Global Policy Forum

By Flora Lewis

The huge rush to prosperity in much of the world has left a lot of people behind, but it is bringing tools and resources to help them, too. Globalization means not only making money anywhere but also knowing what is going on elsewhere and taking it into account.

This works both ways. The well-to-do are more than ever obliged to be aware of inequity and worry about its consequences in parts of the world where they want to do business. And the poor are more and more aware that it is possible to be much better off. We enter the new millennium with more poor people than the world has ever known - but there are a lot more people in all. Out of 6 billion now (compared with fewer than 2 billion in 1900), 1.3 billion are below the absolute poverty line, living on less than $1 a day, and 2.8 billion eke out survival on less than $2 a day Of the poorest, 70 percent live in Asia.

Inequality has multiplied enormously. The Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Program says that the gap between the one-fifth of the world's people who live in the poorest countries and the one-fifth who live in the richest countries is now 74 to 1. In 1990 it was 60 to 1 and in 1960 it was 30 to 1. The poor are not really poorer (below the subsistence level, you can hardly exist), but the rich are a lot richer and there are more of them.

In Asia, again, according to Tadao Chino, president of the Asian Development Bank, the absolutely poor are now one-third of the total, compared with one-half in 1970. Their average life expectancy is 65 years, compared with 48 years then, and 70 percent of adults are now literate, compared with 40 percent. So there has been improvement. But excruciating misery is still with us, even as part of the world flushes with prosperity never known before. The wealthy countries have cut back severely on foreign aid since the Cold War ended in the early 1990s. The world's leading economies did agree in June to cancel more than half of the Third World's debt, writing off $70 billion, but as income continues to rise in the richest countries, generosity continues to fall.

Is there more distress than ever in a degrading world, as some say? Has a lot been achieved to make life better for huge numbers of people, as others announce? The big difference now is probably in how we think about it. Overwhelming poverty is no longer accepted by everybody as a fact of nature or of divine intent, a test of faith to be relieved by charity. Enough people have become convinced that something can be done about it to organize a diverse array of projects. Some of these are helpful and some less so, but most are no longer based on the idea of the virtue of giving bounty only to those who deserve it. The trend is to argue, like Eliza Doolittle's father in George Bernard Shaw's ''Pygmalion,'' that the needs of the ''undeserving poor'' must also be met.

In other words, as Jorge Braga de Macedo, who heads the development center of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, puts it, ''Poverty is largely man-made.'' That means that it can be largely un-man-made. This is a dramatic new concept in the sweep of history. It is by no means taken for granted, but it is no longer inconceivable, as it was just a few years ago.

In fact, even the word poverty is disdained by development specialists because of its implication of inferior capacity, beyond repair. The specialists prefer to speak of exclusion, which suggests a minority that has yet to be given its chance. Among the excluded, a distinction is made between income-poor and ''human-poor'' - recognition that lack of earnings is not the only handicap to be overcome if people are to be able to lead even a minimally decent life. Such things as clean water, sanitation, health services and education are important measures of the level of living conditions and make a big difference in people's ability to advance.

The basic tests that show how a country, or a continent, is doing in the struggle are per capita income (which has doubled since 1960, even though population has also about doubled), illiteracy, infant mortality and life expectancy. All of the statistics have shown big improvement. Still, there is serious concern that because of the AIDS epidemic, life expectancy in Africa may soon drop back to 48 years, after having reached 65. Aid can be perverted by mismanagement and bad ideas; it can support corrupt governments that exploit their people; it can be wasted in grandiose projects that fail to pay off; it can create dependencies. There is a new understanding that theories, ideology, even balance sheets do not get it right if they overlook the human factor.

That is even more important now, Mr. de Macedo points out, because, in contrast with the 19th century, economic progress is no longer mainly about heavy, visible things involving iron and steel and electricity. Progress in the 21st century will be about light, invisible things like information technology, and will therefore necessarily be focused on the education and motivation of people. The North-South gap is certainly still there when adding up numbers of people on the Internet. But it is no longer the kind of draining, hostile confrontation that was familiar during the Cold War.

