The end of poverty is a choice, not a forecast. There are a billion people on Earth fighting daily for their survival. The world has committed, in the Millennium Development Goals, to cut extreme poverty by half by 2015. By 2025, extreme poverty can be banished.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has dramatically raised the stakes. Now, he must deliver.
The Blair Africa Commission is a masterful display of diagnosis and politics. Africa’s leading development thinkers and Britain’s political leaders are aligned on a sound diagnosis and course of action.
Blair has promised that Africa and development aid will be at the core of this year’s Group of Eight (G8) summit, which he will host in Scotland in July. Africans are daring to hope that this time offered help will not be just empty words.
The ways out of the poverty trap can be found. The financial costs of the needed development aid are quite manageable as 0,7% of the national incomes of the donor nations is all that’s needed.
While the United Kingdom has raised the banner of fighting poverty in Africa, the United States has armed only for its war against terror.
The US spends 0,15% of its national income on aid, while devoting nearly 5% to the military. Is a superpower that devotes 30 times more in spending to the military than to development aid a reliable partner in the fight against extreme poverty?
The money, including the US contribution, needs to be Blair’s focus in the lead-up to the July G8 summit, since the fight against extreme poverty cannot be won on rhetoric alone.
Africa faces three pressing problems that were overcome in Asia 40 years ago. The first is growing enough food.
Asia had its green revolution, Africa has not. The biggest difference is biophysical.
Asia’s breadbaskets are in the great river systems flowing from the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau. The Indus, Ganges, Mekong and their vast floodplains have enabled monsoon Asia to develop the world’s finest systems of irrigated, high-input farming.
African agriculture, by contrast, is overwhelmingly rain-fed, without the floodplains and monsoons to underpin large-scale irrigation. The African savannah, with its long dry seasons and irregular rainy seasons, is home to hundreds of millions of poor subsistence farmers and their families.
Yet modern science now points the way to a 21st-century African green revolution. Improved water management, combined with proven methods of replenishing Africa’s soil nutrients and improved seeds adapted to African conditions, now make it possible for Africa to achieve the same agricultural breakthrough that Asia achieved two generations ago.
Africa’s second challenge is the control of killer diseases. Africa’s children are dying of malaria, diarrhoea, respiratory infection, chronic under-nutrition, and the lack of neonatal care. In many places, 200 of every 1 000 children die before their fifth birthday.
The most immediate campaign should be against malaria, a disease that will claim perhaps 5 000 African children today.
Africa’s third challenge is the lack of basic transport, power and communications infrastructure.
Africa’s farm families need all-weather roads to get fertilizer into the villages and crops out to the market. Africa’s villages need trucks to rush a dying child or mother in complicated labour to a district hospital. Africa’s small businesses need cellphones to get the latest market quote. The necessary investments are clear, and not particularly complex.
If the US and a united Europe honour their long-standing — and long- neglected — pledge of 0,7% of gross national product, then Africans and other impoverished people on the planet will roll up their sleeves and get to work saving themselves and ultimately helping to save the rest of us as well. — Â