Toward Security for All: Development Assistance and Global Poverty

James Gustave Speth

The author is Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

The historian Paul Kennedy has defined "grand strategy" as a commitment to a major result in international affairs, a commitment to be pursued flexibly but comprehensively and determinedly, until the end is realized. Grand strategy presumes that the ends are few; grand strategies address true strategic priorities. The grand strategies chosen by nations tend to define what those nations stand for in the world.

Should western nations have a grand strategy of promoting development in the poorer countries? Does the United States have such a strategy today, and is it pursuing it?

Writing in 1994, Kennedy and a fellow historian, Matthew Connelly, called attention to a key problem underlying the need for sustainable development—"unbalanced wealth and resources, unbalanced demographic trends, and the relationship between the two."¹ These authors portrayed a chilling vision of "a world of two camps, North and South, separate and unequal." As they wrote then:

We are heading into the twenty-first century in a world consisting for the most part of a relatively small number of rich, satiated, demographically stagnant societies and a large number of poverty-stricken, resource-depleted nations whose populations are doubling every twenty-five years or less. The demographic imbalances are exacerbated by grotesque disparities in wealth between rich and poor countries.²

Connelly and Kennedy posed a key question: must it be the West against the rest? The historians suggested that it need not be if the wealthy nations were to pursue a comprehensive strategy of appropriate development cooperation, agreements to restrict conventional arms sales, and efforts to reach a North-South entente that left the developing nations secure that their cultural diversity would not be swallowed up by the technologies and material way of life of the richer nations, especially the United States. They envisioned that these and related measures would be incorporated into a North-South package of linked agreements—a global compact, for lack of a better phrase. And they envisioned that the United Nations might play a central role in this post-Cold War architecture. In short, the authors seem to be suggesting that the wealthy countries need a grand strategy of comprehensive development, and need it for their own good.³

The first section of this Dialogue will examine current trends in world poverty. It introduces new measures to argue that the concept of poverty goes beyond income deprivation. Non-income aspects, such as life expectancy, literacy and deprivation of health services are introduced as components of human poverty. The second section explains why poverty in developing countries matters, or should matter, to the United States. The final section highlights the broad pillars of a new architecture for development assistance, one that requires the active participation of the United States. By adopting this architecture, the United States would put in place a grand strategy for comprehensive and sustainable development.

Expanding the Concept of Poverty

Traditional measures of poverty are themselves inadequate. The development community has long known that identifying an income or consumption cutoff, below which people are poor, provides an incomplete picture of poverty. Although income focuses on an important dimension of poverty, it only partially describes the many levels of human destitution. A focus on income measures of poverty neglects the specifics of each community. Each community has "necessary needs," and these necessities vary across cultures and historical circumstances. The alternative, to use different poverty lines for different communities, is problematic in terms of making international comparisons. How can we define a poverty line for every country? Should we just use national poverty lines, with all their political connotations, or should we construct global indicators? The uniformity of income-measures masks many assumptions and imprecisions that do not stand up to rigorous analysis. People lack income for a variety of reasons, including unemployment, limited access to resources such as land or credit, illiteracy, poor health, and marginalization from society.

Deprivation poverty, as presented in the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP's) 1997 Human Development [32 ELR 10481] Report, is not the same thing as income poverty.⁴ The correlation between income poverty (using the U.S. $ 1-a-day standard) and human deprivation is not especially strong. Therefore, it is important to see poverty in the aspects of both income and other deprivations. Income is only a partial translation of these deprivations; it is not the cause of these deprivations. By focusing on income, the development community is seeing the reflection of poverty, not its reality. Furthermore, the sources and causes of poverty are not addressed, only its symptoms.

As a practical matter, this becomes very important around the world, as countries increasingly move to develop anti-poverty strategies. At the World Social Summit in Copenhagen in 1995, 117 heads of state and of government agreed to develop anti-poverty strategies to eliminate the worst aspects of poverty in their countries on a time-bound basis.⁵ Part of this strategy involves poverty mapping: knowing poor people's location, numbers, and characteristics, i.e., urban or rural backgrounds, ethnic identity, and minority status. Such characteristics cannot be covered by a single indicator, whatever the merits of an income poverty line or however it is calculated. Instead, one needs complex indicators that reflect the complexity of lives in poverty.

To supplement traditional income-measures of poverty, the report proposed a new composite measure: the Human Poverty Index (HPI). The HPI brings together, in a composite index, different features of deprivation in order to determine an aggregate judgment on the extent of poverty in a community. The HPI was calculated for 78 countries for which data of comparable quality was available. Three measures of deprivation are combined to reach the HPI:

1. deprivation of life, which is measured by the percentage of people expected to die before the age of 40;

2. deprivation of knowledge, which is measured by the percentage of adults who are illiterate; and

3. deprivation in living standards, which is measured as a composite of three variables, the percentage of people without access to health services, the percentage of people without access to safe water and the percentage of malnourished children under five.⁶

The main advantage of the HPI is immediately apparent. Unlike income, the components of the HPI are easy to measure in most countries, and are comparable across societies and across time. The HPI also measures deprivation in a manner in which most people, wherever they live and whatever their social preferences, can relate. People place a high value on living beyond early middle age, they benefit from knowing how to read and write, they prefer to have access to health services and clean water, and they prefer to provide their children with good nutritious diets.

