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Other Transcripts From This Panel of Task Force Leaders: Jeffrey Sachs: Poverty Reduction: Transcript Pedro Sanchez: Eradicating Hunger: Transcript Yee-Cheong Lee: Technology: Transcript Audience Q & A: Transcript

Millennium Development Goals Panel Discussion:
Eliminating Poverty

Welcome by Lisa Anderson: Transcript

Welcome. I'm delighted to be able to welcome you here and to be hosting this afternoon, because I think it's a very important function for all of us. This represents a feature of a collaboration between Columbia University and the United Nations, which really reflects much of the spirit of the University.

In some respects the School of International and Public Affairs and the United Nations were born at the same time, and from the same impulses—to improve the world. I'm delighted that that original impulse continues to be reflected in the way that Columbia has interacted with the United Nations over the last fifty-odd years. This is the twenty-first century expression of that kind of support.

Today is a small taste, but I hope it will be instructive. As Jeff told you, we'll be spending an hour on each of our foci. Three panelists will talk to you for about eight minutes, almost exactly eight minutes, I'll guarantee it, and there will be half an hour to present comments and questions. This is an important function in providing you with a sense of what's going on here at the University and in our collaborations with the United Nations.

These goals are extremely ambitious. It is going to be very hard to realize them, but they are very, very important. In order to ensure that we all put forth our best efforts, you should be as critical and pointed in your comments, your questions, your queries, as you can possibly be, because it's only in that kind of debate that we will hone the best sorts of analytical perspectives and research agendas.

With that note, let me invite up the first panelists to join me here. We will be discussing the projects involving the elimination of poverty, and that includes the task forces coordinator for poverty and economic development, Professor Sachs himself. Jeff, do you want to join us? The task-force coordinator Geeta Rao Gupta, who works on primary education and gender equality, and task-force coordinator Yee-Cheong Lee, who works on science, technology and innovation. Their identifying characteristics are in your program. I think, if I can get them up here, that we'll have them go in the order in which they are listed on the program.

There are a half a dozen people on these panels that have to catch airplanes, so we're moving the program around a little bit. Pedro Sanchez, who is the task-force coordinator on hunger, will speak instantly. Do you want to sit here, or do you want to use the podium? This panel's already out of control.

Jeffrey Sachs: Like the world. Oh, long time no see.

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Task Force Coordinator Jeffrey Sachs, Director, The Earth Institute Jeffrey Sachs: Poverty Reduction: Transcript

Let me try to set the stage a little bit on the goals and on the goal of poverty alleviation or poverty reduction. There are eight goals, and the first goal has two very important parts. One is the reduction of what's called income poverty, and the second is the reduction of hunger.

We actually don't know exactly how to measure either of those, as one can imagine, and that is a pervasive technical issue throughout this whole agenda. What we're trying to do here, after all, is have a goal-driven international process. That's hard enough, because we barely have an international process on anything, but having one that's specific and quantified and goal-driven is tricky, so it's worth spending a moment for each of these goals on what they actually say.

The goal on income poverty says that the proportion of the population that is under the absolute poverty line, which is taken to be $1 per day per person. That's the approximation that's used, but it is not a normal $1 a day per person. It is a statistically adjusted $1 a day per person, what's called a purchasing-power-parity dollar. The proportion of the population under that income poverty line should fall by half, comparing a baseline of 1990 and the target date of 2015. This is sometimes called the head-count poverty ratio, so maybe 36 percent of a poor country's population falls under that $1 a day limit, and the target would be that it should be under 18 percent of that country's population by the year 2015.

These goals were adopted as part of an overall Millennium Declaration, then excerpted into these eight Millennium Goals, and with those goals came the numerical explanation of them.

The second part of goal one is what Pedro Sanchez will talk about, which is the goal of reducing hunger. It has the same structure. The share of the population that is hungry should fall by half, comparing 1990 with the year 2015. For both of these goals you can see there are big problems of measurement and even conception; what exactly does it mean to be hungry? You know it, but how do you measure it? There are very big problems with getting those measurements, and for income a lot of very poor people don't earn income on the market, they earn income by being engaged in subsistence farming, farming for their own food intake. There are big measurement problems with how one wants to implement this.

