‘announcements’ seemed designed more to placate a growing body of discontented public opinion than to precede tangible action. There is a great difference between the announcement of debt relief initiatives and their substance. Perhaps the hope is that the public will go to sleep, without tracking the meagre sequels that follow the announcements.

Aside from extending micro-credits and restructuring debt relief to speed it up and to increase it, food redistribution mechanisms need to be carefully worked out. Many studies point out that much food is lost through inadequate infrastructure to take food to market or to store it adequately. This being the case, until better transport, storage and marketing mechanisms are in place, as well as land redistribution and greater use of credit mechanisms targeted directly to the rural and urban poor, the major aim has to be to feed the people now, despite and even because of the current inadequacies.

It is painfully obvious that the market, left to itself, cannot deliver this. The obvious solution is an international food agency to redirect food to areas of need, with the specific aim of ending hunger and starvation within a few years. The right to life itself has to become the highest priority.

(References: Mitchell, Ingco and Duncan, The World Food Outlook, Cambridge University Press, 1997. State of The World 1997, Worldwatch Institute Report, Earthscan Publications Limited, London. E.M.Young, World Hunger, Routledge, London and New York, 1997. Middleton and O’Keefe, Disaster and Development, Pluto Press 1998. The New Abolitionists, Christian Aid report, London, 1998.)

State of the world’s children: Poor nutrition linked to nearly seven million child deaths a year

06-01-2019 by Julian Creme

Malnutrition contributes to nearly seven million child deaths every year — more than any infectious disease, war or natural disaster, according to the 1998 State of the World’s Children Report released by UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund. Where it does not kill, malnutrition can leave victims physically maimed, intellectually impaired and suffering from the consequences of a weakened immune system. “The persistence of malnutrition has profound and frightening implications for children, society, and the future of humankind,” said UNICEF Executive Director, Carol Bellamy. “Yet this worldwide crisis has stirred little public alarm, despite substantial and growing scientific evidence of the danger.”

While there have been dramatic reductions in malnutrition in some parts of the world, the overall number of malnourished children is on the rise. No less than half of all children under the age of five in South Asia and one-third of those in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as millions of children in industrialized countries, are malnourished.

Malnutrition is not only a “silent emergency” but a largely invisible one, the UNICEF report found. Three-quarters of the children who die worldwide of causes related to malnutrition are what nutritionists describe as “mildly to moderately malnourished” and show no outward signs of problems. Starvation of the kind arising from famines, war and other catastrophes, although much covered by world media, is responsible for only a tiny part of the world-wide nutrition crisis, the report points out. “Malnutrition is not a simple matter of whether a child can satisfy his or her appetite,” Bellamy said. “A child who eats enough to avoid immediate hunger can still be malnourished. Good nutrition relies on a combination of adequate nutritious food, good health services and proper care for both pregnant women and children.”

Malnutrition can take a variety of forms that contribute to each other, such as protein-energy malnutrition and deficiencies of micronutrients like iodine, iron and vitamin A. Malnutrition is chiefly a consequence of disease and inadequate dietary intake. But, according to the report, many more elements are involved, including discrimination against women, which results in women eating last and least, and in being denied the educational opportunities that would empower them better to care for themselves and for their children. Malnourished women who become pregnant give birth to children who are already malnourished and whose ability to contribute to society as adults is diminished. Low-birthweight babies, for example, have IQs that average five points below that of healthy children. And women who are stunted — the long-term result of their own low birthweight, a poor diet and repeated illness — are more likely to die in childbirth, especially because of obstructed labor.

“While malnutrition has long been recognized as a consequence of poverty, it is increasingly clear that it is also a cause,” Bellamy said.

But UNICEF says that recent breakthroughs in nutritional science could have yet undreamed-of benefits, not only for the general healthy development of children, but also in helping to limit and even prevent some major killer diseases. “We now believe that good nutrition could be a key element in the fight against some of the world’s greatest health challenges, including maternal mortality, malaria and even HIV/AIDS,” Bellamy said. “And there is growing evidence that better nutrition in early childhood and during pregnancy may reduce the burden of heart disease, and other chronic and degenerative ailments, later in life.”