A difficulty with the HPI, as in all composite measures, is in making accurate comparisons among all countries. For instance, illiteracy and premature mortality may help us to differentiate among poor countries more easily than, say, between France and Germany, which have largely eradicated illiteracy and minimized premature mortality. Thus, the choice was made to concentrate on variables that reflect human poverty in developing countries. In the 1998 Human Development Report, the index was refined to capture the depth of human poverty in industrialized countries.⁷ But even a refined HPI does not capture the full extent of human poverty. Critical dimensions of human poverty excluded from the HPI are lack of political freedom, inability to participate in decisionmaking and community life, lack of personal security, and threats to environmental sustainability. These variables are difficult to measure in a sufficiently large number of countries.⁸

Hence, the HPI is not a perfect measure. However, it has provided us with an interesting insight on human poverty, which income measures had failed to capture. It also leads to an inescapable policy conclusion: successful poverty eradication strategies must rely not only on growth and macroeconomic stability, but must also take into account the political aspects of poverty eradication.

The right to be free of the crushing burden of poverty must be counted among the most fundamental of human rights.⁹ Poverty is brutal. It is embedded in all realms of the existence of poor people, and extends beyond lack of income. Perhaps the most basic human right challenged by human poverty is the right to life. Nearly one-third of the people in the least developed countries, most of them in subSaharan Africa, cannot expect to live beyond the age of 40.¹⁰ Another mark of poverty, adult illiteracy, means that the poor are severely restricted in their access to knowledge, to information, and to the press as well as in their ability to exercise connected rights such as political participation.

The scale of the poverty challenge is described in the UNDP's annual human development reports and other documents.¹¹ Among the 4.6 billion people who live in developing countries, three-fifths live in communities without basic sanitation; one-third are without safe drinking water; [32 ELR 10482] one-quarter lack adequate housing; and one-fifth are under-nourished.¹² Fully two billion people lack access to electricity.¹³ More than 500 million people "earn their livelihoods in ecologically fragile and low-productivity areas."¹⁴

Women are the hardest hit by human poverty, and comprise an estimated 70% of the world's poor.¹⁵ Poor women suffer the same deprivations as men. They too must cope with joblessness, lack of income, and decreased life expectancies. However, women typically have additional obstacles such as unequal opportunities to education and health services as well as to the productive assets by which they can hope to break free from the shackles of poverty. In developing countries, women make up 60% of the illiterate adults; female enrollment at the primary education level is 13% less than male enrollment and female wages are only three-fourths of male wages. In industrial countries, unemployment is higher among women than among men, and women constitute three-fourths of unpaid family workers.¹⁶ Thus, in addition to poverty, women are less able than men to break free from deprivation. In a sense, women suffer compounded poverty. Another aspect of women's poverty is violence. Violence against women who are poor is pervasive in many societies, and women in these societies are afforded little recourse against domestic violence. There is also the violence of armed conflict and forced displacement, in which a majority of the victims are civilian women.¹⁷

To be sure, there have been gains in the global effort to end poverty. The proportion of people living below national poverty lines has fallen. For example, in China, and in 14 other countries with populations that add up to 1.6 billion, the share of the population living below the national poverty line has been halved in less than 20 years. In the same time period, 10 more countries, accounting for almost another billion people, have reduced the proportion of their population living below the poverty line by one-quarter or more.¹⁸ Since 1960, in little more than a generation, the rate of child deaths in developing countries has been more than halved, malnutrition rates have declined by more than one-third, and the proportion of rural families without access to safe water has fallen from nine-tenths to about one-quarter.¹⁹

But there is still much to be done. Efforts to reduce poverty have been undermined in recent years by epidemics, such as human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS), armed conflict, stagnant economies, and environmental degradation which threatens the sustainability of resources on which the poor depend for their livelihoods.

Perhaps most striking is the realization that one-half of humanity survive (or don't) on less than two dollars a day.²⁰ And poverty is increasing. Outside of China, over 100 million people have been added to the $ 1-a-day poverty category over the past decade.²¹ In over 60 low-income countries, individual consumption has declined over the past 15 years. In Africa today, consumption per capita is 20% lower than in 1980.²²

Global poverty amidst global abundance translates into huge and growing disparities between rich and poor. The trend is toward much greater inequality, not less. The gap in per capita income between the industrial and developing worlds, far from narrowing, tripled between 1960 and 1995, moving from a gap of $ 5,700 to 1 or more than $ 17,000 to 1.²³

So the world today is deeply divided. It has become more polarized, both between countries and within countries. The risk of an evolution toward an unstable, two-class world, with a huge global underclass, is quite real.