What we know, surely, no matter what the measures are, is that we're talking in these particular goals, and for most of the goals, perhaps between a sixth and a third of the world's population are critically affected by being below the relevant thresholds. Of course, it depends on the goals; in some ways we're subject to the environmental sustainability limit.

The number of people that are below the absolutely poverty line right now is somewhere around a billion of the world's six billion people. The number of people estimated to be in chronic hunger is somewhere around a billion people. It's not absolutely the same group, of course, but it's with a very big overlap.

As you talk about some of the other goals—the people with lack of access to clean water, or to sanitation—those numbers can rise, in some cases to two billion people without adequate sanitation, for example.

We're not talking about most of the world, we're not even talking about most of the developing countries. I think this is important to note. The world has six billion people; the so-called high income or rich world has about one billion in it, in the United States, Europe, Japan, and a few other countries. The so-called developing world has, therefore, five billion people, of whom around one billion are in absolutely extreme poverty—so extreme that life expectancy is fifty years or less, compared to nearly eighty years in the rich countries. The least developed countries is an even more exclusive club of desperate people, forty-nine countries designated by the UN system, as being basically in the worst shape of all.

That is, I think, about 450 million people, and I will check before the end of our session. The life expectancy for the least developed is around fifty years and falling sharply in many countries right now.

When we debate globalization, as we do all the time, and when we focus on the Millennium Development Goals as we do today—and I hope we do all the time in the future, because we're going to need to do that if we're going to have a chance of actually achieving something, much less the goals themselves—we should keep in mind that for a lot of the developing world there's actually been some reasonable progress. For some of the developing world, for two or three billion of the five billion people, there's actually been quite substantial progress. Both India and China, still with hundreds of millions of very poor people, have achieved a lot of economic progress in the 1990s, while leaving many behind. But there are at least a billion, and, I'd say depending on the goal, between one and two billion people that are being left disastrously behind in these objectives, where the progress not only is not fast enough but often is no progress at all.

One of our key tasks in the task force that I cochair is to try to understand where are the places of highest priority in the world, the ones where, on the current trajectory, we're just not going to make it. What you find is very, very important. You find, of course, this mixture of progress and regress, you find no simple story. Globalization's not a disaster for developing countries, nor is it a panacea. But you do find some important geographical correlates, most importantly of course in sub-Saharan Africa, a region in the world that is way off track—systematically, in nearly every goal—to achieving the progress that is envisioned.

Another region that's similar to that—not quite as desperate but pretty desperate—is Central Asia, Afghanistan, and the so-called "stans" of the former Soviet Union: Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kirghistan. If you have oil under the ground and you actually see any of it, that'll help some of those countries, but in general they're in pretty bad shape.

Then there are other parts of the developing world—some in Southeast and East Asia, some in Latin America, both Central American and the Andean region—where many, many countries are off track on one or more of the goals, but usually not as pervasively as sub-Saharan Africa.

If we have one overwhelming development challenge and disaster in the world, it is sub-Saharan Africa right now. This is a continent with almost no good news in terms of economic progress and public health in the last two decades, where economic decline has been pervasive, perhaps half the countries showing absolute declines of living standards from the very bottom, and where the AIDS pandemic and the resurgence of malaria, tuberculosis, and other similar infectious disease endemics and pandemics and epidemics are plaguing the population.

So very briefly, what do we learn when we look at those priority areas? We learn that meeting these development goals is actually a mix of probably three core factors, and this is the thought that I want to stop with here.

One is that where you are in the world counts a lot for what your prospects are, for you and your children to stay alive and to get an education and to have water and sanitation. Countries that are in the malarious regions, as most of Africa is; countries where the populations are living far from seaports and trade, as most of the African populations are; countries ravaged by disease, by poverty that's so extreme, by soil nutrient depletion that Pedro Sanchez will talk about in a moment, have arrived for many, many complicated reasons in a kind of trap of poverty, where they're too poor on their own to get out of this crisis. So one aspect of this is the geography. Living in the Andes at 12,000 feet, or in the middle of a malarious belt, or on a one-hectare inland homestead trying to produce maize and to stay alive on depleted soils—it's not going to be solved on its own.

