Governments have already thrown trillions of dollars into their own financial systems to save banks from going bust. They have also made it clear they will find whatever trillions more are necessary to stave off global financial meltdown. Now set these massive sums against the maximum of $60 billion a year that the United Nations said in 2000 was necessary to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) to slash Third World poverty by 2015.
At the very most the program to attack key issues such as destitution, high mortality, disease, polluted water sources and lack of education would have cost the First World $900 billion — a fraction of the cash that has been found to save the financial system. Yet even when rich countries were prospering, governments with a few exceptions such as the UK, fell seriously behind on their MDG promises.
It can with justice be asked how they could not find such relatively small sums for the world’s poorest people but can conjure up far bigger amounts when their own prosperous societies are threatened. Arguing the two crises are not equivalent simply does not wash. What precisely is the threat to the First World? There will be hardship, of course, as the recession destroys jobs. Those in work must eventually pay higher taxes to support teetering economies. But nobody is going to die in wealthy countries because of the dramatic economic collapse. Yet while the First World has prospered and as it now faces challenges that represent little more than frustration and financial cutbacks, people in the Third World, most particularly in Africa, have been and will continue to die for lack of the most basic necessities of life, which even in recession inhabitants of the First World will still take for granted. Clean water, sufficient food, proper health care, decent transport and education will not come to an end in rich countries. But it does not exist among hundreds of millions of citizens in the Third World, who have to survive on less than a single dollar a day.
UN Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon rightly warned yesterday that if wealthy countries now abandon their already inadequate efforts to fulfill their MDG commitments, it would be “the final blow that many of the poorest of the world’s poor simply cannot survive”.
This is not a matter of economics but of conscience and morality. While world leaders are busy agreeing on future regulation of international banking and how they will tackle the immediate risks to their economies, there is too little time being devoted to positive action to save the Third World poor, who remain powerless to help themselves. The options for them are truly grim. They do not face bankruptcy. They face death.
By ignoring their plight, the greed that drove the international financial system to disaster is actually being perpetuated by the governments who now so condemn it. If they can find huge sums of money to save their own citizens, they can find far smaller sums to save the truly poor.