Why Global Poverty Should Matter to the United States

Does the world of underdevelopment and poverty matter to the United States? Looked at objectively, the short answer is that the developing world means a lot for America today, and it will mean even more in the decades ahead. Four out of five people live in the developing countries.²⁴ From an economic perspective, developing countries are likely to become an increasingly important market for American products and services. While U.S. total trade with the developing world continues to be significantly smaller than trade with developed countries, the former has increased both in absolute terms and as a percentage of U.S. global trade, growing from 27% in 1988 to 31% in 1998.²⁵

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Beyond our positive stake in the economic health of the developing world, Americans have a large stake in what we might call the "prevention agenda"—the avoidance of terrorism, humanitarian emergencies, national and regional conflicts, environmental deterioration, illicit drugs, the spread of diseases, illegal migration, and other human and "natural" disasters. We now see plainly that economic, environmental, and political problems do not need passports to travel around the globe. Many of these threats stem directly or indirectly from poverty, inequity, joblessness, and social disintegration. The world's 24 poorest countries are in Africa,²⁶ and one-half have been the scene of wars or coups in the past decade.²⁷ No one would attribute such problems solely to underdevelopment, but underdevelopment is surely part of the disease. And development—sustainable, people-centered development—will almost always be a part of any cure.

I can state very simply one of the most important take-home lessons from my years at the UNDP: none of the admirable goals that the United States has pursued around the world—not peace and stability, not human rights and democratization, not the expansion of trade and markets, not environmental protection, not population stabilization, not an end to hunger and extreme deprivation—not one of these can be accomplished except in the context of equitable, sustainable, successful development.

We should remember that it is far cheaper and more intelligent to invest in preventive development today than to pay dearly tomorrow for the tragic consequences of neglect. Consider the Clinton doctrine on humanitarian intervention. During the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) campaign to protect Kosovo residents against Serbian atrocities, President William J. Clinton made the following statement:

Never forget that if we can do this here, and if we can then say to the people of the world . . . if somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, or ethnic background, or their religion, and if it's within our power to stop it, we will stop it.²⁸

The great bulk of modem conflicts are within rather than between countries, and most are in the developing world and are often linked to inequities and deprivation. If we are serious about implementing the Clinton doctrine, preventive approaches are likely to be the most effective way to deal with the potential for such humanitarian emergencies. And development must be seen as central to such preventive approaches.

So the case for seeing development as a strategic priority for the United States and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is strong indeed. Unfortunately, interdependence with the rest of the world, including the underdeveloped world, has not been matched by a willingness at a policy level to engage the world. Take the case of development assistance. In 1956, 63% of all development assistance came from the United States. In 1999, it was down to 16%.²⁹ In 1960, 4% of the U.S. budget went for development and international affairs in general.³⁰ Today, that figure stands at less than 1%.³¹ The United States ranks dead last among industrialized countries in the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) devoted to development assistance.³²

Declining developing assistance is part of the larger picture. Basically, the issue is our country's flagging commitment to international leadership. The country that has benefitted most from globalization, and has the greatest stake in its success, seems deeply reluctant to shoulder the lead that our position in the world requires for us.

At present, 191 countries have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child.³³ The United States is not among them.³⁴ We stand as one of the few countries that have not ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.³⁵ Even more countries have ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, 165 at last count, but Afghanistan and the United States have not.³⁶ We join Afghanistan again, and also Libya, in being among the few that have not ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity.³⁷ Believe it or not, we have not yet ratified the Law of the Sea Treaty.³⁸ Our partners in opposing the Land Mine Convention include Cuba, [32 ELR 10484] Libya, North Korea, and Sudan.³⁹ The list goes on and on, and the pattern is clear—a pattern of unilateralism, of not cooperating, of not leading.

Now, it cannot be said that the United States has no strategy whatsoever vis-a-vis the developing world. Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard, writing in The Economist, has described U.S. strategy in the following terms:

America has wanted global leadership on the cheap. It was desperate for the developing world and post-communist economies to buy into its vision, in which globalization, private capital flows and Washington advice would overcome the obstacles to shared prosperity, so that pressures on the rich countries to do more for the poorer countries could be contained by the dream of universal economic growth. In this way, the United States would not have to shell out real money to help the peaceful reconstruction of Russia; or to ameliorate the desperate impoverishment and illness in Africa . . . .

Washington became skittish at anything or anybody that challenged this vision. When developing country leaders pointed out that development was much harder than it looked; their economies were falling further behind in technology; that they were being destabilized by financial flows they could neither track nor understand; that falling commodity prices were taking them further from the shared prosperity that they had been promised; that unattended disease was ravaging their societies; that the wreckage of soviet communism would take real aid, not just short-term loans to overcome; or that they were still drowning in debt ten years after America acknowledged the need for debt relief; all these honest reflections were taken as hostile challenges to the vision of shared prosperity because they put at risk the notion of cost-free American leadership.⁴⁰

As Sachs suggests, we have consoled ourselves with myths. One is that economic globalization is a cure-all for global poverty. Indeed, globalization can be an engine of growth. We know that economic integration produced remarkable economic growth in the United States and in Europe. But we also know that powerful governmental measures are necessary at home to ensure that this growth is actually pro-poor and pro-environment, measures that we have often been unwilling to take. There is no reason to expect that economic integration at the global level should be different. If millions of people can be marginalized at home, hundreds of millions can be marginalized globally. And that indeed is today's reality. Also, if government action and international cooperation are needed to protect and stabilize markets, imagine how much more they are needed to protect people and stabilize societies.