Second point: to get out of this clearly requires commitments from governments, those governments themselves. Bad governance is a guarantee of no way out of the trap. Until Mr. Mugabe leaves Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe will never get out of this trap right now. We have to name names, because the situation is disastrous and people are suffering from terrible governance.

There's a corollary of the first and the second, and that is my third and final point. When you are in a poverty trap, what it means is that even if you do everything possible within your limited means, you're not going to make it on your own. What we find in our work is that if countries are below an absolute minimum threshold, they don't have roads, they're living in the interior of continents, they're battling with malaria and AIDS, education levels are tragically low, infrastructure barely exists, power or electricity is not available, water and sanitation are not available. The idea that all you have to do is send over an IMF mission and tell them to tighten their belts and the world's economy will lift them up is like a cruel death sentence. A trap is a trap, and hundreds of millions of people are trapped in poverty.

When the good governance allows the possibility of progress, then comes the need for the third element, and that is true help from the rich countries to address the concrete and specific problems—to pave some roads, to help make a port work, to help give some modern power system or electricity so that the rest of the forests aren't cut down for firewood and destroyed, to help bring in fertilizers or other methods for soil nutrient fortification, to help address the disease pandemics, which are destroying the populations and leaving millions of orphans. Our philosophy in this is yes, good governance is a necessary but far from sufficient condition for the desperate places in the world. For them we have to help lift them out of the poverty trap. After that they can grow and achieve the same kind of economic progress that many other countries do in the developing world, because globalization is not a barrier to progress. What is a barrier is when you can't even get the first foot on the ladder because you're so sick, so diseased, the ladder's too high, there's no road to reach the ladder. That's what we have to do. We have to do it scientifically and seriously, and be ready to do it with our financial assistance as well.

If one thing good came out of the Iraqi war—and we'll have to wait and see on many fronts—one good thing that came out of it was to find out, "eighty billion dollars in six months, no problem." That's good, I like that benchmark. All of a sudden we have confirmed from the treasury secretary, the administration, American conservatives, and others, "eighty billion in six months, no sweat." The fact of the matter is the United States and other rich countries have the means to provide the help to save lives and to lift these countries out of the poverty trap, and that's why within these twelve years we can actually achieve the goal of halving or better absolute poverty and giving these countries the foothold to get started in what they have not had, and that is self-sustained economic development. Thanks.

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Task Force Coordinator Pedro Sanchez, Director, Tropical Agriculture, The Earth Institute: Eradicating Hunger: Transcript

Lisa Anderson: For those of you who just came in, we've reconfigured the order in which people are going to be speaking. We're now going to be hearing from Pedro Sanchez. As he comes up to the podium, I'd like to just let you know that while Jeff Sachs was talking about an hour and a half ago, he said that the life expectancy in Malawi is 42 years, and I was sitting next to the Ambassador to the United Nations from Malawi, he tells us it's actually 36.

Jeffrey Sachs: Thirty-nine, I think—between 36 and 39.

Pedro Sanchez: Thank you very much, Lisa. Every five minutes, just to give you another grim statistic—no every minute, I'm sorry—every minute, five children die of malnutrition-related causes, every minute. So by the time we're through with this, my five minutes, there will be 25 children less in the developing world dying out of malnutrition-related causes.

I think Jeff has said enough about the moral and ethical imperative, and the fact that we do have the resources—we as a world—to turn it around. There's not much question about it.

In the case of the hungry people, there are about 800 million people around the world who do not know where their next meal is coming from. Those are largely located in two main areas. The largest chunk is in South Asia, in India, a country that has produced an enormous pile of food, that is exporting food to a certain extent, and still has 200 million or so people going hungry every night out of a population of one billion.

The other large chunk is in sub-Saharan Africa; numbers are slightly smaller, but on the order of 200 million people out of 600 million who do not know where their next meal is coming from. There are similar areas in the rest of Asia, Latin America, and other parts of the world, but much, much less.

What are these 800 million people doing? We have found out in our task force, very preliminary findings, that half of them are on small-holder farms throughout the developing world, too small to make it into a business. For example, in Africa one farm has an average of eight people in their household—one household has eight people or so. That's about half of the 800 million.

