By Cosimo Storniolo | Posted: Friday, July 6, 2007 12:00 am
More than 1 billion people - a sixth of the world's population - live on less than $1 per day. This doesn't mean what a U.S. dollar can buy in another country, but rather the equivalent of what it can buy here. This has been defined as extreme poverty. Another 2 billion people live on less than $2 per day. Remember how our governor recently took the food stamp challenge of $3 per day? That was just for food.
Global poverty is the moral issue of our time. Economist Jeffrey Sachs says in his book "The End of Poverty" that "ours is the first generation in the history of the world with the ability to eradicate extreme poverty. We have the means, the resources and the know-how. All we lack is the will."
The mantra that increasing trade and global economic growth will solve the issues of global poverty has not proven true over the last 25 years; the economic gap between the top and bottom 3 billion people continues to widen, according to journalist Paul Hawken. "The industrial capitalist systems … priorities do not encompass either justice or the environment."
The Millennium Development Goals, a publication from the United Nations, give us a tangible framework to address global poverty issues. In September 2000, at the U.N. Millennium Summit, world leaders from every country agreed on a vision of the future, "a world with less poverty, hunger and disease, greater survival prospects for mothers and their infants, better educated children, equal opportunities for women, and a healthier environment; a world in which developed and developing countries work in partnership for the betterment of all."
The result was a plan outlining eight millennium development goals; eight time-bound and measurable objectives. The target date is 2015. They can be found at www.un.org/millenniumgoals.
The goals are lofty; the challenge daunting. How do we get there? Who leads the way? How do we engage wealthy nations and convince them that these goals are achievable; in their best security and economic interests and most - importantly - a moral imperative?
That is our challenge as citizens and as a nation. We need to adopt a world view and shed our insular self-interest attitudes. We need to see how our choices as a nation - government spending, military policy, oil consumption, environmental policy, trade policy - affect every other nation. We need to see how our individual choices - our votes, where we shop, our energy consumption - affect individuals in distant lands. We need to be true world citizens and world leaders.
The world's nations also agreed to donate yearly 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product in efforts to eradicate extreme poverty. While the United States is one of the largest donors in absolute dollars (based on our wealth and population), our percentage falls far short of this goal and the efforts of most other developed nations.
The Millennium Goals give us a forum to understand and judge a whole variety of other pressing moral issues of our time - fair trade, global environmental issues, immigration policy, debt relief, child trafficking, fair labor practices.
I would also refer you to the ONE organization at www.one.org, which is the United States' equivalent of other nation's End Poverty organizations. They are now sponsoring a www.onevote08.org effort to put extreme poverty and global disease concerns on the agenda for the 2008 elections.
Our minister often quoted Henri Frederic Amiel: "Life is short, and we have not too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel the way with us. Oh, be swift to love. Make haste to be kind." Let us look back - as a nation and as individuals - and proudly say that we answered the call to our era's greatest challenge.
Cosimo Storniolo of Corvallis is a physician of internal medicine.