One of the most exciting discoveries is of the power of vitamin A, which is found in such foods as eggs, butter, whole milk, and liver. Studies show that deaths from diarrhoea can be reduced by 35 to 40 per cent if children are given vitamin A supplements. Other research shows that vitamin A could halve the number of deaths among children suffering from measles. A recent study in Nepal found that low-dose vitamin A supplements can reduce pregnancy-related deaths dramatically — an average of 44 per cent among women in areas where vitamin A deficiency is widespread.

Supplements of vitamin A and zinc may boost children’s resistance to malaria, which currently kills 600,000 young children each year. Moreover, zinc supplements seem to have a remarkable effect in reducing the toll of diarrhoea and pneumonia in poor countries. “Like the breakthroughs in immunization in the 1980s, such simple, low-cost nutritional supplements could be one of the most significant new public health interventions for the late 1990s,” Bellamy said.

But UNICEF is concerned that much more needs to be done to reduce the global toll of severe and moderate malnutrition. Governments in poor and rich countries must show leadership and commitment and must provide funding to mount and support actions to combat malnutrition that can be implemented by communities themselves. The price of inaction is high, the report warns: countless millions of children intellectually disabled, physically stunted and especially vulnerable to illness.

Microcredit Summit seeks to help world’s poorest

01-01-2019 by Julian Creme

For people like Francisca Rojas of El Salvador, a little bit of money can go a long way. A little bit of money has to go a long way.

Rojas was orphaned at the age of nine and lived by herself in a ditch beside the road. A woman found her, took her home, and put her to work washing and ironing. Rojas ran away when she was 17 and had her first child when she was 18.

“I went to my first [microcredit bank] meeting and was afraid I could not [take and repay a loan],” she said. “But the bank promoter who was there believed I could do it, and I was so desperate that I tried it.”

With her first loan, Rojas bought spices, noodles, and little ceramic pieces on a tray which she sold at the market. After three loans of $50 each, she had saved $45. “I never saved before,” she said. “I used to earn $17.50 a week. Now I earn from $35 to $53 each week. I can spend almost twice as much for food, live in a much nicer home, buy medicines, and save money. I feel safer now. I sleep calmly at night because I am not so worried about how to pay back a money lender. I don’t have to prostrate myself to anyone. I have confidence. When you have been as poor as I have been, there is a lot of shame. Even when I was a child, people wouldn’t look at me. I guess they were afraid I would ask them for something. I never had any friends. Now each week I come to our bank meeting. They are glad to see me. Now I have friends. This is the most important thing,” she concluded.

Rojas is one of an estimated 8 million people around the world who have access to microcredit. Programs such as the one Francisca works with provide very small loans, training, and, importantly, peer support, to the poor to help them start or expand self-employment projects.

A worldwide Microcredit Summit convened in Washington DC recently with the goal of increasing the 8 million people currently receiving microcredit to “100 million of the world’s poorest families, especially the women of those families, by the year 2005.” It is an ambitious goal, especially given the humble beginnings of the microcredit movement a little more than 20 years ago.

Humble beginnings

Mohammed Yunus, a US-trained economist, returned to his native country of Bangladesh in 1972, one year after the nation became independent, to head the Economics Department of Chittagong University. But he soon discovered that the economic theories he taught at school meant little to the poor people he spoke with in the villages. He found one woman who earned two pennies a day making bamboo stools. But she had to borrow money for the materials from a trader who bought the final product at a price which barely covered the cost of the materials. It was essentially slave labor.

“I took a student of mine,” Yunus said, “and went around the village for several days to find out if there were other people like her who were borrowing from traders … In a week’s time, we came up with a list of 42 such people. The total amount needed by all 42 of them was only $30. I was terribly ashamed of myself for being part of a society which could not provide $30 to 42 able, hard-working, skilled persons to make a living for themselves.”

He took $30 out of his pocket and asked the student to distribute the money to the people who needed it, telling them it was a loan, and they had to pay him back. The people’s lives were improved, and they repaid their loans to Yunus. But he soon realized that, as a university professor, he couldn’t provide money for all the people who needed it. So he went to a bank. The bank manager literally laughed at him. “This little money is not even worth all the papers they have to fill in, and the bank is not going to do that,” the manager said. And besides, the poor had no collateral to back up the loans. Finally, after months of wrangling, Yunus persuaded the bank that he would be the guarantor of a $300 loan, which he proceeded to give to the poor people of the village in 1976.

