Beyond Morality:
A New Fight Against Poverty by: Susan Rice

Susan Rice is currently serving as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Previously,
Rice was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and served on the staff of the National Security Council and as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during President Bill Clinton’s second term in office.

Despite the misery and suffering of billions of people worldwide, very few of today’s political leaders have evinced much interest in the subject of global poverty. This is a departure from America’s past, when in the 1960s, leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., and President John F. Kennedy called upon our nation to rise up and wage a war on poverty and build a Great Society.

Today, by many standards, the alleviation of global poverty has become an anachronism. There are notable exceptions, of course, including President Bill Clinton, who through his Global Initiative has made poverty reduction a pillar of his post-presidency. But overall, the unfortunate reality is that combating poverty barely cracks the top 10 lists on many
political agendas.

The majority of Americans seem largely indifferent to the impoverishing scourge that swarms across our planet, killing millions every year. It is estimated 3 billion human beings live on less than $2 a day ($730 a year): the equivalent of seven pairs of quality sneakers.

In the developing world, poverty means even more than abject suffering and a life devoid of the basic necessities, such as food, clean water, health care and education — it is a death sentence. Hunger, malnutrition and easily preventable diseases such as diarrhea, respiratory infections and cholera continue to thrive, even in slums adjacent to major cities, while rural areas lack the basic health infrastructure to provide prenatal care or life- saving vaccines.

When human need is great and these kinds of service gaps persist, people are often eager to accept help from almost any source. If not from government, that help comes from multilateral or bilateral aid agencies, secular nongovernmental organizations, or missionaries and mosques. Many of these entities are unselfishly providing lifesaving help. But sometimes their assistance comes with extremist strings attached.

In a rapidly globalizing world, poor states can pose significant risks not only to bordering countries, but to nations far away as well. People, goods, money and information now travel the planet with lightning speed. More than 2 million people cross an international border every day, and in the past four decades seaborne trade has more than quadrupled. On an almost-daily basis, these factors increase America’s exposure to distant occurrences, including transnational security threats that can arise from and spread to anywhere on the planet.

These threats can take on myriad forms, some potentially deadly.

Imagine a mutated avian flu virus that jumps from poultry to humans in Cambodia, or a terrorist cell that attacks an American Naval vessel in a foreign port. Or envision the flooding and other effects of global warming exacerbated by extensive deforestation in places such as the Amazon and Congo River basins.

Weak states can function as incubators for these kinds of transnational events, which have the potential to cause major damage to an already weak U.S. economy. But, more importantly, in a worse-case scenario such as a deadly pandemic, they can result in the loss of thousands, if not millions, of lives in the United States.

Consequences of Global Poverty
Every year, the Brookings Institution and the Center for Global Development identify a set of the world’s weakest states. They consist of approximately 50 countries vulnerable from conflict and corruption, which pose immediate and deadly risks to their own citizens. Yet, in a globalizing world, the consequences of state weakness can and do spill across borders into neighboring countries and around the world. Among the most significant of these consequences is the heightened risk of civil conflict, which correlates with country-level poverty.

Recent research shows that a country with a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $250 has a 15 percent risk of experiencing civil war within five years. On the other hand, a country with a per capita GDP of $5,000 has a civil-war risk of less than 1 percent during the same period.

Sierra Leone is a tragic example. Just before civil war erupted in March 1991, Sierra Leone was experiencing negative economic growth. Its per capita GDP had dropped more than 35 percent from 1970s levels. Youth unemployment soared, and the education system, once among the best in the region, collapsed. In lacking opportunities to pursue responsible employment, some youths were drawn to rebel activity in order to gain power. Civil wars tend to be long and can function as sinkholes, which destabilize entire regions and require costly international interventions. At the same time, conflict zones provide the optimal anarchic environment for transnational predators. And yet weak states need not collapse into conflict or fail completely before they can be exploited by terrorists.

Mali, a West African country roughly the size of Texas and California combined, is an example of a relatively well-governed but poor country that has been exploited by extremist groups. Malian authorities struggle to prevent terrorists from the Algerian-based Salafist Group for Preaching in Combat (GSPC) from operating in its territory. Mali’s poorly controlled borders and desert terrain make it an irresistible magnet for the GSPC.

Poverty also renders Mali vulnerable in another respect: Its government lacks the resources to provide for its citizens. Many badly-needed social services are now provided by Wahhabi charities and mosques funded by the Gulf states.

I’ve become friends with the Imam of the Sankore Mosque in Timbuktu, Mali, and he explained that the Wahhabis are establishing mosques throughout Northern Mali, often right next door to the indigenous Sufi Mosques (the traditional form of Islam in Mali). The Wahhabis are offering what the Sufis cannot: food, clothing, medical care, schools and the opportunity to send young men to Saudi Arabia for religious training. Wahhabis are taking a long-term approach, slowly driving traditional mosques out of existence, while implementing their own extremist philosophy.