Another 22 percent of the 800 million are the landless rural poor people, largely in places like India, people who don't have access to land who sell their labor. Twenty percent are urban poor, and 8 percent are poor who depend of forests and fisheries, natural resource dependent people poor.

Of all these 800 million people, 92 percent are not in emergency situations. What you see on TV of the starving children, usually because of wars or natural disaster, is just 8 percent of the picture. Ninety-two percent suffer the chronic hunger; they don't die of starvation, they eat very little and especially the children are stunted and have very little potential.

Our task force is composed of about 25 people from academia, from policy, from nongovernmental organizations, from the private sector, from African governments, and from UN agencies. I have one colleague here of the task force present, Dr. Peter Matland, from the Rockefeller Foundation. Peter, especially since I'll have to leave soon, I'll like you to pinch hit for me if necessary.

This year we're concentrated on sub-Saharan Africa; we'll tackle the issue of the Indian type of poverty next year. One of the reasons why we're doing that is while we were beginning to develop our studies and get in the science behind it and analytically strong cases, the Secretary-General Kofi Annan called Jeff Sachs about two months ago and says, "Hey, Jeff, I want you to tell me how to get a new green revolution in Africa." His words, not ours. That changed the whole picture, and the task force is concentrating now on sub-Saharan Africa, and we have the elements of what I would like to call a doubly green revolution in the sense of being green in terms of green growing crops, and being green in terms of being environmental friendly and actually helping safeguard some of the biodiversity, carbon and other environmental services that are critical.

During the old green revolution of the 1960s and 1970, when I was a graduate student at the International Rice Research Institute and all these things were happening, we had no clue about environmental issues, we wanted to increase the pile of food, and by God, we did it. It was one of the most remarkable—and I played a very minor role, needless to say, on this one—but it was one of the most remarkable achievements of humankind in the last part of the last century.

Hunger went from 33 percent of a developing country to 18 percent. Poverty was cut by half, this absolute poverty was cut by half during those years. The real price of the basic food crops, maize, wheat, rice, the real price was decreased by 76 percent during this period. It's a remarkable achievement, it's one of the remarkable achievements of humankind.

But this green revolution largely bypassed Africa, and now we've analyzed and found two reasons, one a policy one and one a biophysical one, why this has happened.

The policy one is that the classic economic concept that agriculture is the engine of growth, and as you're developing you must give priority to the rural sector and agriculture, has been ignored and put aside for the last twenty years by the governments themselves and by the donor agencies. Agriculture lending in the World Bank now is less than 2 percent of its portfolio.

There are a lot of needs in the urban areas, there are a lot of needs in other things, but we just didn't understand the history, our history, everyone's history, this country, any other country, that you started with agriculture. One is a big policy failure.

The other one, which is a consequence of the big policy failure, is a big biophysical problem. In the green revolution, which was extremely successful in Latin America, in Asia, and the Middle East, the real limiting factor was the need for new high-yielding varieties of the key crops. Those high-yielding varieties did it, and they have increased yields by anywhere from 60 to 80 percent in Africa, Asia and Latin America, but only 28 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, even though the rates of adoptions are just about the same, about 80 percent everywhere.

Why? Something's missing. In Africa it took me a while to come out of the closet and say this, after doing the ten years I lived in Kenya, in Africa there is a depletion of soil fertility. Just a simple fact that too many nutrients have been taken out of the fields are not returned back. Normally this problem is handled everywhere with fertilizers, but fertilizers cost anywhere from two to six times as much in Africa as in the farm gate as in Latin America, Asia, Europe, North America. So they couldn't do that.

So we have a biophysical reason. Out of that the hunger task force right now is saying let's focus, and we charge the Jeff Sachs task force on poverty to focus on the big issue of restoring high priority to agriculture. And that means infrastructure, that means markets, that means better communications, education, better research and extension services, lowering the barriers for trade, and all that. So we're saying this is essential, go there.

What we're saying also is there are three key entry points. Entry points are not going to solve the problem, but of three entry points, that if they're done simultaneously and if they're done at the community scale, they could really break the vicious cycle and start turning things around.

