August 1, 2002: Jeffrey Sachs discusses Cambodia and the challenges of international development with host Jamie Rubin.
Jamie Rubin: Joining me tonight is Dr. Jeffrey Sachs. He has served as a key advisor on economic transitions around the world and last December was appointed special advisor to the secretary general of the United Nations. He is charged with organizing an international response to world poverty. He's also the head of the Earth Institute here at Columbia University. Jeffrey Sachs, welcome.
Jeff Sachs: Thanks very much.
Jamie Rubin: Jeff, we just saw a film that showed extreme poverty in Cambodia. Why is this America's business?
Jeff Sachs: I think the whole world would sit up at the images that we've seen in -- more than take notice -- be shocked. These are people fighting for survival, fighting to stay alive day to day to get enough to eat, to be able to earn the meager amount to be able to go see a doctor for a life-saving antibiotic. And here we are in the 21st, and you see people fighting for their survival every day. And of course Cambodia, with its population of a little more than 10 million, is an impoverished country. But it exemplifies a struggle that's much more general. There are hundreds of millions of people for whom every day is a fight for survival . . . for the food to eat, for the way to stay clear of diseases that could kill them, kill their children, destroy their families, destroy their livelihoods.
Jamie Rubin: But for Americans, should we think of this as a moral issue, as the same reason one gives charity at ones church or to people on the street? Or are their national security implications of this kind of poverty around the world?
Jeff Sachs: Well, surely it is a moral issue in . . . in an obvious sense. And it's even more a moral issue when one looks carefully at all the things that the wealthy countries could [do] to make huge differences to these people's lives. But it's more than that. We are in an inter-connected world, where our fates are tied up with the fates of Cambodia, with the fates of Nigeria.
If you thought a year ago what's the place in the world that could never hurt the United States, you'd look at the map, you'd pick the middle of nowhere, as it were . . . you'd pick Afghanistan. We learned in a very graphic way in this country that in a globalized world society all of us are in this together. And that means Cambodians, that means impoverished Africans, that means those struggling for survival and development in the Andes war . . . war and drug trafficking are the daily fair to those in Central Asia and other parts of the struggling world.
Jamie Rubin: Let's look at Afghanistan, then, for a moment. Do you think that what happened in Cambodia, ravaged by war, disease, genocide over decades -- could that happen in Afghanistan if we don't stay the course and help rebuild that country, the same kind of poverty that we're seeing in Cambodia?
Jeff Sachs: We don't have to deal in hypotheticals. This is what happened in Afghanistan, a society that collapsed, where civil war, political vacuum, warlordism ended up bringing the Taliban, ended up making that base in which terrorism could take hold. In Cambodia, we don't have to speculate if whether America could somehow be implicated with Cambodia in a common fate. We fought a land war in Southeast Asia. This isn't so long ago. This is a generation back.
In other words, these are not your hypotheticals - that poor places in the world somehow could threaten the United States. This is the reality. Except we keep finding each time that we are hit that way that it seems to us a surprise rather than understanding that that's the nature of the world that we're living in.
Jamie Rubin: But some Americans would look out at this kind of extreme poverty in Cambodia in the film we just saw and said "Well, that's happening all over the world." How typical is what we saw in the film in Cambodia?
Jeff Sachs: We were looking at the lives of some of the poorest of the poor in the world. Fortunately, a lot of economic development has taken place in the so-called developing world, which is five-sixths of humanity. The part that's stuck in this incredible impoverishment of the kind that we saw is probably about one billion of the six billion of us on the planet. It's about a billion. Maybe by some ways of thinking, one and a half billion, possibly two, who are struggling for survival. I define this kind of extreme poverty as poverty that kills. Not the poverty of inconvenience, not the poverty of jealousy, not the poverty of wanting to catch up with one's neighbor. But the kind of poverty that threatens to take life. And not just threatens . . . takes millions of lives every year of people that are too impoverished for an adequate diet, that are too impoverished to see a doctor, that are too impoverished to gain access to clean water that they need for survival.
Jamie Rubin: So you're looking at a billion people out there who need help. Who's got the resources to help a billion people?