Consider this recent data from the World Bank. Even where there has been economic growth, it translates rather poorly into poverty reduction and human development. The simple correlation coefficient between growth in GDP and decrease in poverty is significant at .52, but this suggests that variation in growth rates accounts for only about 25% of the variation in declines in poverty.⁴¹ Even more striking, the coefficient linking GDP growth to improvements in an index of human development is only .22, a very weak relationship.⁴²

A related myth holds that trade and private capital are reliable substitutes for development assistance. If only this were true. Flows of private capital to low- and middle-income countries grew to $ 286 billion in 1998, but much of this is short-term spending and little goes to the neediest.⁴³ Consider that 75% of direct foreign investment in the developing world goes to fewer than a dozen countries, all middle-income countries except for China. Just 6% goes to Africa, and 2% to the 47 least developed countries.⁴⁴ In fact, the least developed countries (countries such as Bangladesh, Chad, and Haiti) received only 2% of all foreign direct investment to developing countries in 1996-1999, a decline from 2.2% in 1986-1990.⁴⁵ There is no correlation between need and direct foreign investment.

Another myth is that development cooperation doesn't work. Indeed, development aid has often failed. It can contribute to inefficiencies; it can lead to dependency; and it can delay needed structural reforms. But despite these risks, political leaders in lucid moments know that development cooperation can work and often has. That is why whenever there is a high-stakes crisis—from Afghanistan, to Bosnia, to Indonesia, to the Middle East—development resources are sought as an essential component to supporting peace and stability. Development cooperation has done a lot of good in the world. It's too bad that political support for it materializes only when crises are upon us and our interests revealed.

Toward a Grand Strategy of Comprehensive Development

The eradication of poverty has been seen in two ways. One approach tends to look at eradication as the performance of an international charity. This view has lost salience in recent years, but it still emerges from time to time, and that is a good thing. There is nothing wrong with charity; we need more of it in a selfish world. And this sense of charity is one of the important means by which valuable resources are collected and allocated to development cooperation. As strong as charitable impulses may be, they are not easily translated into the predictable and growing resources which are increasingly necessary. Funds for development cooperation are declining in a world in which 1.3 billion persons live on less than U.S. $ 1 a day, and where debt service in subSaharan Africa is equivalent to four times the expenditure on health.⁴⁶

The second approach is to view the eradication of poverty in purely functional terms. The rationale behind this notion holds the eradication of poverty as perhaps good in itself, [32 ELR 10485] but more important, as a prevention against the rise of conflicts, social disruption, and many other social ills such as terrorism, drugs, and disease. In this view, the eradication of poverty is an instrument in the search for peace and security. The events of the Great Lakes region of Africa, for instance, are telling in the terrible levels of poverty and hopelessness which accompanied the genocidal wars of the 1990s. Recent concerns with advance warning for civil conflict are laudable, but we have ample advance warning from the lives of millions living without jobs and without hope, who are at the margins of society. The desperation of the poor is never quiet for long.

The link between economic and social development and peace is also quite strong. In country after country, failures of development can be seen as contributing to instability and the eruption of conflict. Experience demonstrates that penury, hopelessness, inequity, and marginalization are often among the root causes of devastating conflict. In crisis situations, and in societies emerging from conflict, human rights are often violated. International support for governance mechanisms leading to the restoration of the rule of law is important for the protection of human rights. Indeed, it is significant that some of the most important actions in terms of peace-building in post-conflict situations have been projects that seek to promote greater employment opportunities for the demobilized and the disadvantaged, and programs to rebuild national capacity for good governance.

So let us take a leap of faith here—faith, and hope, that we will see the farther shore beyond Wall Street and the daily closing of the stock market, and that we want a grand strategy worthy of our great nation. What would be some of its elements?

We should be delighted the international community finally seems to be moving on debt relief. But we will need to go far beyond current proposals. Developing country indebtedness has climbed to over $ 2.5 trillion.⁴⁷ Three-fifths of this is long-term public debt.⁴⁸ In many poor countries, servicing the debt represents a significant percentage of the total government revenue which, in turn, reduces the ability of these countries to fund much-needed health and education programs. While the public spending on education per capita in countries like Germany, Japan, and the United States reaches levels above $ 10,000 (U.S.), such investments can be approximately $ 10 (U.S.) per capita in countries such as Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, and Nigeria.⁴⁹ In Africa, governments are now transferring four times more to international creditors than they spend on basic health and education.⁵⁰ New initiatives to relieve both bilateral and multilateral debt burdens are clearly in order. The debt crisis is not simply a balance of payments crisis or a repayments crisis. It is a human crisis and a social crisis. Despite all the talk, too few countries have qualified today for debt relief under World Bank-International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs.⁵¹ Progress in debt relief has been slow and inadequate.

