More than 20,000 people died yesterday, mostly in Africa and South Asia, from avoidable extreme poverty. Their deaths are everyone’s responsibility.
Jeffrey Sachs has a critical and ambitious project: to end global poverty by 2025. His new book, high highly visible efforts to promote its ideas, and his highly visible friends like U2’s Bono are not only a wake-up call for those ignoring the problems of global poverty and its eradication, but also a shot in the arm for those working for its eradication over the past several decades.
The cause of eliminating poverty needs as many allies as it can get. Sachs’ contributions, more on the side of awareness raising and mobilization, are very important. They include relating successful examples of poverty alleviation, demonstrating that aid can be and is effective; and dispelling common development myths. He is also very good at clearly stating the challenge and its important, its solvability, how little it would cost the developed countries to deal with and how remarkably we would benefit.
Sachs has been around and dealt with some of the most intractable economic development problems from Malawi to Moscow. The descriptions of his discussions and negotiations with presidents and peasants are among the most gripping pages in this new book. He knows firsthand what he is talking about.
The first chapters explore poverty, prosperity and Sachs’ “clinical economics” approach. For a few chapters, Sachs’ then relates his personal experience and knowledge of countries such as Poland, Russia, China, and India. IN the final chapters, he lays out how to solve poverty and why.
One of the persistent doubts about development aid is concern over an exit strategy, the belief that aid is a bottomless pit and developing countries will need aid for decades to come. Sachs clearly demonstrates that the general public can address some of these problems not only in the short run, but permanently. The eradication of smallpox is a clear example of permanently solving a major problem through mobilization, commitment and use of resources.
There is an oft used phrase in development that says “give a person a fish and they eat for one day; teach them to fish and they eat every day,” implying that the latter is better. But many of the solutions that Sachs proposes seem to be of the “give a person a fish” variety rather than the “teaching” variety. In the chapter with on-the-ground solutions for ending poverty, Sachs comes up with the “big five” for a village in Kenya. These include: agricultural inputs, investments in basic health (one of his favorite examples is of supplying anti-malaria bednets as a way to address the devastating consequences of malaria); investments in education, power, transport and communication services; and safe drinking water and sanitation.
All of these things are goo to do, but all of them also seem to be “giving people fish instead of teaching them how to fish” or perhaps more importantly working on differential access and control over fishing grounds. Sachs seems to focus more on the short-term impact rather than long-term systems and processes. It is sometimes hard to see how “big five” lead to fundamental changes in the socio-economic systems over the long term.
Many of the countries that Sachs describes have had subsidized fertilizers in the past and yet they have never moved onto a sustainable growth path. Most o these systems have collapsed under their own weight. Investments in land steward-ship and improved productivity are constrained not only by a lack of inputs, lack of human capital and lack of markets, but also by a lack of tenure security. The rental car never gets washed (at least by the renters!) and farmers do not invest in the crucial soil and water conservation or the management measures that must accompany inputs. People do not invest if they are not sure they can control the means of production for a significant period of time.
Sachs says that the “big five” are not welfare handouts but investments in sustained economic growth. It does appear that one-time interventions, such as those suggested by Sachs, if done over several years, can permanently bump people above the threshold of a poverty trap and put them on a growth path, especially if these bump ups are asset-based.
The relationships between poverty, growth and inequality need to be explored, especially the growing asset inequality which drives poverty across the globe and robs growth of its potential. More must be done to directly address the power issues: inequality, asymmetrical/segmented markets, adverse incorporation, lack of access to decision-making for property rights and secure tenure, among other. In the asset-based approaches to poverty, the control of assets and capital by local people is key to their long-term growth.
No one can accuse Sachs of thinking small, and no one can accuse him of doing less than first-rate service in his attempts to end poverty. He shows how easily it can be done if there is commitment to it, and that poverty eradication is possible, but it needs a concerted effort to release the agency of the poor and increase their voice and choice.
