The Guilfordian

With a mix of emotion, I read your coverage of the protests of the World Bank in Washington last week (Guilfordian Oct 26) -- pleased to see student activism on issues of global poverty but disappointed to see so little discussion of the policy issues in debate. Commitment among American students is vital if we as a nation are to contribute positively to raising people's incomes around the world and reduce global poverty.

Progress is being made. Since 1990, the number of people living in dire poverty - the $1 per day - has fallen from about 1.25 billion to less than 985 million. The number of people with access to clean water has increased, infant mortality has fallen, and the percent of women dying in child birth has declined. Average incomes throughout the developing world have risen substantially.

However, this performance is not good enough. In the next 25 years the world will add some 1.5 billion people to our numbers. Some 97% of these people will be born in today's poor nations. This poses huge challenges to the planet.

Helping poor nations to develop health systems that provide for a rich and productive life is one. We are on the verge of stamping out type-1 polio, for example - but pockets of unvaccinated communities in poverty-stricken parts of Nigeria, India and Afghanistan still harbor this highly contagious, crippling disease. Left untreated, threaten to export it to the rest of the world. Yet the multilateral organizations dealing with this problem still do not have all the funds they need to complete this mission.

Or consider the fact that rising incomes will accentuate global warming. Because poor countries consume less than one tenth of the average energy per capita energy consumption of the rich countries, total energy usage will rise throughout the world. While today's stock of greenhouses gases is a consequence of rich countries' past growth, a major share of increases to that stock will come from developing countries. Moreover, the impact of global warming are falling most severely on the world's poor. Africa will experience severe water shortages, increasing vulnerability to warm weather diseases such as malaria, and weather-induced lower land productivity in agriculture. In Vietnam and Bangladesh, rising sea levels will displace huge populations. Melting glaciers threaten already scarce water supplies of poor people in China, India and Peru. Add it all up and global warming seems likely to produce the strongest impulse to new waves of human migration in history.

The World Bank is one multilateral agency working on these problems. It is one of the largest financiers of environment, education, and health projects in the world. And American support for developmental assistance is crucial to the Bank's success. Yet every year Americans spend fewer pennies of their dollar incomes on development assistance.

The world -- and the World Bank -- needs American student involvement. But we need more than protest. We need thoughtful suggestions for better policies -- and, even more, we need a commitment to positive action that would help improve people's lives. The Guilfordian is to be commended for covering the protests in Washington, and I hope it will extend that coverage to the substantive policy issues as well.

Richard Newfarmer Special Representative to the UN and WTO World Bank Geneva, Switzerland October 28, 2007

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