The villagers paid Yunus back, and he was able to distribute more loans. Yunus eventually set up his own bank, the Grameen [Rural] Bank in 1983, to lend only to the poorest people in Bangladesh — landless, assetless people — mostly women. The average loan size is $75, and the repayment rate is 98 per cent. The Grameen Bank has lent to 2.1 million people so far.

With some variations, the Grameen Bank model has been replicated around the world, helping millions of people across the globe.

At the Summit, Yunus compared microcredit efforts today to the first airplane flight by the Wright Brothers at the beginning of the century. “Some find our plane unsafe, clumsy, not good enough,” he said. “But soon we will be flying our Boeings, our Concordes and launching booster rockets.”

Movers and shakers

The impressive roster of participants at the Microcredit Summit, and their enthusiasm for microcredit programs, was a tribute not only to Yunus, but also to the power of his idea that the poor can help themselves out of poverty if given half a chance.

Among the more than 2,000 participants from 100 countries were three presidents and two prime ministers; Queen Sofia of Spain; the President of the World Bank, and the presidents of major regional development banks; the heads of UN agencies; members of parliament; heads of commercial banks and private corporations; heads of major foundations and philanthropists from around the world; representatives of nongovernmental organizations; practitioners — those who implement microcredit programs across the globe; as well as borrowers like Francisca Rojas who have received the benefits of microcredit.

The presence of the world’s movers and shakers, from every part of the political spectrum, appeared to mean more than simply efforts at photo opportunities with the gathered media. US First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, a co-chair of the summit, who, along with the US Secretary of the Treasury, spoke at the conference, said that she and the President, Bill Clinton, first met Mohammed Yunus in 1986, and have been deeply committed to microcredit since then.

Hillary Clinton showed photos of her visits to microcredit programs in Bangladesh, Chile, India, Nicaragua, and the US itself. The First Lady talked about a woman she met in Chile who had received a loan for a new sewing machine. “She said that when she got that new sewing machine she felt like a caged bird set free. And that is a good way to describe how many of the people I have met seem to feel when given the opportunity.”

Mrs. Clinton went on to describe the opportunity presented at this moment in history: “As we move toward this 21st century, we have an opportunity that has seldom come, if ever, in the history of humankind. We have a world that can, with technology, democracy, and free enterprise extend the benefits of prosperity and peace to countless millions whose lives can be lifted up.”

The US Government’s international development agency, USAID, has targeted $120 million in both 1996 and 1997 for microenterprise projects worldwide.

Japan, the largest single provider of international assistance among nations, was represented at the Summit by former Prime Minister Tsutomu Hata and two members of the Japanese parliament. Hata and his colleagues, part of their parliament’s League for Poverty Eradication, expressed their determination to support and “promote grass roots assistance, especially the microcredit movement” in their communications with the Japanese Government, private financial institutions, economic organizations and the public at large. They urged the government to shift $1,000 million of Japan’s $10,000 million annual overseas development budget to grassroots assistance, with $100 million of that devoted to microcredit programs.

Birth of a new movement

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in a statement read by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) administrator Gus Speth, called the summit “a landmark event in our ongoing fight to eradicate poverty.”

“When the poorest, especially women, receive credit, they become economic actors with power, power to improve not only their own lives, but in a widening circle of impact, the lives of their families, their communities, their nations, and the community of nations…. Microfinance, though not a panacea, has proven to be a remarkable instrument to lift the poor out of their plight.

“I therefore fully endorse the goal of this summit to reach 100 million of the world’s poorest households by the year 2005 … In our common struggle, you can count on the UN to be with you throughout this effort.”

UNESCO President Federico Mayor said that we must be bold in our efforts to fight poverty. “We must learn to share,” he said. “We must dare to share.”

John Hatch, founder of FINCA, a nonprofit group that has pioneered microlending in Latin America, said that the summit gave birth to “one of the largest humanitarian endeavors ever attempted by the human family … We have launched a movement too powerful to fail, a movement led not by governments, but by their citizens. Its power is fueled by the most potent energy of all — a mother’s love for her children.”

World Bank President James Wolfensohn said his institution, the largest international lending agency in the world, was an enthusiastic supporter of the summit’s efforts. “We commit ourselves at this summit to be your partner. We will help in whatever way we can. If we don’t get it right, tell us how we can get it right. Let us work together as partners in trying to reach that 100 million goal, and in trying to leave the world a more peaceful and safer place for our children.”