Yes, we need globalization and we even need the World Trade Organization (WTO). But we also need norms and rules of the road to guide globalization to protect and benefit poor countries and poor people, the environment, workers, consumers, and investors. And we need to reform the WTO to make it more open and broadly accountable, with different principles and procedures to guide its decisions. On the environment front, we need a World Environment Organization (WEO) to match the WTO.⁵² More broadly, we need an international polity as robust as the international economy, but we are far from that today. Things are badly out of order. Governance of the international economy, shaky though it is, is far ahead of global governance in other areas. Globalization is on trial, and a growing backlash from many quarters could threaten the process itself—killing, or at least weakening, the goose that lays the golden eggs. In sum, while efforts to promote economic globalization proceed apace through the WTO and elsewhere, policymakers continue to ignore parallel reforms needed in the social and environmental areas.

Multilateral challenges require multilateral solutions, and the United Nations has an important role to play in helping to make globalization work for people, for human development, and for the environment.

And, yes, we need to increase trade and foreign investment. But we also need to increase development assistance. We know much better now—often from sad experience—how to succeed in development cooperation. Yet, right at this confluence of greater need and greater opportunity, we find tragically that resources are declining, not increasing. Development assistance has declined from about $ 61 billion in 1992 to $ 56 billion in 1999,⁵³ and much of today's aid remains "tied aid" and thus must be spent in donor countries. It is a trend that must be reversed or we will pay dearly later—perhaps with emergency relief; perhaps with peace-keeping forces; perhaps through the increased spread of terrorism, disease, environmental problems, or migrants and refugees. It is better to invest in development today than furnish troops tomorrow.

Beyond resources, we also need a new architecture for development cooperation, not just a scheme for international finance. The following are several elements of this new architecture.

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First, we must broaden the scope of development cooperation to include not only development assistance but also trade, debt management, private investment and capital flows, private sector development, and access to technology. All these must work together, not at cross purposes, as they often do today.

Second, the strictly government-to-government foreign aid of the past should go to the dustbin of history with the Cold War. The new development assistance must focus on being synergistic with private sector development and the strengthening of civil society as a whole.

Third, the relationship between industrial and developing countries needs to be redefined. Common interests and complementary needs of the rich and the poor, as well as global goals forged through the United Nations, must provide the basic rationale for global and regional compacts. Whatever today's threats to national security, more pervasive and insidious are the threats to human security—the social, economic and environmental threats in people's daily lives. These threats to human security—drugs, terrorism, environmental change, illegal immigration, crime, threats to peace and stability around the world—do not need passports to cross borders. And solutions, too, must cross borders. Global challenges require cooperative, global solutions, none more so than global climate change. We must act in concert, preventively, to attack root causes of these threats because we cannot afford to cope with the future tragic consequences of neglect. Development assistance is an essential part of the cost-sharing needed for global compacts; development assistance is part of the price we pay to purchase "global public goods."

Fourth, a new development framework is needed to consolidate the emerging concept of sustainable human development. Too often, development cooperation has been shaped by short-term military, political and economic interests. Past aid has far too often not been used for poverty eradication, sustainable livelihoods, environmental regeneration, and advancement of women. We must now ensure that scarce funds address the most pressing needs of people and their environments, including correcting the chronic under investments in social and environmental programs that has occurred in countries with unshoulderable debt burdens. Development assistance must empower the poor—economically, socially, and politically—not marginalize them.

Development cooperation should seek to promote economic growth, but it should also seek to ensure that people reap its benefits. Economies exist for people, not vice versa. Growth should be job-led, not job-less. Growth should replenish environmental heritage, not destroy it. It should advance women, not keep them "in their place." These maxims have not been the predominant goals of development strategy in thepast, or even of development assistance, and that is precisely why the world today is in so much trouble.

An innovative World Bank report, The Quality of Growth, recently concluded that there has been systematic underinvestment in human capital, inadequate attention to institutional capital, and overexploitation of natural capital.⁵⁴ Meanwhile, physical capital has been heavily subsidized. Energy, transport, infrastructure for water, and the like have been subsidized to the tune of $ 700-900 billion a year over the past decade, one-third of this in the developing world.⁵⁵ So there is plenty of room for reallocation.

Fifth, we must learn from past mistakes and ensure that development cooperation supports the polity and not just the economy. The challenges of growing poverty and widening inequity will not be met without democratization and good governance. Development cooperation must be fully committed to these ends.

Sixth, development assistance must be country-driven, not donor-driven. Assistance projects must be owned by the people they are intended to help—owned, because these initiatives respond to their actual needs and because, through their participation, they themselves helped design the project.

Finally, we must see development assistance not as an alternative to private investment but, for much of the world, as an essential building block to a vibrant private sector and successful financial markets. Special programs are needed, for example, to support privatization and the transition to market economies and to address the challenges of preemerging markets, where banking and regulatory systems need serious attention.

