Global Policy Forum

Thalif Deen

World Bank President James Wolfensohn, a longstanding critic of excessive global military spending, says he cannot comprehend why the world spends only 50 billion dollars on development aid annually while it squanders a whopping 950 billion dollars on its armed forces. If the world's rich nations spend the 950 billion dollars to really fight poverty and disease, he argues, they would not need to spend even 50 billion dollars fighting wars. Wolfensohn's argument is based on the premise that the root causes of some of the world's political problems -- including ethnic conflicts and civil wars -- are primarily due to economic and social deprivation.

Concurring with this view, Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, told representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on Friday that the United States was one of the worst offenders as far as military spending and development aid was concerned. "This year," he said, "the United States is spending 450 billion dollars on the military and 15 billion dollars for all development assistance."

Sachs said the United States, like most other western donor nations, had signed on to a pledge at a U.N. conference in Monterrey, Mexico in 2000, by which all industrial nations had committed to make efforts towards achieving the target of 0.7 percent of gross national product (GNP) as development aid to the poor. "Unfortunately, what was seen was the United States spending 30 times more on the military than on development assistance for the whole world," Sachs told a gathering of nearly 3,000 NGO representatives who concluded a three-day meeting Friday.

The conference, titled "Millennium Development Goals: Civil Society Takes Action", was aimed at mobilising broader public support for a series of global anti-poverty goals agreed at the U.N. Millennium Summit in Sep. 2000. The deadline for achieving these goals, including a 50 percent reduction in poverty and hunger, is 2015. "We are at a crucial moment," said Sachs, who is also a U.N. Special Adviser on poverty alleviation. "A billion people were fighting for survival today. Thousands would lose that fight today and thousands more tomorrow. Nothing was more dangerous than a world where millions were allowed to die without anyone doing anything about it," he added. "If life was so devalued," Sachs asked, "how would it be possible to win a war against terrorism?" He also said that nothing was more important for global security than for the rich world to finally follow through on the 0.7 percent pledge for development assistance. "A safe world would come when everyone's lives were taken seriously," he added. According to World Bank figures, one-sixth of the world's six billion people own about 80 percent of the world's wealth, while another sixth live below the poverty line of less than a dollar a day.

On Tuesday, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry blasted U.S. President George W. Bush's "wrong headed" policy on Iraq, which is draining billions of dollars in taxpayer monies while urgent social and economic needs in the United States remain unmet. Bush's "go-it-alone" Iraq policy, Kerry said, is costing the country about 200 billion dollars. "That's 200 billion dollars we're not investing in our schools, and that's 200 billion dollars we're not investing in health care for all Americans and prescription drugs that are affordable."

In a 53-page report released Wednesday, Annan said that only Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and Luxembourg have achieved or surpassed the 0.7 percent target for development aid. Five other countries, he said, have pledged to meet the 0.7 target over the next the next decade: Ireland by 2007, Belgium by 2010, France and Spain by 2012, and the United Kingdom by 2013. Although the United States is the largest aid donor in absolute terms, it has refused to make a commitment to meet the 0.7 target.

British Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry told NGO representatives Thursday that if developing nations want to reduce poverty, the current levels of development assistance should double: from 50 billion dollars to 100 billion dollars annually. Parry said his country would increase that aid from 6.8 billion dollars annually to 9.5 billion dollars. "If that commitment was maintained, and it was his government's intention to do so, the United Kingdom would get to the target of 0.7 percent by 2013," he predicted. Ninety percent of aid from the United Kingdom went to the world's poorest countries, the British envoy said, another sum went to tackle HIV/AIDS, and a large share of the rest was to be spent on health and education. Most of the aid was funneled through multilateral channels like the United Nations, Parry said, and all aid was "untied" so that developing countries are not obligated to use British aid money to buy only British products.

Meanwhile, a new U.N. study released last month said that global military spending may be heading for the one-trillion-dollar mark by the end of this year reaching Cold War spending levels: up from 900 billion dollars in 2003. But the 2004 estimates would be "substantially higher if the costs of the major armed conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq were included", the study said. .