The bottom line

Summit organizers estimate that it will cost $21,600 million in grants, low interest loans and commercial loans over the next nine years to reach the goal of providing microfinancing to 100 million families by the year 2005. Yunus in his remarks reminded the audience that the summit was not a fund-raising event, but there were financial commitments announced. Among them was Microstart, a new pilot program from UNDP, which pledged $40 million to help microenterprise efforts in 25 countries.

Conference participants signed a declaration of support for the summit’s goal, and worked on action plans detailing how each would work individually and institutionally to attain that goal. Most of the institutional action plans are due for completion by 1998. The “boldest and most inspired” of those plans will be published by summit organizers as they are finalized. In 1999, the summit secretariat will produce an evaluation of the progress being made toward achieving the summit’s goal.

The meaning of that goal, as expressed by Makgomo Mangena, a micro-entrepreneur from South Africa, is clear: “As for me,” she said, “I will be happy if my children and I live long. I am determined that each of them will have a better future.”

Recurring questions on Third World development

01-01-2019 by Julian Creme

By now, many of us involved in educating about hunger, poverty and related development issues have discovered there are certain questions that inevitably arise when we discuss these issues with the public. Struggling to respond, however, it has become increasingly clear to me that, while the questions may remain the same, the answers — like development itself — are constantly changing. This is all to the good, I believe, for it bespeaks the kind of openness to new ideas, insights and experience without which we could not solve the massive problems of underdevelopment which imperil our survival as a world community.

So with the caveat that there are a multitude of perspectives on these questions, and, of course, many other important concerns about development I cannot begin to address in a short article, I’d like to frame some responses. My hope is that you will be stimulated to look more deeply into these matters and to wrestle your own way to a more satisfying understanding of this most crucial global issue.

Q. Why can’t people in these Third World countries grow enough food for themselves?

Actually, they used to. Mass hunger on the scale we see today is a relatively new phenomenon. It has arisen from a combination of factors. In many nations, it can be traced directly back to the effects of colonialism, when nations like Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and The Netherlands essentially invaded large parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America so as to meet the needs of their own ideologies, countrymen and trading partners. During their colonization of these regions they imposed drastic changes on the traditional cultures, including the ancient ways of finding and growing food. They converted land that grew a healthy variety of crops for local inhabitants into land that grew a single crop (like sugar cane or tea) for export, not only forcing many farmers out of the business of providing for their own people, but pushing others onto less fertile land. Thus was set in motion a cycle which gradually led to widespread poverty, an increased birthrate, and severe environmental damage.

The powerful industrialized countries have also pushed their own export crops (like wheat) on Third World nations, thus competing with local farmers who cannot afford to produce such massive amounts of food as cheaply as we can with our heavy machinery and chemicals. A majority of developing countries could grow much of what they need, or at least earn the capital to buy it from elsewhere, if the power brokers, both without and within their own nations, weren’t exploiting farmers and other workers for their own ends.

Distorted view

Q: These Third World governments seem so corrupt and violent. What would it matter what we do if they are oppressing their own people?

It’s true that there is corruption and violence in some governments in the Third World. But we have gotten an exaggerated and distorted view of this matter. People from the Third World often comment that we hold them to standards we ourselves cannot meet, and with all our own corruption in the developed world we’re in no position to criticize them. Certainly we have no Idi Amin. But we have had Hitler and other notorious despots. And when you consider that many of the developing countries have had to create governing structures from scratch in 20-40 years, it’s remarkable how quickly they are passing through and going beyond the inevitable problems all nations must endure in learning to govern themselves.

Just think about Africa. After the Second World War, the continent Africa was subdivided into a whole set of new countries. The Western powers did the subdividing, of course, drawing arbitrary national boundaries between ethnic and cultural communities that had for millennia considered themselves one people, and forcing traditional antagonists to become members of new nations to which they had no real allegiance. To make matters worse, whole new systems of government — based not on the historical patterns of governance in these regions, but on the structures imposed by colonial powers — had to be learned and mastered.