These are challenging objectives. But there should be no mistake about what is at issue. The policies the United States adopts now, in the context of the globalization world, with regard to development cooperation and mulitlateralism are defining decisions. They will define the values for which our country stands.

Will we ever see a grand strategy of comprehensive development aimed at poverty? In fact, one exists, or almost exists, and it owes its existence to those much-maligned U.N. mega-conferences and summits of the 1990s. The story begins with those conferences: Beijing, women; Cairo, population; Copenhagen, poverty; New York, children; Rio, environment; Rome, food; and Vienna, human rights.⁵⁶ Out of these conferences came quantifiable development goals, agreed to by all. It was also agreed that each country would work toward the elimination of absolute poverty by a date certain and would develop a multifaceted national plan of action to that end.

The action then shifted to the OECD development assistance ministers, who built on these conference goals in preparing their seminal report, Shaping the 21st Century: The Contribution of Development Cooperation, in 1996.⁵⁷ They agreed there that all OECD bilateral aid agencies would work together toward the central goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by 2015.⁵⁸ This interim goal, and various quantitative sub-goals regarding health, education, environment, population, and children, all drawn from the conferences, have now been adopted by the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF, and the OECD. It is remarkable to see the report, 2000: A Better World for All, signed by the senior officials of these organizations.⁵⁹

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And then in September 2000, the U.N. General Assembly adopted the Millennium Declaration in which all Member states unanimously agreed to the following goals:

. To halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world's people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger and, by the same date, to halve the proportion of people who are unable to reach or to afford safe drinking water;

. To ensure that, by the same date, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling and the girls and boys will have equal access to all levels of education;

. By the same date, to have reduced maternal mortality by three quarters, and under-five child mortality by two-thirds, of their current rates;

. To have, by then, halted and begun to reverse, the spread of HIV/AIDS, the scourge of malaria and other major diseases that afflict humanity;

. To provide special assistance to children orphaned by HIV/AIDS.⁶⁰

Behind all this is a set of well-thought out approaches and strong development assistance institutions that now share to an unprecedented degree both a common vision and a disposition to work together. What they mainly lack is money. What they mainly need is leadership from the great power and the other G-7 Members, which has been hard to find.⁶¹ By leadership, I mean leadership from the top—from the heads of state and government in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Having development ministers on board is not enough.

One of the major initiatives to come out of the upcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg should be firm financial and other commitments by developed countries to help realize those goals, and adherence to those commitments. At day's end, the only world that works is one in which the aspirations of poor people and poor nations for fairness and opportunity are being realized. Such commitments should also help strengthen developing country interest in cooperation on environmental objectives. The sustainable development compromise reached in Rio in 1992, after all, combined commitments by developed countries for financial assistance in return for developing country commitments to environmental protection. Developing country views in international negotiations on environment are powerfully shaped by preoccupation with their own economic and social conditions, fear of high environmental regulatory costs, and distrust of industrial country intentions and policies. Sustained and sustainable human development provides the only context in which there is enough confidence, trust, and hope to ground the difficult measures needed to realize environmental objectives.

Thus, we have all the ingredients for a grand strategy to eliminate mass poverty in the lifetimes of today's young people. Imagine a world without large-scale poverty. It is within reach.

1. Matthew Connelly & Paul Kennedy, Must It Be the Rest Against the West?, ATLANTIC MONTHLY, Dec. 1994, at 61, 62.

2. Id. at 69.

3. The article began by discussing a controversial and hard-to-obtain novel, JEAN RASPAIL, THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS (1973). The authors of the article are in the true "camp of the saints."

4. There are many ways to measure income poverty. One common approach is to use a poverty line, where a certain cutoff income or consumption figure is set, and the poor are defined as the number of people who fall below that line. For international comparisons, the World Bank uses a consumption level of U.S. $ 1 a day in 1985 purchasing power parity dollars. Another measure is the Food and Agricultural Organization-World Health Organization (FAO-WHO) definition, in which an ultra-poor household is said to be a household which cannot meet 80% of the FAO-WHO minimum calorie requirements, even when using 80% of its income to buy food. See UNITED NATIONS DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME (UNDP), HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 1997, at 13 (1997) [hereinafter 1997 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT].

5. The text of the Copenhagen Declaration and the Programme of Action adopted in Copenhagen can be found in Report of the World Summit for Social Development (Copenhagen, Mar. 6-12, 1995), U.N. Doc. A/CONF.166/9 (1995) and in UNITED NATIONS, COPENHAGEN DECLARATION AND PROGRAMME OF ACTION: WORLD SUMMIT FOR SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT (1995). See UNDP, UNDP SERIES ON SUSTAINABLE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, COUNTRY STRATEGIES FOR SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT (1995) for examples of national implementation of the Copenhagen Declaration and Programme of Action. In 2000, the U.N. General Assembly held a five-year review of progress since the Copenhagen Summit. See United Nations, Documents of the Social Summit + Five, at http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/geneva2000/documents/index.html (last updated May 3, 2001).