Those entry points are based on knowledge, and they're proven. One is school lunch for elementary school kids with foods that are locally produced. This is major, and you are putting good nutrition so children can learn. It's very hard to learn when you're hungry. This will attract more kids, 40 percent of the elementary school kids in Africa do not go to school. Most of those are girls. It will attract them and give them a chance of an education. This has tremendous repercussions in terms of maternal health and so on afterwards. And it would also serve as a magnet for other things, such as health interventions and so on.

The last two are making markets work, and the last one drastically increase agricultural productivity by replenishing soil fertilities. We know how to do it, even without fertilizers. We want to use fertilizers but we can fix nitrogen from the air with leguminous trees and put along with higher quality seed and seed-supply systems and small-scale water management. This is where we are, and I'd like to stop here, Lisa. Thanks.

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Task Force Coordinator Yee Cheong Lee, President-elect, World Federation of Engineering Organizations (WFEO) : Technology: Transcript

Lisa Anderson: Thank you very much. We're very grateful for your willingness to stay with us for a little while. Our last panelist for this session is task force coordinator of science and technology and innovation Yee-Cheong Lee.

Yee-Cheong Lee: Good afternoon. I think that I don't have to say it very much that science, technology has made life very much more enjoyable than before, although the benefits are not evenly shared. I left home in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday at 9 P.M. —that means Sunday morning 9 P.M. your time—and I got here at noon yesterday. I went to the UN to register for the eleventh session meeting of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development that is going on, then went to the Met[ropolitan Opera] and enjoyed six hours of the Master Singers of Nuremberg, because Wagner is my favorite composer, and James Levine, my favorite conductor, and James Morris, my favorite Wagnerian singer. Of course, the opera was about one of the illustrious ancestors of Jeff Sachs, Hun Sachs. So then this morning I got up and then thought about what I'm going to say this afternoon. In the meantime I enjoyed a sumptuous lunch at the hospitality of the Earth Institute, and now I'm singing for that lunch.

So that is science and technology for you. But more seriously on poverty eradication, poverty under the Millennium Project, our task force actually is constituted to address the target 18 of goal number eight. Goal number eight is about building global partnership, and the target 18 is about in collaboration or cooperation with the private sector to make use of the benefits of emerging technology, like information and communication technology, biotechnology, etc., to address the MDGs. My task force actually is very practical, because we tend to want for the least developing country to concentrate on the technology end rather than the scientific end, because the time, as Jeff has said, is only 12 years away from the target, the time frame of 2015.

Actually there is plenty of technology to address every MDG. We tend to want to concentrate on the technological end, and what do we do for the least developing country? I think first we have to have the rudiments of physical infrastructure—the roads, the schools, the hospitals, the other transportation system that bring goods to market, that stimulate the industry. The other part is a basic technology for the services, and also to maintain and operate the agriculture and natural resource industry, which are basically the industries of the developing countries' economy.

To do that I don't think it needs very much science and technology. The technology is there, but the commitment and the will to do that is still lacking. Jeff had talked about funding from the developed country. I think the view from the developing country is also very lacking, because we tend to look to the developed world for a successful model. Scientists and engineers in our country, they all look at the high end, projects must be big. When you talk about sciences, about research, frontier research, about postgraduate degrees and all this, what do you do when you invest in those projects?

First thing, you actually widen the income gap. The second thing is that the graduates who can not find any employment at home constitute to the brain drain to the developed countries. The developing country has contributed very scarce resources, to train for the developed world, which is quite an irony for me.

Our task force would like to concentrate on the technology, the basic foundation of economic development. What do we do? What we need is to have a good science and technology advice system for government in the developing world, like a science-advice office backed up by the academies of science and academy of engineering that mobilize the nation's science and technology base to help in this effort to build infrastructure, basic infrastructure, to try to encourage the growth of small and medium enterprises, which are more widespread and which are more rural based. That is where the employment opportunity and the graduate uplift of economic activity is going to happen.

To me personally, I am worried about the employment problem, especially for the young, because I think there's nothing more dangerous in the world than educated young people who are frustrated because they are not able to find employment. So in the application of technology to the developing world, we have to be very conscious that we must have the technology not necessarily the [inaudible] and the most up-to-date, but actually technology that will also provide employment for the young.

