Dr. Mahbub ul-Haq Reflects on Working Toward Peace
Simply
put, our challenge is this-can we make the twenty-first
century a century of human development, when all people
enjoy access to education and health, when each individual
is enabled to utilize her or his full human potential, when
all people have developed their basic capabilities and enjoy
equal access to the opportunities of life? Now let us be
clear. This is a vision of human competition, not state
welfare. It is a vision of access to opportunities, not
access to charity. It is a vision of the enrichment of human
lives, not just the enrichment of national income or wealth,
and the investment required to realize this vision is fairly
modest.
We wish to move over the next fifteen years toward a society
where there is universal basic education, primary health
care for all, safe drinking water for all, adequate nutrition
for all malnourished children, and family planning services
for all willing couples. In other words, we wish to move
toward a world society where basic social services are available
to everyone, both men and women, and women before men; where
the worst human deprivations curbing the potential of more
than 1.3 billion people today have been finally overcome;
where all essential ingredients for the full flowering of
human potential are available in the form of adequate education,
health, and nutrition. We wish to achieve all this.
What is the financial cost of achieving such a society?
According to the best available estimates, the cost will
be around an additional $34 billion a year-34 billion dollars.
This cost is less than 1 percent of the total income if
the poor nations bear all the burden themselves and this
cost will be reduced to less than one-seventh of 1 percent
of global income if the international community decides
to share the cost along with the poor nations. That is the
cost.
The question we face today is this: Can we persuade the
leaders of the world to accept such a global compact for
human development for the twenty-first century?
Let us again be very clear. Such a global compact is not
yet another treaty requiring the formal approval of the
governments of the world. It is, in fact, a shared vision
of what the world can and must achieve. It requires global
understanding, not a global treaty, because in the last
analysis most action must begin at the national level, and
often at the grassroots level, and such action must begin
in the developing world itself.
These countries do not lack financial resources. What
they lack is political courage. We need to ask the leaders
of the Third World, and ask them bluntly, why they insist
on spending $130 billion each year on the military when
even a quarter of this expenditure can finance their entire
essential social agenda. And we must ask them why they insist
on having six soldiers for every one doctor when their people
are dying of ordinary diseases, from internal disintegration,
not from external aggression, from many threats to human
security, not any threats to territorial security.
And we must also ask them why they are not convinced that
everything they buy costs the immunization of four million
children and every jet fighter they purchase costs the schooling
of three million children and every submarine they store
away in the waters denies safe drinking water to sixty million
people. Why do we let them argue poverty of resources for
human development when they have well-fed armies but unfed
people and when many of these nations spend more on their
armies every year than their total education and health
budgets?
And at the same time, we must ask the leaders of the rich
nations, why do you keep subsidizing your arms exports to
poor lands when you argue against even food subsidies in
these poor nations? Why is it that you refuse to close down
your military bases, phase out your military assistance,
and restrict the export of the sophisticated military weapons
even now when the Cold War is over? What is your excuse?
And why do you make such handsome profits on your exports
of arms to poor, starved, disintegrating countries while
giving them lectures all the time on respect for basic human
rights? And we need to ask these leaders, why do they not
invest in human development and instead make profits out
of the future prosperity of poor lands and not out of the
current state of human deprivation?
I believe, my friends, what we need to change is the mindset
of our leaders in developing countries as well as in rich
nations, because changes in policies will then follow and
adequate resources for priority human development agendas
will then be mobilized.
Let us spread the message to all world leaders that such
a compact is not only desirable-it is eminently doable,
it is feasible. And many years from now, we can look our
grandchildren right in the eye and tell them quite proudly:
"Yes, we tried."
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