Jeffrey Sachs has a new book out. The renowned author and economist, in a follow-up to his 2005 best seller, “The End of Poverty,” continues his assessment of the global economy and what it will take to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
In the book titled, “Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet,” Sachs argues that unless the world comes together to face the four major challenges of global poverty, stabilising the global population, narrowing the gaps between the rich and the poor and protecting the environment in a spirit of global cooperation, it will not be possible to engage in sustainable growth and development.
These challenges are too huge for individual countries to go about solving on their own, and if the world’s leaders continue in the current mode of unilateralist attempts at piecemeal solving of these challenges without the joint global effort that is really required, by the turn of this century, the problems will be insurmountable.
And that the consequence will be devastation of the human population, of the entire global eco-system and an end to the efforts of the past two centuries to increase prosperity, develop new technologies and meet human needs satisfactorily.
Without this global effort, current attempts to stop the harmful effects of climate change, to bring in more and more of the earth’s population into a share of global prosperity and to find manageable and efficient ways to use the earth’s ever dwindling natural resources will be futile.
This analysis of the current state of the global economy offers a new and important framework to take a fresh look at why the less developed countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America have failed over the past half century to make much progress in the march towards greater prosperity and sustainable development.
It offers an opportunity to go beyond the usual scapegoats of poor leadership, corruption, mismanagement, politics and greed. It shifts the focus to the more useful notion of the interconnectedness of the world, and the need to make that interconnectedness more permanent as humanity struggles to deal with these four paramount global issues.
From the perspective of a country like Uganda this will entail moving away from the narrow lens that says one person (the President) has all the answers to Uganda’s problems and needs, to a much broader outline that acknowledges that the issues of poverty and sustainable development for all Uganda requires not just the input of Ugandan policy makers, but also the involvement of the entire population of the country and a strong emphasis of global partners who can share resources and know how. It is going to require a massive change of attitude on the part of all people.
Take for example the issue of the dwindling natural resources of the entire world. If Ugandan policy makers think that in order to develop further they need to encourage industrialisation and by that they essentially mean increasing production of sugar cane in order to increase sugar exports and thereby increase marginally foreign exchange earnings, then it will not matter how much people complain about how harmful it would be to do this by destroying one of Uganda’s major natural resources, Mabira Forest.
Rather, the potential future harm of the diminishing global cover of the earth’s surface will mean nothing against the potential short-term gains from increased sugarcane production.
In order to allow Ugandan policy makers to see the long term effects of what they might be contemplating, there is the need for the global community to continually reinforce the negative consequences of a decline in the coverage of the earth’s surface with natural forests. Sachs argues that part of the result of dwindling natural resources is the multiplication of the negative effects of continued use beyond the rate at which they can regenerate naturally, and these negative effects tend to cause much wider global damage than are currently understood by most people.
The result is that the impact of destroying Mabira Forest does not affect Uganda alone, but the entire world, through its contribution to the increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to dangerous levels that make changes in the earth’s temperatures much harsher than they would otherwise be. Ugandan policy makers need to understand this interplay.
The fact that there was a critical global summit in 1992 on the negative impact of increased chlorofluorocarbons in the earth’s atmosphere should make these policy makers think twice about their actions. The fact that increasing climate change will have a negative impact on rainfall, water levels in lakes rivers seas and temperatures has to be taken into account if leaders think that they are going to make positive gains in development. Without this interconnected outlook, policies supposedly geared towards success will lead to ultimate failure.