A year, later Sachs is still unafraid to talk dramatically. And he’s not much more optimistic. In a recent appearance at Harvard University he didn’t pull any punches, telling audience members that 2003 was an “utter disaster.” What made the last year so terribly bad? “It was a year in which almost every decent agenda in the world was overtaken by war, by the loss of life, by a failure to address impoverishment, disease and environmental degradation.” Come on, Professor Sachs, tell us how you really feel.
But much of the economist’s tough talk may in fact be justified. As 2003 ends, the outlook on some of Sachs’s and the Earth Institute’s signature issues–stopping global warming, fighting the spread of AIDS and ending global poverty and hunger–remains rather dismal. Not that the year didn’t have its bright spots. In his State of the Union address, President Bush raised hopes for a major push to focus the world’s attention on the African AIDS crisis when he pledged $15 billion over five years to fight the disease in Africa. By year’s end, Congress had funded most of the $3 billion first installment of that aid package. But many global AIDS experts worried that, distracted by Iraq and other problems, the administration would fail to give the global AIDS epidemic its proper front-burner position, even as the year saw infection rates in many Asian countries reach unprecedented highs.
On another key Sachs issue, economic aid for developing countries, 2003 wasn’t much more encouraging. Sachs continually reminds audiences of rich country’s long-standing pledge to give 0.7 percent of their GDP in aid to developing countries. “The rich countries have a combined GNP of $25 trillion this year,” he told an audience in Geneva in October. “They’ve repeatedly said that they should take concrete steps toward the international target of 0.7 percent for donor assistance, which would be $175 billion a year. Compare that with the current rate of $50 billion a year. There is a gap of $125 billion between promise and delivery.”
Sachs holds the Bush administration responsible for the international community’s failure to get serious on these and other issues. In his Harvard address, he argued that the administration’s actions in Iraq this year symbolized a fundamental misunderstanding of America’s global role. “We are not the world,” he said. “We think we’re fighting terrorism by terrorizing the world … We have a lot of ability to bomb places; we have no capacity to turn on the lights in Baghdad, and we have no capacity to run places.”
But Sachs hasn’t given up all hope, yet. Indeed, he still tells audiences around the world that as grave as the world’s problems may be, their solutions are relatively uncomplicated and possible to find. At Harvard, he argued that rich countries have “the technology, the science and the opportunity,” to responsibly face down the planet’s most pressing problems. He claimed that he remains optimistic that change could come quickly. “The millennium,” he said, “could be an opportunity for a breakthrough of the quality of life on the planet and a chance for the poor to escape lives of hunger and impoverishment.”
