Sachs Reith Lecture No.4

Jeffrey Sachs fourth lecture is online;

Lecture 4: Economic Solidarity for a Crowded Planet

Some selections from the transcript;

JULIAN MORRIS: How do you explain Nigeria's poverty then, because ... ... oil wells.

JEFFREY SACHS: Yes let's please understand how Botswana got wealthy, because it's perfectly plain that it was very poor people living in the Kalahari desert, until the diamonds came. And with all that good governance, let's remember also that Botswana has the highest AIDS prevalence rate in the world. So let's not over-simplify that it's all just corruption and mismanagement. Sometimes it's other things as well. President Guebuza, President Kufuor, President Toure, President Kikwete, and many others are not big men. This is just a slur, and I'm surprised it's a slur here where you know Africa, and you understand it's fifty-four countries. It's not one mass of homogenous corruption.

SUE LAWLEY: What people listening to this think to themselves is, look, as we know, the figure is over the past fifty years 2.3 trillion dollars has been given in aid somewhere out there - why hasn't anything moved on, why hasn't anything changed?

JEFFREY SACHS: That preposterous figure confuses everybody rather than illuminates. If you take 2.3 trillion dollars and you divide it by sixty years, and you divide it by three billion people in the developing countries, it comes out to thirteen dollars per person per year, that's all. We've spent seventeen trillion dollars on the military in the US alone during that period.

ALISTAIR McFARQUHAR: I'm Alistair McFarquhar, retired, … from the University of Cambridge, but once the first economist working for government in Africa - with the possible exception of South Africa. Take the two biggest problems generally acknowledged, malaria and AIDS. The problem with malaria is a failure of Western science and green politics to use DDT. Take the use of contraceptives to control AIDS in South Africa - that's a combination of the juju and the Vatican Church. There's nothing complicated about it.

JEFFREY SACHS: We did not try for a long time to control malaria, and DDT is one possibility. It's only one of many tools and it's not appropriate in some places and is appropriate in other places. It turns out to be more expensive than long-lasting insecticide treated bed nets, less effective in some areas. So where you want to use that tool among many is a scientific and ecological question.

SUE LAWLEY: What about the juju and the Catholic Church?

JEFFREY SACHS: I think that, again, the South African position on AIDS has been despicable, and it's only recently changed. But as I hear all of these things I can tell you of twenty-five or thirty countries desperately trying to do the right thing. But AIDS treatment requires help and it requires financing, and it's only very recently that that has started. So in all of the statements that are made, there are fifty-four countries, very different circumstances, many countries desperately trying. The one thing that is relatively consistent though is that the level of our effort and attention is far below what we have promised and far below what's needed.