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| Friday, 6 February 2004 |
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The world must set its own agenda and the South find its voice by Jeffrey Sachs By far the hardest challenge facing the world community today is to keep long-term goals in mind in the face of urgent and bitter divisions over Iraq and the war on terrorism. The problems of Aids, poverty and environmental degradation will not wait for a new consensus on Iraq or the Middle East. The Bush administration seems to forget that the war on terrorism is but one of many wars to fight. The horror of September 11, 2001 must never be minimised, but the 3,000 deaths on that day are exceeded every single day in Africa by children dying of malaria, a preventable and treatable disease. And malaria deaths are accomplished by mass deaths from Aids, tuberculosis, under-nutrition and other preventable or treatable killers. Why, then, is the US spending less than $ 100m to fight malaria each year, while spending 1,000 times that, about $100 bn a year, on the war on terrorism, with its fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq? The central problem is global leadership. Though the US accounts for less than 5 per cent of the world's population, and terrorism represents a comparably small part of the world's burgeoning problems, the rest of the world has let the US set the agenda. The US has defined the global agenda for the past two years as the war on terrorism, while allowing all other global problems to fester. The Bush administration obsessively sees every problem through the lens of terror and accordingly considers itself excused from the struggle against poverty, environmental degradation and disease. The irony is that without solutions to these problems, terrorism is bound to worsen, no matter how many soldiers are thrown at it. Indeed, the military approach may provide no solution whatsoever. The world community does not have to let the US set the agenda. Indeed, it has already identified its priorities in a series of important decisions in recent years... ...These priorities have been pushed aside by the US preoccupation with terrorism. It is crucial that they be put once again at the centre of the global agenda - just where the world's leaders put them in the first place. Unlike the war in Iraq and its troubled aftermath, the Millennium Development Goals, the Doha Declaration, the Monterrey Consensus and the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation were subscribed to by all the member governments of the United Nations of the World Trade Organisation in the case of Doha. Re-establishing an appropriate global agenda will require much greater leadership outside the US government. Most importantly, the developing world, representing four-fifths of humanity, needs to find its voice... (Courtesy: South Letter) |
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