My responsibility is to make sure that Australia’s generosity matches the need of those who are in distress. - John Howard, 5 January 2005
The Make Poverty History campaign has inspired global solidarity. Nation states and their citizens have tightened their focus on the plight of the poor. The challenge of ending poverty has progressed from an idea of good intent to a global campaign, enthusiastically embraced. A global coalition of goodwill is clearly evident. A music festival in the slums of Maputo; an open air concert in Lusaka; a peaceful rally in El Salvador; rock concerts; white wrist-band days; debt relief by G8 leaders—all in the name of poverty reduction. Can the current mood of idealism be converted so that the ideal becomes real?
A child dies every 15 seconds from water-borne diseases. One woman dies every minute as a result of complications in pregnancy or childbirth. Of these, 99 per cent are in developing countries. More than eight million lives are needlessly lost each year as a result of inadequate health-care facilities. While it is difficult not to despair at the chilling reality of global poverty, there is good reason for hope.
Although certainty cannot be attached to the task of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, evidence indicates that the challenge can be pursued with optimism. In The End of Poverty: How we can make it Happen in our Lifetime (Penguin, 2005), Jeffery Sachs, development economist and special adviser to UN Secretary Kofi Annan, methodically maps out a ‘way towards the path of peace and prosperity, based on detailed understanding of how the world economy has gotten to where it is today, and how our generation could mobilise our capacities in the coming 20 years to eliminate the extreme poverty that remains’. His account is one of ending poverty in our time. He does not offer a prediction as to what will happen, but an explanation of what can happen. Through fairer trade, debt relief, and more and better aid, Sachs argues that our generation can be the first to choose to end extreme poverty by 2025.
It is a sentiment shared by Fr Bruce Duncan cssr in his recent discussion paper Ending Hunger—How far can we go? (Australian Catholic Social Justice Council, Sydney). For Duncan, the challenge facing Western countries is a profoundly moral one. Are we, he asks, ‘prepared to commit a tiny fraction of our unprecedented economic