Media Toolkit - Jeffrey Sachs Speech

Jeffrey Sachs

Jo, thank you so much for the honor to be here.  Mr. President, Mr. Governor, Mr. Mayor, Tererai, distinguished members of the dais, and ladies and gentlemen.  Each generation faces its greatest challenge.  Ours is to live safely, prosperously and sustainably on a very crowded planet.  Our world is under stresses that we have never experienced before: manmade climate change, water scarcity and instantaneous inter-connections in finance, trade, politics, terror, war and infectious disease.  It’s as true today as when Benjamin Franklin said it two and a quarter centuries ago, the quote: “We must all hang together or assuredly we will all hang separately.”  The difference is that today the entire world must hang together to solve problems of common concern.  Us versus them is an ideology of the past. 

We, together, in a common fight for our children’s future is the challenge that brings us here together today.  We needed what will be a historic site in the future.  Not only are we here celebrating the new, splendid green building of Heifer International, but we are celebrating the new form of collective action of our time.  In a beautiful spot on the banks of the Arkansas River, we have the triangle of political leadership represented by the Clinton Library and by President Clinton’s presence with us today, academic and scientific leadership represented by the new Clinton School for Public Service of the University of Arkansas in the old Choctaw Railway Depot, beautiful building, and, of course, private sector, non-profit, and philanthropic leadership represented by Heifer International and its many friends and supporters.  Public sector, academia, and private hands are united on this spot to solve global problems and to promote peace. 

This is history in the making here and millions of people will flock to this site in future years for understanding, inspiration and participation in the great challenges of our time.  We are here today because the connection of public leadership, science, academia and private initiative can accomplish something that no earlier generation could even conceive of accomplishing.   And that is to end extreme poverty on our planet in our generation by the year 2025.  Our country and all other nations in the world have adopted the “Millennium Development Goals” to cut hunger, extreme poverty and disease by half or more by the year 2015.  These “Millennium Goals” can and should be our halfway station to the great work of our generation: the end of extreme poverty by the year 2025. 

I visit the villages of Africa many times each year.  Just a few weeks ago, I saw children dying before my eyes of malaria.  Two to three million children in Africa will die this year of a disease that is preventable by an insecticide-treated net that costs $7 and that lasts five years and which is a disease that is curable by a treatment course of medicine that costs $1: two to three million deaths per year.  Yet the poorest of the poor are too poor to pay and we in the rich world have been too neglectful to make up the difference.  Even after our government recently announced an expanded anti- malaria effort, the amount of spending announced by the U.S. Government over the next five years, $1.2 billion, will be less than we spend on the military in a single day.  One day’s Pentagon spending trumps five years’ worth of U.S. spending on malaria control that would save millions of lives in the coming years. 
Americans know now that we are on the wrong course and that something needs to change.  They know that military approaches will never stabilize the world.  We are coming to understand clearly what a general in the European command of the U.S. Army recently told me, that there is no possibility for the U.S. military to secure security vis-à-vis Africa through military means.  “The key”, said the general to me, “is through the end of hunger and the end of extreme poverty”.  From the European Command of the United States Army. 

Heifer International points the way.  And to explain the Heifer way, I want to invoke my favorite definition of an economist: as a person who when he or she sees something that works in practice, tries to find out whether it works in theory.  That may sound upside down, but there’s actually a lesson in it, ladies and gentlemen.  By understanding in theory, in concept, what works in practice we can take those lessons to a global scale.  We can find large-scale and broad-based solutions to seemingly intractable problems.  For decades, Heifer International has indeed shown what works in practice:  helping the poorest of the poor who live as subsistence, or more accurately, as sub-subsistence farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America to grow more food and, of course, to incorporate dairy and other animal husbandry into sustainable farm practices. 

Heifer International has shown that low-cost interventions, such as giving a goat to an impoverished family, not only enables that family to feed itself, but, also, to begin to earn income, to save and to accumulate capital for the future.  Heifer’s plan is not a handout, but an investment in partnership with the poor in their future.  And by making that investment, Heifer has opened the path for the sustainable escape from poverty, for millions of households in thousands of communities around the world. 

As an economist, I can offer a theory of what has worked in practice; I could use fancy jargon to say the poor are stuck in a poverty trap, because they are too poor to save for their future.  I could say that they do not have the threshold level of farm capital to escape from poverty on their own.  I could say as an applied mathematician that the dynamics of economic growth display a critical bifurcation at low income levels.  But let me instead enunciate what I will call “Beatrice’s Theorem”, for Beatrice Vira (sp?) of Uganda, the wonderful young woman who is here with us today.  A single goat given to Beatrice’s family a decade ago, made all the difference for Beatrice to escape a life of grinding poverty and instead to embark on a sustained climb out of poverty.  Now because of one goat from Heifer International, Beatrice will help lead her generation, our world to the end of poverty itself.  In doing so, she and Heifer International and all of us will be putting vast global experience into global practice. 

Heifer International continues to implement lessons that have by now been demonstrated for hundreds of millions of people in Asia and other parts of the world.  Asia’s “green revolution” beginning in the mid 1960’s of raising farm-yields through improved seed varieties and then followed by a “white revolution” of commercial dairy farming was the key first step which led Asia’s great escape from centuries of impoverishment and famine.  Now with Heifer International’s leadership and joined by political and scientific leaders in Africa, the United States and other parts of the world, we can work with our partners in Africa to usher in Africa’s own “green” and “white” revolutions to put that continent on a course of prosperity, health and peace.  It is achievable; it is vital that we do so. 

As Special Advisor to U.N. General, Kofi Annan, I have the enormous honor and thrill to be working throughout Africa in establishing “Millennium Villages”, where impoverished communities are empowered by our help with goats and cows, bed-nets and medicines, safe water-points and clinics, schools and basic infrastructure that even include the internet giving villages instantaneous connectivity around the world.  These communities backed by these investments are taking the lead in their own escape from poverty.  And lead they do with remarkable energy, determination, and ingenuity.  Such “Millennium Villages” will reach hundreds of communities in Africa this year with hundreds of thousands of residents.  And as Heifer International knows well, such investments in partnership with the poor are needed in tens of thousands of communities throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America. 

I want to take this moment to express my utter confidence that with Heifer International’s leadership and its proven models that “Millennium Villages” or their Heifer equivalents will spread throughout the impoverished world.  I believe that “Beatrice’s Theorem”, that small help from us can support the end of extreme poverty on our crowded planet, will be the guiding truth for such efforts.  And I, also, so much look forward to the dynamic role of the wonderful new Clinton School for Public Service to help energize the young, idealistic and well-trained youth of our time from the United States and abroad to take the lead in these efforts. 

We can conclude with Tererai “Te ne gona.” It is achievable.  Ladies and gentlemen, with these thoughts in mind, I want to say what a thrill and deep honor it is for me to share the dais with the world leader of our era, a leader who led our country through eight years of prosperity, peace and technological advance and who thereby has played a unique role in setting the foundations for our coming triumphs and ending global poverty.  He is a leader who unites the world rather than divides it, who brings together all faiths and races in a common cause.  He is a friend of the poor who is working tirelessly on their behalf.  To introduce him, please welcome once again, the one and only Jo Luck.