So I would like to also end here by playing to the gallery, because I see a lot of young people here. There are a lot of young people in age, and I think the rest are young at heart, so I'm addressing it to the young people, to all of you, that I think the Millennium Project, the Millennium Development Goal, is not for the likes of me, it's for the likes of you. The world is your world, so you have to be committed and be part of the Millennium Project to help us to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

One of the best ways, I think, is for you to go out to the developing countries, to spend some months, a year, to work in the rural areas in whatever way, just to open your mind to what is the developing world. All the figures about millions dying, billions without work do not mean a thing to you unless you go there for however short a time. After you come back to the good old USA, maybe you can become part of the [inaudible] to get your government to commit more resources to the developing world. Thank you very much.

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Questions and Answers: Transcript

Lisa Anderson: Thank you. On that note, I invite you to take up your responsibility and to pose your questions or comments. We're going to have about ten or fifteen minutes for your observations for these panelists before we move on to the next panel. There are microphones in the aisles, and I commend those of you who want to pose any questions or make any remarks. The floor is open. Why don't you come up to the mike?

Woman: I assume all of you are optimists, right? We keep hearing these goals are attainable, we know what we want to do, we have a roadmap. It's not really a question of money. It was the same thing in my experience with climate change policy. Eighty billion was too much then, and now it's no problem. You kept repeating, all three of you, it's a question of political will on the side of the developing countries as well as on the side of the industrialized countries, particularly the biggest, richest country on the planet. What's your take on how optimistic or how realistic it is to be this optimistic?

Jeffrey Sachs: I think the general philosophy is not to predict but to act. So we have to shape—we are a big part of the political will, and we have to therefore make this happen. Very odd thing's happening today, for example. President Bush is campaigning vis-á-vis his Congress and the right-wing conservative constituency, which is at the core of his party right now, in favor of his AIDS program and against the opposition of the religious right. How bizarre is this, and how terrific? Don't presume what the political will is, we've got to act. What you can do analytically is to say how one can act, what could be done, what are the costs, what are the possibilities. Then just shake your head in disbelief that how could anyone not want to do such obvious things and spread the word in many different ways?

I find as I speak all over this country that one of the profound obstacles to progress is the belief that things can't be done, or that all the money would be stolen, or any kind of cliché based on misunderstandings, not based on ill will. I think in this country we're rather groping for answers and approaches right now, and there's a way to help shape events, probably more than we think, and that's why we have to not pause to ask the question "What is going to happen?" but continue what should happen and to work to try to make it happen.

Yee-Cheong Lee: Can I just add? I come from the part of the world that used to be termed the "Asian miracle." It is quite true that I can remember that in the '50s, just after Malaysia became independent, we were as poor as many of the African countries now. So was South Korea devastated by the Korean War. Yet we didn't spend for three decades. We have come out to be now called what are called the higher income developing countries. That's why when I was at the World Summit for Sustainable Development last year I interacted with quite a number of the policymakers and ministers of science and technology and the scientific and engineering communities in Africa. I found that they were looking to the developed West, and they found that the gap in science and technology and development was too wide. Then they also knew that handouts are not forthcoming, so it was a spirit of despondency. I urged them to look to Asia, to look to the Asian Pacific, and see what we have been able to achieve in the last thirty years. Not to say to imitate us, just to find what are the successes and, more importantly, what were the failures in our part of the world and then learn from it. In the Millennium Development Project itself, I have been actually locating them. Don't just ask from the very developed countries, those who have just come up, like Malaysia, like South Korea, like Mexico, we also must now become donors, because we have received. As my prime minister Dr. Mahathir said, we have come out of the pain of poverty very recently, we must remember that pain and make sure that our sister countries do not suffer the same or continue to suffer the same pain as ourselves. So I'm very optimistic that together we can achieve the MDG.