Finally, we have to look at the kind of media reporting we are getting. It’s the media, after all, which has provided most of us with whatever impressions we have about the Third World. And these impressions are about as accurate as the ones Soviet citizens get of the United States. Just as their media have (at least before glasnost) often depicted Americans as either evil profiteers or impoverished beggars, so our media have tended to depict people in the Third world as either violent and corrupt, or totally dependent and helpless. The fact is that Third World governments and people come in all varieties and types, and no simple generalizations can be any more true of them than of us.

Q. Why doesn’t the food and aid we send to Third World countries actually get to the people who need help? So much of it seems to be wasted, or siphoned off by those using it for their own ends.

Again, where do these impressions come from? Most people tell me this idea comes from what they’ve seen on television or read in newspapers and magazines. But this is a one-sided picture, a parallel to the tendency — at least in the United States — to see the whole welfare system in terms of the relatively few welfare cheats who misuse it. The question I would ask anyone who is tempted by that kind of one-sided picture is this: why are we so willing to believe that most Third World people — both within our own borders and abroad — cannot, or will not, use resources we have shared with them, intelligently? Why do we focus on, expect, and believe, the worst?

Of course there is some waste and some mismanagement of development assistance: any time you are trying to move a lot of resources through bureaucracies over distances, a certain percentage is misdirected or misused. Development assistance to the Third World is not unique in that respect. But there are special problems in the Third World that compound the usual logistical and institutional challenges. Food may be rotting on docks, for example, not necessarily because of ineptness, but because there may not be trucks to transport it — or roads to transport it on, or because there is no place to store it while it’s waiting to be moved. The recipient countries are simply too poor to afford such an infrastructure.

Some of the distribution problems are as much the fault of the donor governments as the recipients. The United States government, for instance, usually opts to funnel assistance through political channels in the recipient nation, rather than through grassroots groups working directly with the poor. And just as in the developed nations, governmental bureaucracies in the Third World are strongly affected by special interest groups — particularly the wealthy who help politicians maintain their power. As we know all too well from our own experience in the First World, when the wealthy control resources, they do not necessarily trickle down to the poor.

Still, for every such problem there are probably 10 successes most people never hear about. Grassroots groups are making truly astonishing progress, using often minimal help proffered by the wealthy nations to invent new, appropriate technologies, restore their land, educate their children, and improve their agriculture. Thanks to the capacity people have to learn from past mistakes, both ‘donor’ and ‘recipient’ nations have by now come to a fairly sophisticated understanding of what good relief and development activities require, and they are moving to a new stage of collaboration to put these learnings into practice. Anyone willing to believe there must surely be good news about the Third World will find it. Once you start watching you will wonder why you never noticed it before.

Population growth

Q: Isn’t the rate of population growth in the Third World destroying any chance for things to get better there? Can’t anything be done about it?

The growth rate is indeed high in many parts of the Third World, and this is of tremendous concern to their own leaders, as well as to us. There’s an increasing effort within these nations to find ways of decreasing this growth; in some areas it has actually been going down for some time, though it is still high by our standards. I should point out, however, that if the world’s economic resources were distributed more fairly, there would be no trouble feeding this projected population increase. People who have money — no matter how many of them there are — can get food, while the poor — no matter how much food there is — cannot afford it.

Poverty is also strongly associated with the occurrence of large families. Without the capacity to pay for help, families must rely on children to work the land (so that the farmer does not lose it), earn income for the family, and care for ageing parents and relatives. But it is also true that the poor people, like many rich people, often deeply love children, consider it a blessing to have a lot of them, and may consider it a sacrilege to try not to have them.

Specific population control measures must be geared to the cultures and lifestyles of the many diverse peoples who are having large families. But there is good reason to believe that, whatever these measures, family size will decrease spontaneously if three things happen: if the standard of living improves (which means people have more income, children survive infancy, and are not chronically ill); if women have access to educational opportunity, and if they have more say in the decision-making of their society. We now have statistical evidence to demonstrate the linkage between these factors and a decrease in population.

We also have evidence in our personal and national histories: if you are middle-aged now, how many brothers and sisters did your own parents have (compared to the number that you have)? Your grandparents? How many of their siblings died when they were very young? What was the overall standard of living in your nation at that time? How much education did the women in the family have? It’s sometimes a revelation to realize that ours were developing nations, our birth rate too was very high.

