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Global wealth must be shared

January 3, 2004

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Illustration: John Spooner

It's in our self-interest to ameliorate poverty in developing countries, writes Graham Barrett.

World events rush through our lives with such speed that we are challenged to discern the trends that one day will define the history of our time.

How should we remember 2003 as it slips into the mist? It is already marked down as a period of terrorism and tyranny engendered by a Middle East that is battling to come to terms with itself and a wider world that is dominated by secular modernism.

This struggle will continue in its various forms for many years, with its appeals for attention clouding our view and understanding of the deeper shifts in the evolution of humanity.

It encourages us to dwell on doom rather than reflect on the slower forces at work on history that in recent decades have lent the billion people of the developed world a much higher standard of living than our forebears, from quality of life and opportunity to longevity, health, education and experience.

"If the diver always thought of the shark," as the old Arabic saying has it, "he would never lay hands on the pearl." The pearl we need to grasp is that after a few thousand years we have finally developed the means to start conquering the deprivation, disease and despair that once made life for all but a lucky few a short and feverish stab at survival.

How quickly we take progress for granted. One excellent reason not to do so in our complacent consumerism is that another billion people on the planet are still stuck in a Hobbesian hell, making whoopie on less than a dollar a day. A bit better off are the four billion souls between the two extremes, clinging precariously to the ladder of advancement.

While many observers of the global condition would identify terrorism, say, or globalisation as the force about which we should fret most, a more considered thinker might nominate the growing gap between rich and poor.

The pearls on which we in the West have laid our hands need to be shared with greater sincerity, commitment and effectiveness.

Average real incomes of the rich billion are now about 80 times those of the poorest billion, a gulf that is not only wider than at any time in the past but continuing to expand. The distortion that this is imposing on the fabric of human affairs is fundamental and profound. It extends far beyond the conscience of the Western politician weighing a foreign aid budget or one of his or her voters deciding whether to contribute to a humanitarian organisation.

In today's globalising world, with its information and communications revolution plus increasingly easy means of travel and growing numbers of migrants seeking escape from lack of opportunity, no country - however advanced and well defended - can consider itself isolated from waves whose origins may be a continent or two away.

Look at the way in which France is struggling with its once inviolable identity, banning all visible expressions of religious adherence as a way of trying to forbid the Islamic scarf in a society of secular values where in a decade or so two citizens in 10 will be of that faith.

Globalisation is the prism through which this huge disparity between rich and poor is visible. Terrorism is partly a reaction to the surge in progress, prosperity and liberalisation that marks out the West as the part of the world to be despised on one hand, desired on the other.

If the developed world is to maintain its poise and continue its advancement, it must face the challenges of other societies and cultures or fall prey to their failures and resentments. The pearls on which we in the West have laid our hands, in other words, need to be shared with greater sincerity, commitment and effectiveness if for no other reason than that it is in our selfish interest to do so.

In this we have no choice. Drugs, disease, disorder, conflict, transnational crime, terrorism, mass migration and other forces are the products of poor, distressed and moribund societies. Globalisation is delivering them to our door.

"The wall that many people imagined to separate the rich countries from the poor came down on September 11 two years ago," as the president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, has put it.

We must deal with the causes of these failures where they exist or face a future in which the people of those countries increasingly seek escape in growing narcotics - as the Afghans, Burmese, Bolivians and others already do - or in extremism - as we witness on the Islamic fringe - or in the safety and prosperity of the developed world as we see from the annual inflow of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and economic migrants.

Many of those who leave for the West are from the most motivated and better educated parts of their societies, enhancing their new societies even as they deprive their old ones.

Wars are ruining the lives of a billion people, most of them already in the category of the wretched.

Civilians - women and children, primarily - are the main victims. As a World Bank study has indicated, countries are at high risk of civil war if they combine low income with economic stagnation and dependence on primary commodity exports.

When rebellion or anarchy intervene, such societies are easy prey for maladies that are now readily transferable to other countries and continents. This is the reason Australia is stepping into those sensitive waters of neo-colonialism by intervening in the Solomons and Papua New Guinea.

The lesson of our time is that we need to do everything we can to prevent global problems from unfolding rather than trying to fix things after the event. Restoring Iraq, once a prosperous country, is ruinously expensive at an estimated $50 billion or so. Rebuilding Europe after the Nazis cost twice as much. Such sums, saved through prevention, would be big enough to start solving global problems.

Prevention can only be employed collectively. This is the issue that keeps Kofi Annan awake at night as he seeks ways of persuading the big powers to allow the United Nations to adapt to changing threats and give it the resources it needs to deal with them.

The crisis of confidence in the UN and other multilateral institutions is in reality a crisis of confidence in humanity itself. Only the application of that rare and delicate flower - political will - can overcome this problem. Here, globalisation is demonstrating the importance of co-operation.

The West, China, Russia, India and other powers are all vulnerable to these transnational forces and are slowly realising that they can be overcome only by reasoning together. Reason, as Euripides said, can wrestle with terrors, and overthrow them.

Graham Barrett was an external affairs adviser to the World Bank 1995-2003 and is a former foreign correspondent and foreign editor of The Age.




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