Jennie Perlman: Thank you. My name's Jennie Perlman, I'm from The Hunger Project. Thank you to all the panelists, and my comment's directed to Pedro Sanchez. I'd like to think that I'm stating the obvious, but I think when we're talking about Africa's low agricultural productivity we have to mention the role of women in Africa, and the role that they play in food production—it's said that they're responsible for 80 percent of food for consumption—and the lack of support that they've received in terms of access to land and credit and agricultural extension services. I just hope that this is an area that the hunger task force is prioritizing, focusing on: women in Africa's agricultural production.

Pedro Sanchez: Thank you, and very much so. As you said, women do agriculture in Africa. Not only that, but do the firewood fetching, the water fetching, the cooking and the caring of the children. Men are—I don't know what they're doing, but it's so different from Latin America and Asia, so I think some of us have actually have been guilty of not mentioning the obvious, and this has to be stated more and more and indeed the access to tenure is good.

I'm also an optimist; let me give you some good news. In villages in western Kenya and in eastern Zambia where farmers, i.e., women, have been able to restore their soil fertility through agroforestry, these women are tremendously empowered. Their place in their village societies is different. Still, the men are the village chiefs, but they're totally different. They're the ones who started, some of them, a school lunch program; it was their idea and they're doing it, and we'll see as things progress that the role of women is going to increase with empowering. And boy, farming is power and farming in Africa is women.

Jeffrey Sachs: I wanted to mention, I think probably everyone got it, but in case. When Pedro said that only 80 percent of the hungry were in emergency hunger, and that the 92 percent are not dying of starvation, just to clarify, because I think it's important, it means not specific events like an extreme drought, which has pushed the population. This is chronic hunger. When he says they're dying of starvation, it doesn't mean they're not dying; as he said at the beginning, they're dying of deaths related to undernourishment. The typical way to go is through disease, because of the immunosuppression that comes with undernourishment. So there's lot of death associated with this, and Pedro said that at the beginning, but I wanted to clarify it just in case there was any misunderstanding on that.

Lisa Anderson: We're going to take these three questions for this panel before we move to the next panel. Sir.

John Robins: John Robins from the Wildlife Conservation Society. This is a question to Dr. Sanchez. One of the unforeseen consequences of the first green revolution was environmental, and we lost a lot of crop lines. We developed crops which required a lot of energy inputs, a lot of pesticides, herbicides. Do you want to talk just a little bit more about how the second revolution will be more environmentally friendly?

Pedro Sanchez: Sure, sure. We want to use to the maximum our natural resources, which is what farmers want to do. We want to fix nitrogen from the air with legumes. At the same time, we do encourage also the use of fertilizers. Fertilizers are different from pesticides; fertilizers provide nutrients that are needed for agriculture. Pesticides, hopefully you can avoid by having integrated plant control. The wise combination of organic and inorganic inputs is what we are advocating. A lot of that involves, for example, conservation tillage, which requires a lot less tractor traffic and therefore less diesel fumes and far less CO2 in the atmosphere, and stuff like that.

We have learned how to do this in ways that indeed sequester carbon, protect biodiversity in the soil, which is a kind of biodiversity seldom accepted, and these are the ecosystem engineers, that increase biodiversity in the farm and then protect biodiversity. Especially the labor-intensive agricultural options like agroforestry do detract from the need to clear additional land, while the capital-intensive ones—pastures in Brazil, for example—do stimulate additional deforestation. I think we're getting there. There's a series of paradigm shifts that have happened in the last ten, fifteen years, that are bringing the agricultural community a lot closer to the conservation community and realize that we're both in the same game together.

Lucie Epujama: Hi, my name is Lucie Epujama, excuse me, and I work for a small organization, it's a new startup foundation, called the Juma Trust, and our mission in Sierra Leone is to promote human development by investing in knowledge that provides people with tools and resources to combat poverty in sustainable ways. What that comes down to is local development of human capacity. Could you say something about that? I was born in Sierra Leone, I'm lucky enough to work with an organization that does work in Sierra Leone, and we've got nowhere to go but up.

Jeffrey Sachs: In the end of the day, much of what we call development takes place of course at the community level. It's at the community where health will or won't be provided, where children will or will not go to school, where water will or will not be available safely, where sanitation will or will not be provided. A tremendous amount that needs to be done is both empowering people at the community level to gain better control over their lives and resources, but it also means giving them the tools to do it. When you're so poor that the land isn't feeding you and that you're cutting down the trees next door—because I think what Pedro was stressing on conservation is essential—high yields per hectare are a huge advantage in protecting habitat, they're absolutely essential. Otherwise, if yields remain so low you're just going to destroy all the habitat by spreading out to try to feed a growing rural population.

