Readings
OPINION US bailout no excuse for sellout- Herald Sun
29/09/2008
IF IT were valued as a country, the US Government bailout of Wall Street would be the 21st largest economy in the world.
The Bush plan to underwrite $US700 billion worth of bad loans has a price tag that surpasses the combined gross national products of the 26 countries that make up middle and western Africa.
It is also 14 times greater than the $50 billion in additional aid funding the developed world promised in 2005 to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals.
As world leaders, including Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, converged on the UN General Assembly meeting in New York to take stock of their 2005 commitment, the debate about ending poverty in the developing world was swamped by the bailout.
In Australia, controversy over the Prime Minister's attendance caused further distance from the poverty agenda.
In his address to the General Assembly, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon highlighted the need to ensure the focus remains on alleviating poverty in the face of the global economic crisis.
Along with many members of non-government organisations, I was at the UN to add my voice on ending world poverty and to make the case that a bailout of the world's richest must not become an excuse to sell out the world's poorest.
In New York, we launched the Global Poverty Project, aimed at applying pressure on governments like ours to match their words with deeds on ending world poverty.
In practical terms, that means meeting targets for aid spending, eradicating crippling debt, and reviving multilateral trade talks that could drive economic growth in poorer countries.
At the rate we're going, we will fail to meet the Millennium Development Goals to halve extreme poverty by 2015.
If we meet the aid target of 0.7%, it could mean the survival of 200,000 children in our region who would otherwise die from poverty-related causes.
At the landmark UN meeting, Mr Rudd and other world leaders were told that at the halfway point to the target date of 2015, the world's richest countries - the G8 - had only delivered 14 per cent of their promised aid increase and debt forgiveness had slowed significantly.
On every measure, the richest countries in the world are once again failing to harness their economic and humanitarian power to wipe out extreme poverty.
They blame the challenges of the credit crunch, the cost of wars or domestic political issues.
These are not reasons for inaction - they are excuses for neglect.
For all the economic discomfort caused by events on Wall Street, few will die as a result.
By the same token, it's fair to say that not one of the billion people living on less than $1 a day had their savings invested when the financial markets tumbled.
The swiftness with which we tackled the collapse in the financial markets stands in stark contrast to the glacial progress we make in combating the catastrophe of extreme poverty.
Some kind of bailout is clearly necessary, but it is not an either/or proposition.
Both must happen.
The only explanation for such a vast divergence in approaches to these crises is their political urgency.
If leaders felt they would be punished at the ballot box by neglecting global poverty, that urgency would doubtless appear.
We need to let politicians know that bailing out Wall Street while selling out the world's poor is bad policy and bad politics. We must hold them to account because we have the resources to lift the world's poorest out of poverty. But do we have the will?
Hugh Evans is the founder of the Oaktree Foundation and was 2004 Young Australian of the Year
