By Joseph Klein
Monday, april 24, 2006
Jeffrey Sachs–the director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and Special advisor to Secretary General Kofi annan — has been dubbed "the most important economist in the world" by The New York Times Magazine and "the world's best-known economist" by Time Magazine. With all of the hype of a superstar Hollywood production that has attracted activist celebrities like U2 singer Bono and actresses angelina Jolie and Sharon Stone, Sachs has been selling since early last year perhaps the largest global wealth redistribution program ever conceived to finance what are known as the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. His Millennium Development Project Report, entitled "Investing in Development –a Practical Plan to achieve the Millennium Development Goals", called for hundreds of billions of dollars of development aid to be transferred from the world's most developed countries to the undeveloped countries of the world, with the lofty goal of ending poverty, disease, environmental degradation, malnutrition and illiteracy in one fell swoop. It is in the same league as a Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood extravaganza, except for the fact that DeMille knew how to make successful movies while Sachs' program is an expensive failure.
Sachs wants american taxpayers to pay exponentially more than they now do to single-handedly lift the world's poor out of their "poverty trap" - even where the trap is set by their own corrupt, oppressive governments. His plan would compel each developed country to contribute a fixed 0.7 percent of its GNP (Gross National Product, a measure of a nation's total wealth) towards global funding of the Millennium Development Goals. Looking to 2015, the year when the Millennium Development Goals are supposedly to be achieved, the United States alone would be required to pay nearly $140 billion a year for development assistance under the ‘.7% solution.' america's portion can be financed through a rollback in tax cuts, including a five percent income tax surcharge on incomes above $200,000, Sachs tells us. On top of this, Sachs has called for raising even more money for the UN's programs through global taxes.
Sachs argues- incorrectly - that the United States specifically ‘committed' to this level of contribution when it signed the 800-page agenda 21 at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 that included one paragraph on the 0.7 percent target. He claims that this target was reaffirmed at a summit meeting held in Monterrey, Mexico ten years later. aside from the fact that these were entirely non-binding general expressions of good intentions with no time frame attached, the US went on the record at both conferences to distance itself from any pledge to that effect. Maurice Strong, the organizer of the 1992 Rio summit and an eyewitness to what actually happened, conceded that there was no binding commitment. Nor did the United Sates agree to a binding commitment at the Monterrey, Mexico summit meeting. alan Larson, U.S. Under Secretary for Economic, Business and agricultural affairs, said just before the 2002 Monterrey conference: "First of all I would like to point out that the U.S. has never been a party to the 0.7-percent agreement target." at the fall 2005 Millennium+5 World Summit in New York, the administration made it very clear that it would not agree to commit to artificial numerical aid quotas. Indeed, the only specific undertaking by the United States was to increase its development aid to 0.15 percent by 2006. The Bush administration in fact reached that target in 2003– three years ahead of schedule!
Sachs is not very discriminating when it comes to deciding who should get our hard-earned money. He is a moral relativist, who recently criticized the decision of the U.S. and European Union to cut off financial aid to the "new Hamas-led government in Palestine", despite its refusal to renounce its goal of destroying Israel and its embrace of terrorism. While admitting that "Hamas's doctrines are indeed unacceptable for long-term peace", he still said that the "newly elected Palestinian government should be treated, at least initially, with legitimacy". ("Development aid for Development's Sake", Project Syndicate, March 2006) (www.projectsyndicate.org/commentary/sachs108)
If Sachs is to be believed, african countries are not really all that corrupt as compared to other parts of the world — ignoring the fact that corruption alone has already cost africa nearly $150 billion dollars a year, according to the african Union. In his book, The End of Poverty, he declared that "the charge of authoritarian rule as a basic obstacle to good governance in africa is passé." Tell that to the impoverished subjects living in Nigeria, the Congo Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Sudan and Chad, whose corrupt governments have not used the revenue coming in from their countries' oil resources to provide the poor with all of the assistance that they need. Or tell that to the Ethiopian peasants, where the corrupt government owns all land and provides long-term leases to the peasants rather than giving them formal title to their own land so that they can start to build their own wealth.
Sachs' answer is that the aid he envisions would be used to pay directly for items like fertilizer, seed, mosquito bed nets, effective anti-malarials, antiretrovirals against aIDS, health clinics, teachers etc. He says not to worry about the political conditions in the recipient countries. "But we've got 10 million children dying because they are too poor to stay alive and not because of the corruption of their leaders," Sachs declared.
He even opposed sanctions against perhaps the worst of africa's corrupt dictators, Zimbabwe's strongman Robert Mugabe. (Global Poverty: a Conversation with Jeffrey Sachs, Council on Foreign Relations, Washington, D.C., March 14, 2006) (www.cfr.org/publication/10161/global_poverty.html)
Sachs fails to see that good governance is a necessary pre-condition to success in lifting the poor out of their poverty trap. Sachs overlooks the tribal, racial, religious and ethnic divisions that have spawned killing fields in africa. Real progress in meeting the basic needs of the peoples of these lands cannot and will not happen until the slaughter stops. Even beyond the direct casualties of war, such violence destroys the social networks necessary to feed, clothe, shelter and provide health care –right down to the family unit itself. What good are hospitals if staffs and patients are forced to flee while vital hospital supplies are looted? What good is mosquito netting if the homes utilizing it are burned down? What good are more schools and trained teachers if the children, their parents and teachers are raped or slaughtered?
Finally, Sachs has unleashed a volley of verbal attacks on the United States for being the "developed world's stingiest donor." He has said that the United States is guilty of "grossly irresponsible neglect of the world's poor." He has pooh-poohed the significance of private giving, claiming that it is only a pittance and that only official government foreign development aid matters. However, a new study entitled the "Index of Global Philanthropy" issued on april 19, 2006 at the United Nations by the U.S.-based non-profit policy research group, the Hudson Institute, shows the utter fallacy of Sachs' dogmatic focus on government-imposed solutions. The study cited extensive empirical data showing little correlation between government foreign aid and economic growth or poverty reduction in the recipient countries. "Massive foreign aid transfers through governments are prone to top-down, one-size-fits-all approaches," the authors of the study concluded. "Even the most well-meaning and well-planned government aid project runs up against the usual barriers in developing countries." Moreover, the study is a complete rebuttal to Sachs' criticism of american contributions to alleviating the plight of the world's most vulnerable peoples. according to the Hudson Institute's report, total non-governmental aid climbed to at least $71.2 billion in 2004 — more than triple the amount of U.S. official overseas development assistance. The study took into account international private giving by U.S. foundations, corporations, academic institutions, faith based and other voluntary organizations and individual remittances of earnings going back to immigrants' home countries. Remittances in particular go directly to the families and communities where they are needed to help pay for food, medicine and shelter, bypassing altogether official governmental channels. (gpr.hudson.org/files/publications/GlobalPhilanthropy.pdf)
Professor Sachs is cut out of the same mold as Maurice Strong, who has been a highly influential presence at the United Nations for years until his recent alleged entanglement in the oil-for-food scandal. Both men are arrogant enough to believe that they have the true path to solving the world's problems and are using the United Nations as their vehicle. In Sachs' case, his Hollywood-style production is a dud that deserves the same fate as Hollywood star-cum-activist Sharon Stone's Basic Instinct 2.
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