Empowering local communities, but also giving financial mechanisms so that they can do the job, is vital. It of course depends on the circumstances. It may be empowerment with respect to water and sanitation, it may be empowerment with respect to basic hygiene and placement of pit latrines and a water stand. It may be empowerment with respect to learning how to plant leguminous crops as fallow in order to promote nitrogen fixation. All of those things—they don't come naturally actually, and one needs to not only have communities organized, but then helped in order to achieve these ends.

Lisa Anderson: Sir, last question for this panel.

Man: I'm a returned Peace Corps volunteer in a country that was ranked number two in the world for corruption, and everyone joked that they had sold the top spot to Cameroon that year. I just recently—

Jeffrey Sachs: Which one is it?

Man: Paraguay. That was a big part of the development picture in that country. I worked with people who worked with the World Bank and a lot of the other development banks. I recently saw a survey in which about eighty granting foundations were asked about what they saw as the problems of development, and a lot of them cited the corruption within the development agencies themselves. I guess what I would like to ask you gentleman is, What are the obstacles to effective control in the international development community itself? If it's a donor community, it seems to me that they have the market power to set the rules. I guess I would like to know what are the obstacles?

Yee-Cheong Lee: I think the thing comes back to that saying "power corrupts, power decorrupts." If you can tackle problem of poverty and uplift the general standard of well-being of the people, you'll find that in this empowerment process it will reduce very dramatically, corruption. That's why I think in the review of the Agenda 21 since Rio, about '92, it has been quite well accepted that Agenda 21 at the global level, at the national level, has been a failure. The only good news was local Agenda 21 has been great success in developed countries as well as developing countries, and that is because of community participation—that the communities themselves want to do things that they would like to do, not being imposed by agencies from overseas, funding agencies or otherwise, or even national government. So I would believe that if we reduce poverty, we will start to tackle the problem of corruption.

Jeffrey Sachs: Could I add just a couple of thoughts? First, I want to say a word about Paraguay. Paraguay is of course a land-locked country, it's one of the two land-locked countries in South America, next door to Bolivia. It is paradigmatic of the problems of land-locked countries. Paraguay is not only poor and corrupt because of corruption and other things, but it's also one of the most isolated places in the world from an economic point of view. There's a lot of trafficking of all sorts of things across Paraguay, but in terms of companies interested to invest to produce, you don't go to the middle of South America for that purpose; you might go to Rio or Sao Paulo or Fortaleza or Valparaiso or Santiago on the other side of the Andes, but you generally wouldn't go to Asunción for that purpose.

All land-locked countries in the developing world are in trouble right now, actually, all of them. If you're going to be land-locked, the best policy advice is do it in Europe, because then you'll be surrounded by rich countries and then it's okay. If you happen to choose to be land-locked surrounded by poor countries, you're in a lot of trouble, because if investors are going to come they're going to come not to you but to your coastal counterpart. This is a major issue for us to think about.

When Malaysia took off, the takeoff point was on an island, Penang Island. This was the epicenter of the miracle. That's where a little known company in 1971, an American company with a few people—it was named Intel—decided to come and invest, and having "Intel inside" is really powerful for economic development. But Intel does not go to land-locked countries, and this is part of the structural issue that I was talking about before.

I want to say one word about the corruption also. There are many aspects of corruption—internal, bad governance, lack of power and knowledge to control national leaders—but there's also the international angle, as you said. Corruption often is both directions, and we see it in the oil sector. The corruption of oil-rich countries by our oil industry and our country is a profound issue. We have to understand this is sometimes bigger than giving lectures to poor people when we're also slipping them the bucks or doing a lot worse. We need some international rule of law on this as well.

One of the things that I'm particularly keen on to try to keep corruption levels under control in our country as well as the world is that we keep our eye firmly on the Iraqi oil right now, lest it be taken as the war booty by American oil interests that are very well connected right now.

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