6. 1997 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT, supra note 4, at 18.

7. UNDP, HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 1998, at 27-29 (1998) [hereinafter 1998 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT].

8. 1997 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT, supra note 4, at 17.

9. See James Gustave Speth, Poverty: A Denial of Human Rights, 52 J. INT'L AFF. 277 (1998).

10. 1997 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT, supra note 4, at 5.

11. See, e.g., UNDP, HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2000 (2000) [hereinafter 2000 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT].

12. Id. at 226, tbl. 19 (population); 1998 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT, supra note 7, at 2.

13. UNDP ET AL., WORLD ENERGY ASSESSMENT: ENERGY AND THE CHALLENGE OF SUSTAINABILITY 7 (2000).

14. 1997 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT, supra note 4, at 8. "Here, efforts to reduce poverty need to go hand in hand with efforts to protect the environment." Id.

15. UNDP, ENDING POVERTY AND BUILDING PEACE THROUGH SUSTAINABLE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, ANNUAL REPORT 1996-1997 (1997), available at http://www.undp/org/dpa/publications/annualreport/ (last visited Nov. 21, 2001).

Women do 60[%] of the world's work but receive only one-tenth of its income. They own less than 1[%] of the land, have limited access to educational and financial resources and have less say than men in decisions affecting their future. Most of the household and community work done by women worldwide is unpaid and therefore ignored by household surveys and national censuses. The Human Development Report for 1995 estimates the value of women's invisible contribution to global economic output at U.S. $ 11 trillion of the total U.S. $ 23 trillion.

Id. at 10.

16. Id. at 24, 30, and 39.

17. 1997 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT, supra note 4, at 31 & 39. See also LOURDES BENERIA & SAVITRI BISNATH, GENDER AND POVERTY: AN ANALYSIS FOR ACTION (1996).

18. Id. at 2.

19. Id.

20. KOFI A. ANNAN, WE THE PEOPLES: THE ROLE OF THE UNITED NATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY 19 (2000), U.N. Sales No. E.00.1.16, available at http://www.un.org/millennium/sg/report/ch2.htm. (last visited Nov. 21, 2001).

21. James D. Wolfensohn, Foreward, in VINOD THOMAS ET AL., THE QUALITY OF GROWTH xiii (2000) [hereinafter QUALITY OF GROWTH].

22. 1998 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT, supra note 7, at 47, 50.

23. UNDP, HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 1996, at 2 (1996); 1998 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT, supra note 7, at 140-42.

24. ORGANIZATION FOR ECONOMIC COOPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT, SHAPING THE 21ST CENTURY: THE CONTRIBUTION OF DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION 1 (1996), available at http://www.oecd.org/dac/pdf/stc.pdf (last visited Nov. 21, 2001) [hereinafter SHAPING THE 21ST CENTURY].

25. U.S. Agency for International Development, Overview of U.S. Merchandise Trade, at http://www.usaid.gov/economic_growth/trdweb/overview.html (last visited Nov. 21, 2001). During the 1990s, the average annual growth of U.S. merchandise exports to the world was 5.8%. Even though the average annual growth in places like Latin America was higher (11.7% annually), the rates were very low in the poorest and neediest countries. For example, the average rate of growth of U.S. exports to Africa was 0.8%, and the growth rate was actually negative for subSaharan Africa. Most export growth was concentrated in a few developing countries, not in the least-developed countries. More broadly, about 70% of the U.S. exports were linked to OECD countries. See U.S. International Trade Commission, U.S. Trade by Geographic Regions, at http://dataweb.usitc.gov/scripts/Regions.asp (search performed by Monica Araya, Yale University doctoral student, on interactive website).

26. 2000 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT, supra note 11, at 171.

27. WORLD BANK, WORLD DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2000-2001: ATTACKING POVERTY 50 (2000) [hereinafter 2000-2001 WORLD DEVELOPMENT REPORT].

28. President's Remarks to Kosovo International Security Force Troops in Skopje, 35 WEEKLY COMP. PRES. DOC. 1170 (June 22, 1999).

29. Development Assistance Committee, OECD, Net ODA Flows (In Current U.S. Dollars) From 1950 to 1999, at http://www.oecd.org/dac/xls/longtermODA.xls (last updated Jan. 23, 2001).

30. U.S. OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT & BUDGET, BUDGET OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT, FISCAL YEAR 2002: HISTORICAL TABLES 46 (2001).

31. Development Assistance Committee, OECD, Net Official Development Assistance Flows in 2000, at http://www.oecd.org/media/release/ODA_april01.pdf (visited Nov. 21, 2001) (showing U.S. assistance to be 0.10% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2000) [hereinafter Development Assistance Committee].

32. Id.

33. Convention on the Rights of the Child, Nov. 20, 1989, 28 I.L.M. 1448 (1989), corrected at 29 I.L.M. 1340 (1990) (entered into force Sept. 2, 1990); United Nations, Status of Ratification, at http://www.unicef.org/crc/crc.htm (last visited Nov. 21, 2001).

