STWR - Share The World's Resources

 

Rich countries must deliver more money directly to poor nations to avert a growing health and sanitation crisis spreading across the southern hemisphere, Oxfam will say today.

 

The dominance of the global pharmaceutical firms in providing medicine to the world's poor faces its strongest challenge yet at a meeting of World Health Organisation (WHO) in Geneva this week.

Poor women are getting pregnant unintentionally at considerably higher rates now than in the mid-1990s, and they are giving birth to many more unplanned children and having more abortions.

Some retrospective entertainment about World Water Day, the U.N.-mandated aqua-celebration each March, read Rule 12 of the World Bank's "Principled Pragmatism & Rules for Reformers." It goes: "Reforms must provide returns for the politicians who are willing to make changes." And the Bank report gives us proof that water reforms "can be good politics." It holds up two Indian politicians it sees as highly successful with water reforms. Chandrababu Naidu and Digvijay Singh.

Note that this report comes more than a year after Mr. Naidu suffered one of the worst defeats in the electoral history of Andhra Pradesh. And after Digvijay Singh, once a highly popular Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, was trounced at the hustings there. Both in 2004. Well after such "reforms" were unleashed on the public.

Still the Bank report India's Water Economy asserts that these reforms have proved to be good politics. "There is evidence that this was indeed the case for Mr. Singh in Madhya Pradesh. And the intensive formation of WUAs [water users associations] in Andhra Pradesh was certainly politically useful to Mr. Chandrababu Naidu, because farmers perceived this to be a reform which moved in the right direction. The bottom line is that ... it must be viewed as a `good thing' by sufficient numbers of people that they will consider voting for the politician who championed the reform."

Long-term economic progress comes mainly from the invention and spread of improved technologies.

The scientific revolution was made possible by the printing press, the industrial revolution by the steam engine, and India’s escape from famine by increased farm yields – the so-called “Green Revolution.” Today’s era of globalization emerged with the spread of computers and the Internet. Thus, when we seek solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems, they, too, are likely to be found, at least in part, in new technologies that can resolve old and seemingly intractable problems.

Consider poverty in Africa. Every conceivable explanation has been given, usually focusing on what Africans do wrong. But a visit to Africa’s villages makes clear that the problems have more to do with the struggle for survival under difficult physical conditions than with any special problems that are unique to African societies.

Africa’s farmers produce roughly one-third or less food per hectare of farmland than their counterparts around the world, resulting in massive hunger, which is exacerbated by a heavy disease burden. Malaria poses a unique challenge, owing in large part to Africa’s mosquito species, which are especially adept at transmitting the disease. Other tropical parasitic diseases imply similarly extraordinary burdens in Africa. Add the practical difficulties of broken-down roads and few cars and trucks, and economic isolation follows. So the challenges of survival are enormous.

In a recent report by the Taskforce for Child Survival & Development, it has been announced that for an estimated 92 cents, a person living in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) can be protected from five devastating, disabling diseases for an entire year.

Whilst Malaria, TB and AIDS have dominated the health development and aid agenda, there are many other diseases which can be easily controlled at a relatively minimal cost. The World Health Organisation has recognised this as an attainable target and one which fits in with the aims of the Millennium Development Goals (which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015).

The MDGs form a blueprint agreed to by all the world's countries and all the world's leading development institutions, aiming to spur unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world's poorest. The sixth MDG is to "halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and to halt and begin to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases." (see www.un.org/millenniumgoals for further details). These "major diseases" often called "neglected diseases", affect at least one billion people.