Jeff Sachs: Well, of course, what history shows is that a great part of economic progress takes place within the countries themselves as education spreads, as the technologies that have been developed in modern life take old in other parts of the world. Indeed, in the film we were seeing, a fiber optic cable being laid. Now, the irony was the back-breaking, life-threatening work to lay it. But, after all, let's remember also that there will be a fiber optic cable there and it will reach Phenom Pehn. And sooner or later, and we hope sooner, it will reach villages in Cambodia and in Vietnam and in Thailand so that it will make a difference.
But what's also true when you're looking at such extreme poverty, countries that have been broken by disease, often broken by terrible civil war, by events outside of their country, more recently by dramatic climate change. If they don't have a helping hand, a hand that can help to provide the education and the urgent needs to allow these system to lift themselves up, then inside of being on that positive path of development, which much of the world has caught, they can find themselves in a downward spiral in which the disarray of society, the conflict, the disease, the lack of education, the displacement of families, the separation of families, even the slavery that we heard talked about in that film can cause a downward spiral that eventually leads to mass violence, unwanted mass migration, the spread of disease, such as is taking place in Southeast Asia with AIDS right now threatening the whole region, including Cambodia.
And if you don't catch that until you get calamity -- that's when it really comes back to haunt the United States and others. So just viewing this as a spectator sport -- if you're very cynical -- or viewing this as a tragedy in which we shouldn't get involved is a huge mistake, given what we can do. Given our own humanity and our own souls, but given our direct foreign policy, security, public health needs to prevent these kinds of crises from spinning out of control.
Jamie Rubin: But let's look at the irony of this fiber optic cable now. Here you have jobs being provided to impoverished Cambodias, terrible conditions they're working under. But the jobs wouldn't exist if it weren't for the fiber optics cable. And yet some of the advocates of helping the poor in Cambodia would criticize this kind of fiber optic plan, because the jobs were not up to Western standards. Where do you stand on this globalization doubt where some believe that by bringing fiber optic cables to places like Cambodia we end up harming the people there?
Jeff Sachs: I think first it's important to understand the people that we saw were coming from the villages for temporary work, and then they were hoping to earn some money that they would bring back to the village. Cambodia, like many impoverished places, like most of the most impoverished places, is basically a rural agrarian society, with 80-90 percent of the households in peasant subsistence agriculture. The life in the countryside is so shockingly poor it's hard for us as Americans to understand it. Without water and sanitation, without access to health care, without connections to a power grid, to put a computer online and so forth. This desperation, this is the poverty that kills people.
Jamie Rubin: But would they be better off with kerosene for their lamps, as the man said in the film, or helping build a fiber optic cable that no Cambodians are likely to ever use?
Jeff Sachs: Well, the idea is to understand first how extreme the impoverishment in the rural areas is, to understand why people take back-breaking jobs which threaten them physically. In the countryside, the dangers, the risks to their health, the extreme impoverishment and hungry is even worse in many parts of the country. Now, these jobs were temporary jobs. This was to earn a little income maybe to put the kerosene in the lamp.
The kinds of jobs that are more persisting in delivering income are what also is sometimes criticized here. But in Cambodia, it's the garment factories, what are called the sweatshops. But those are the places, in Phnom Penh and in the other urban areas, which are providing the first food hold on the ladder out of extreme, death level impoverishment. And it's getting that foot on the ladder, and then the next step and then the next step, which is the essence of the process of economic development.
Now, what I think is crucial to understand is that some places are in such extreme poverty that even lifting that foot to the first rung is nearly impossible. You have to have enough energy. You have to physically have enough nutrition to get that foot up there. Your leg has to be there. If there are landmines everywhere, that is not just a literate disaster, but it's also terrible for a society that can't get to even the first rung on the ladder.
So creating jobs, even humble jobs, allowing the shift from the extreme back-breaking, life-threatening rural poverty, to new sectors to manufacturers, to services, that is the development. But while some free market fundamentalists think "Oh, that can all happen by itself," and others bemoan it even happening, I see something in between that, yes, that is a foot on the ladder, but we shouldn't presume that it can take care of itself and we shouldn't watch millions of people dropping from the ladder from extreme hunger, from disease, from the death of impoverishment while they're trying to rise. We can help make this a civilized and dignified and much more assured process than it is.
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