34. Status of Ratification, supra note 33.

35. International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, opened for signature Dec. 19, 1966, 6 I.L.M. 360 (entered into force Jan. 3, 1976); United Nations, Status of Ratification, at http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf (last visited Nov. 21, 2001).

36. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, opened for signature Mar. 1, 1980, 19 I.L.M. 33 (entered into force Sept. 3, 1981); United Nations, Status of Ratification, at http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf (last visited Nov. 21, 2001).

37. Convention on Biological Diversity, June 5, 1992, 31 I.L.M. 818 (entered into force Dec. 29, 1993); United Nations, Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, at http://www.biodiv.org/world/parties.asp (last modified Mar. 20, 2001).

38. United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Dec. 10, 1982, U.N. Doc. A/CONF.62/122 (1982), reprinted in 21 I.L.M. 1261 (entered into force on Nov. 16, 1994); United Nations, Declarations or Statements Upon UNCLOS Ratification, at http://www.un.org/Depts/los/los_decl.htm (last visited Nov. 21, 2001).

39. Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production, and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction—Ottawa Convention, opened for signature Dec. 3, 1997, 36 I.L.M. 1507 (entered into force Mar. 1, 1999); United Nations, List of Ratifications, at http://www.un.org/News/ossg/mines.htm (last visited Nov. 21, 2001).

40. Jeffrey Sachs, Global Capitalism: Making It Work, ECONOMIST, Sept. 12, 1998, at 23.

41. QUALITY OF GROWTH, supra note 21, at 3.

42. Id.

43. 2000/2001 WORLD DEVELOPMENT REPORT, supra note 27, at 190.

44. UNDP, HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 1994, at 62 (1994).

45. UNITED NATIONS CONFERENCE ON TRADE AND DEVELOPMENT, FDI IN LEAST DEVELOPED COUNTRIES AT A GLANCE 2 (2001), available at http://www.unctad.org/en/pub/pubframe.htm (last visited Nov. 21, 2001).

46. UNDP, POVERTY AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT. THE SUB-SAHARAN AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE 5 (1997).

47. WORLD BANK, GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT FINANCE 2001, at 246 (2001), available at http://www.worldbank.org/prospects/gdf2001/voll-pdf/img.pdf (last visited Nov. 21, 2001).

48. Id.

49. JEFFREY SACHS, IMPLEMENTING DEBT RELIEF FOR HIPCs (Center for Int'l Dev., Harvard Univ. 1999) available at http://www.cid.harvard.edu/cidafrica/ (last visited Nov. 21, 2001).

50. OXFAM, MAKING DEBT RELIEF WORK: A TEST OF POLITICAL WILL (1998), available at http://www.oxfam.org.uk/policy/papers/hipcapr98.htm (last visited Nov. 21, 2001).

51. In February 2001, 22 heavily indebted poor countries were expected to qualify for debt service relief of approximately $ 34 billion (U.S.) under a 1999 initiative by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to provide "deeper, broader, and faster" debt relief to such countries. INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATION AND INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND, HEAVILY INDEBTED POOR COUNTRIES (HIPC) INITIATIVE: STATUS OF IMPLEMENTATION 3 (2001), available at http://www.imf.org/external/np/hipc/2001/042001.pdf. (last visited Nov. 21, 2001). When combined with other forms of debt relief, the external indebtedness of these countries is expected to be reduced by two-thirds. Id. at 4. These 22 countries are budgeting 65% of the funds freed up by debt relief for education and health care. Id. at 10. Nineteen other heavily indebted poor countries have not qualified for debt relief under this initiative. Most of them are experiencing armed conflict or major difficulties in governance. Id. at 3.

52. See Daniel C. Esty, The Case for a Global Environmental Organization, in MANAGING THE WORLD ECONOMY: FIFTY YEARS AFTER BRETTON WOODS 287 (Peter B. Kenen ed., 1994).

53. See supra note 29 (last updated Jan. 25, 2001).

54. See QUALITY OF GROWTH, supra note 21.

55. Id. at xxvii.

56. United Nations, UN Conferences: What Have They Accomplished?, at http://www.un.org/News/facts/confercs.htm (last visited Nov. 21, 2001).

57. SHAPING THE 21ST CENTURY, supra note 24.

58. Id. at 9.

59. UNITED NATIONS ET AL., 2000: A BETTER WORLD FOR ALL: PROGRESS TOWARD THE INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT GOALS (2000), available at http://www.paris21.org/betterworld/pdf/bwa_e.pdf (last visited Nov. 21, 2001).

60. United Nations Millennium Declaration, G.A. Res. 55/2, U.N. GAOR, 55th Sess., U.N. Doc. A/55/L.2 (Sept. 8, 2000), available at http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e.htm (last visited Nov. 21, 2001).

61. The G-7 should be distinguished in this regard from the five countries—Denmark, Luxemburg, Norway, the Netherlands, and Sweden—that contributed at least 0.7% of their GDPs to development assistance in 2000. See Development Assistance Committee, supra note 31.