Poverty hinders weak states in other important ways. It fuels the outbreak of disease and undermines impoverished countries’ capacity to prevent and contain disease outbreaks before they spread abroad. Not surprisingly, roughly all of the 30 new infectious diseases that have emerged globally during the past three decades originated in poor states. Diseases such as SARS, HIV/AIDS and the H5N1 avian flu virus can be traced to developing countries with rudimentary disease-surveillance capability.

Overpopulation and crowding in poor nations also foster dangerous conditions. People are being forced to seek basic necessities in remote, uninhabited areas, increasing their exposure to new animal-borne diseases. In addition, needy families in developing countries often live in close proximity to their livestock, which enables disease transmission.

Chickens and pigs have proven to be deadly sources of diseases that can jump to humans, with the H5N1 avian flu virus being the most alarming recent example. If a deadly mutation of this virus were to occur in a country with a weak health care infrastructure, the odds of swiftly detecting and containing the outbreak would be vastly reduced, and a global pandemic would become all but inevitable.

Climate change also results, in part, from global poverty. Poverty prompts many families to have more children in order to counter high infant-mortality rates and to earn a decent income. Consequently, population pressure is driving demand for agricultural land and firewood, causing rampant deforestation.

Haiti is one country that dramatizes the negative relationship between poverty and environmental degradation. With 70 percent unemployment and an estimated 65 percent of its population living below the national poverty line, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. One of the few sources of fuel in Haiti is firewood, so cutting down trees for charcoal is a rare and lucrative source of income. Haiti is now 90 percent deforested, with the tree cover plummeting from approximately 60 percent in 1923 to less than 2 percent today.

The global consequences of deforestation are serious. Erosion exacerbates flooding and causes a silting of waterways. Soil degradation reduces agricultural yields, intensifying the seemingly endless plight of the world’s hungry.

Finally, deforestation accelerates climate change. While it’s true that fossil-fuel burning in developed countries and emerging markets accounts for the majority of global carbon emissions, deforestation is responsible for more than a quarter of the carbon released annually into the atmosphere.

As global temperatures rise, coastal areas become more vulnerable to flooding. In Africa and elsewhere, lakes dry up and some land-locked areas become more prone to severe drought, intensifying poverty and increasing the risk of conflict.

Finding Solutions
Poverty plays a complex dual role in facilitating the emergence and spread of transnational security threats. First, poverty substantially increases the risk of conflict, which in turn provides fertile breeding grounds for such threats. Second, poverty can indirectly give rise to local conditions that can severely erode a state’s capacity to prevent or contain the threats. Discerning and neutralizing this dangerous dynamic is essential to grasping the national-security rationale needed for future action from the United States.

There is also, of course, a humanitarian and moral rationale. Our common humanity dictates that we not rest while there is suffering, whether within our own borders or in other parts of the world.

Given our growing interdependence, the United States is at a unique moment where our values and interests converge. It is in our national interest to reduce global poverty, and our values dictate we do the same. Yet, to some, the investments and policy changes that would be required of the United States to make progress against poverty appear unaffordable.

If the United States were to devote the much-vaunted figure of 0.7 percent of its gross national income to overseas-development assistance, it would cost about 80 billion dollars a year — a lot of money in an age of rampant deficits. And, if we do the right thing by opening our markets to goods and services from the least-developed countries, this may also cause short-term job loss in sensitive sectors of the United States already reeling from economic instability.

So the question remains: Is it worth the cost? Does foreign assistance really matter? Or would these investments simply be pouring more money down a black hole?

Accumulating evidence shows that well-targeted foreign assistance can make a crucial difference in countries lacking the resources needed to jumpstart rapid economic growth. Foreign assistance has helped lay the foundation for development in Taiwan and Botswana, and more recently in Uganda and Mozambique.

The Center for Global Development finds that, irrespective of the strength of a country’s institutions or the quality of its policies, certain sources of aid flows have strong pro-growth effects, even in the short term. Taking this finding into consideration, the majority of the world’s major donor countries have pledged to devote 0.7 percent of their gross national income to development assistance within a decade. Washington, however, remains an outlier.

Overall, the U.S. commitment is small compared to Europe’s and falls well short of what is needed to achieve the U.N. Millennium Development goals. Meeting these goals would lift more than 500 million people out of extreme poverty and allow more than 300 million to live without hunger by the year 2015. It would also enable universal primary education and reduce mortality rates for children younger than 5 by two-thirds.

But realistically, it will take more than large, well-targeted aid flows in order to “make poverty history.” The most important ingredients are improved economic policies and responsible governance in the developing countries themselves. We also need to encourage job-creating foreign investment, drop trade-distorting subsidies, cancel more debt, combat infectious disease, prevent and resolve conflict, and assist the recovery of post-conflict societies.

For the United States to meet these challenges, it would require a near tectonic shift in our national security policy. Our leaders and lawmakers must come to view transnational security threats and the poverty that fuels them as among our foremost enemies. They must embrace a long-term strategy, in partnership with other developed countries, to strengthen weak states and to fulfill the basic human needs of their people.

It will be expensive and possibly unpopular to do so. Americans, however, will almost certainly pay more over the long term if our leaders fail to recognize the risks and costs of persistent global poverty to the United States.