The new director-general of Unesco, Koichiro Matsuura, points out that the gap is now a serious concern of many of his members, although it was not mentioned in Unesco's 1946 constitution because, Mr. Matsuura said, ''it wasn't very important at the time.'' This is an example of how geography affects perception. Japan was a very hungry, unhappy, defeated country in 1946. But virtually all the countries now considered part of ''the South'' were scarcely noticed colonies, whose economic conditions were simply lumped into the policies and statistics of one or the other empire.

The Cold War, from after World War II through the 1980s, promoted decolonization, which led to a big revision of international economic patterns, which helped lead to the end of the Cold War, which has brought the bewildering phenomenon of globalization. Globalization has very uneven results. Flows of investment capital converge on some 20 developing countries out of more than 100. Trade has ballooned, growing 15-fold since 1960, but in fairly narrow bands. Clearly, it has been a great benefit to some, a serious threat to others and a challenge to most.

The mix of short-term, good-bad results is as true within rich countries as among poor countries. Longer-term, though, more inclusion in the fluid world economy is bound to help in the goal of ending poverty. It is futile, and harmful, to persist with the idea of a world pattern based on us-and-them, the Marxist idea of haves and have-nots, rich and poor. What the rich are really rich in is the ability to produce wealth, not just consume it.

The OECD, an organization of rich countries, asserts that it is a mistake to think that the states of the world can be rationally divided into rich and poor, haves and have-nots. Just as there are expanding middle classes in many countries, there are middle countries. The latter have evolving interests. Latin Americans, in particular, dispute the view of Nordic do-gooders that the key aim should be to help the poorest; those countries that have made a big successful effort also deserve support. This argument divides the Latin Americans and the Scandinavians.

That there is no recipe, no formula, that can be offered everywhere to assure improvement ought to be obvious. President Bill Clinton's idea that everybody ought to have access to a computer does not fit the problems of ''the Mexicos, the Brazils, the Koreas,'' Mr. de Macedo said. In the same way, microcredit - small start-up loans to the poor - can help a lot of people become self-supporting, but it does not work everywhere, for everyone. There will have to be a whole spectrum of efforts, adapted as far as possible to local needs. This is recognized now, after the disappointing results of super-projects: big highways instead of farm-to-market roads, huge dams instead of accessible water supplies.

There is, in international affairs, at least theoretically if not in actual funding, a renewed sense of what President Lyndon Johnson sought to do for the United States when he proclaimed a War on Poverty in April 1964. It was based on the premise that more could be produced so that no one need be excluded, rather than the ideological premise that wealth is finite and must be taken from the rich to help the poor. Mr. Johnson did have an important impact on American society, but unfortunately his war in Vietnam quite eclipsed the domestic program. The Johnson years left one important lesson. The slogan of the time was expressed by one of his White House aides, Joseph Califano, who said, ''I've never seen the problem we can't solve by throwing money at it.'' That is now considered exactly the wrong way to go about attacking poverty. It is accepted that the problem is not just economics. Health, education, social relations and governance matter, too.

Whether economic growth fosters democracy or political reform brings economic growth is a chicken-and-egg question when statistics are examined, but the link is undeniable. Poverty is a matter of politics, as well as of money. The vague eagerness to do something about it is going to meet some hard trade-offs, not only vested interests but also conflicting interests. Environmentalists, for example, do not see eye-to-eye on development priorities with anti-poverty activists.

Biotechnology will be urged by those who worry about how the continually growing population is going to be fed, given the diminishing availability of arable land, and it will be opposed by those who worry about the uncertain side effects of biotechnology. All in all, if there is not the slightest glimmer of utopia ahead, and the end of human deprivation for all, there is nonetheless a likelihood of great improvement - because improvement is becoming possible and because people want it.

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