Developed countries like ours have small families because we are well-off; developing people within our well-off countries — our own poor — tend to have larger families. It is not the breakthrough in birth control that is responsible for a decline in the birth rate: we ‘discover’ or select birth control methods because our economic and social condition is such that we feel hopeful about our future and the future of our children. If the people of the Third World can look forward to living better lives, the kinds of lives we take for granted now, they will solve their own population problem.

Q: Why don’t we show them better ways of doing things? We’re experts in growing food and using all kinds of technologies. If they’d try some of our techniques they would do much better.

One of the most painful lessons well-meaning donor nations have learned is that you can’t simply transplant technologies and techniques from one culture and environment to another. We tried, but many such efforts failed because local conditions — ecological, social, economic and political — were not right for methodologies developed in very different situations. After all, most of the techniques that enabled our own countries to reach their high standard of living evolved from within. Technologies need to be appropriate to the situation in which they will be used. Otherwise they destroy other vital elements of the society or environment and ultimately self-destruct. Besides, why should Third World people be any more anxious to have outsiders tell them how to solve their problems than we are? We have problems too; to solve them, we may be interested in entertaining suggestions, getting help from people with special knowledge, or adapting others’ ideas to our own use. But it is not a natural function of human nature willingly to surrender our own decision-making and problem-solving capacity to outside experts or authorities. Happily, the Third World is rapidly producing some extraordinary innovations that will not only lead to long-term improvement in their lives but contribute to ours as well. There are new techniques in farming, health care, community development, ecology, scientific research, finance, and many other areas that we are beginning to adapt to our own situations. We can help this dynamic process move even faster by providing capital and resources, responding to requests for help with training and education, and by experimenting collaboratively with our counterparts in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Q: Why aren’t we more actively working toward improving life for the poor? We have them in our rich nations too. Why do we feel so apathetic and uninvolved?

We do indeed have Third World problems here at home, and we’re not doing any better at dealing with them than we are with poverty in the Third World. The real answer, I think, is that while we’d like to see people’s lives improve, we’re not at all eager to make the kinds of structural changes in our institutions and systems this would require. On top of that, we don’t really know what changes will be needed or exactly what these changes might do to our own lives. So we cling to the status quo, to what we do know.

One of the greatest impediments to making these changes is the perception that “they” are having problems that “we” can neither relate to nor do anything about. It’s as though we were members of a modern village looking across a chasm at a primitive people struggling for survival on the other side. We might wish to help, but the gulf — internally and externally — is just too wide.

But suppose we see ourselves as being on the same side of the chasm, members of related clans, aware of an encroaching desert at our backs and looking longingly across the abyss at a beautiful green land of great abundance. Our clans may be different in many ways. But we know that all of us love our children and grieve when they suffer; we all crave the self-respect that comes with doing meaningful work and making a contribution to our community; every one of us is joyful when we marry, when we see our children master a new skill, when we create something lovely, or when we experience the presence of God. We sense our commonality and yet celebrate our uniqueness. We realize we are one even as we are many.

And imagine that some of us have been driven to the edge by the consuming fire of hunger and poverty; others, by the deadly oppression of meaninglessness in a world where there is nothing worth getting and nothing inside to give. But bearing down upon us all are the warning winds of impending disaster, of a confluence of crises: the global environment being stressed to the breaking point, the global economic system which is fracturing and will collapse on rich and poor alike, the global war-machine devouring resources as fast as they are created.

Only if we join together, pooling our human and material resources, each contributing what we can, will we be able to build the bridge that could carry us across to the new world. To do so we must recognize the special strengths each of us brings to the task. We must share and supply those unmet needs that prevent some of us from having the strength to take on the task facing us all. We must be sure we have the kinds of leaders within our individual clans who understand the challenge and are willing and able to tackle it. And we must work together at every level to find methods that work for all — and not just to convey us out of our dilemma and into the abundant future that beckons.

At this moment in the world’s history we are indeed standing on the precipice. But we have yet to recognize we are all on the same side. Of course just saying this is so does not convince anyone. The truth of the matter will only come home to people who learn to identify with others very different from themselves, who are able to discover our shared humanity in the context of our many differences. For if we can make this discovery, we will immediately grasp the need for just and equitable systems that support this global family relationship. And when we begin building these new systems on the bedrock of our love for one another and for the earth that supports us all, the world will work and we will find we’ve made it, over to the other side.