Crowds stirred with both passion and concern in Memorial Auditorium Thursday night as Columbia professor, development economist and public figure in foreign aid policy debates Jeffrey Sachs posed to the audience a staggering challenge: to bring an end to global poverty.
Bringing an end to poverty is “the defining challenge of our time,” Sachs said Thursday.
He suggested that many global problems stem from the core problem of an unsustainable planet and that answers to war and peace might be addressed by tackling sustainable development. For Sachs, these global challenges can be tackled by achieving material progress while nursing a healthier, sustainable planet.
“We categorize [terrorist] crises as Al Qaeda; we characterize those crises as Islamic extremism,” Sachs said. “We talk about political or military solutions to these crises…I find it tragically misdiagnosed.”
Sachs identified “a stretch of about 10,000 miles of instability” throughout the world that suffer from hunger and poverty — critical drivers of powerlessness that can yield to paths of arrested development. The dry lands of Africa, the Middle East and central Asia, he said, are at “the leading edge of catastrophe on the planet.”
The food sector, Sachs suggested, is “the number one driver” of the dire circumstances felt in impoverished regions already hit hard by climate change.
Sachs warned that these challenges will only be exacerbated with continued population boom, especially in Africa, in the next forty years.
According to Sachs, two major challenges right now are vital resource depletion and environmental degradation. He suggested that both of these problems are very much interrelated and require creative and dynamic solutions.
“Designing a path to sustainable development takes us beyond the normal — the normal of how our social institutions work,” Sachs said. He suggested that the solutions to sustainable development cannot be answered with conventional or simple answers.
“We don’t have the institutions yet to address [critical development problems],” he said. “These are problems that the market cannot solve.”
He instead suggested funding research at universities to develop innovative technologies and recommended a global taxation system that uses greenhouse gas levies to fund global aid projects.
Sachs drew from criticism about American military expenditure and the lack of will to supply developing nations with the foreign aid required to help lift them out of poverty.
“Our capacity to cooperate globally is pretty slim indeed,” he said.
Sachs remained resolute, however, about the critical role that he believes young people today will play in designing a path to success.
“I want our universities to see themselves as global problem solvers and not simply observers,” he said. “I believe that in the end we can achieve success in a human and a values point of view.”