The industrialized nations, with approximately 20% of the world's population, use three quarters of the world's energy and produce two thirds of the greenhouse gases. In the face of these statistics, one might well conclude that environmentalists should attack wealth rather than poverty. If we are serious about preserving the environment, we must change our lifestyles, switch to renewable energy sources, and eat lower on the food chain.
But the poor countries have substantial environmental problems which are both caused by and contribute to poverty. In this year's annual State of the World's Children 1994 report, UNICEF introduced the concept of the PPE Spiral. PPE stands for Poverty, Population, Environment, and UNICEF says that these three problems are becoming so intertwined that they should be regarded as one integral problem.
Poverty is an engine of rapid population growth, for a variety of reasons. Poverty means the inability to afford life's basic needs, and leads to high death rates among children. (While famine gets more media attention, chronic persistent hunger kills far more people, and most of the victims are young children.) Families overcompensate for the loss of a child, and often have two after they lose one. In poor countries, without national old-age pension plans, people see large families as the best retirement policy. Poverty is strongly connected with poor education and illiteracy, especially among girls and women. This leads to lack of awareness about family planning methods, and lack of power within a marriage to insist on practicing contraception. For these and many other reasons, poverty is a major contributor to rapid population growth.
Rapid population growth, in turn, reinforces poverty. Governments and businesses struggle to expand the economy, but if economic growth is slower than population growth, the people get poorer. Population growth means decreasing farm land per person. Farm families divide plots into smaller pieces, which makes it harder to produce a surplus. The individual farmer is poorer, and the country as a whole produces less food per capita. Population pressures push more marginal lands into farm use, but these less productive lands produce less income. Population growth strains social services, schools, health centers, family planning clinics, water and sanitation services.
Population growth, of course, has a direct impact on the environment. More people mean more consumers and more pollution. To increase farm production, pesticides and chemical fertilizers are used, with familiar environmental consequences. Chemicals leach into the watershed and kill fish in the streams and rivers. As farming becomes less economically viable, people move to rapidly urbanizing areas, often located in polluted and hazardous industrial regions.
Finally, poverty and environmental degradation feed on each other. On both a national and individual level, poverty leads to short-run economies such as cutting down trees for fuel, which leads to greater poverty later when the forests that once regulated climate are no longer there, and droughts and famine result. Polluted waterways kill fish that once fed people, and soil erosion results in declining crop yields.
In September 1990, almost two years before the larger UNCED ("Earth Summit"), 71 heads of state and heads of government, including President Bush, joined in what was then the largest summit ever: the World Summit for Children. These 71 leaders, together with a total of 158 national delegations, joined in unanimous bold promises to the world's children.
The overall goals of the World Summit for Children for the 1990-2000 decade, for every country, are:
Some of the other goals include:
UNICEF estimates that the total cost of keeping all of the promises of the World Summit for Children would be about $25 billion per year. This could be achieved if the countries of the developing world reallocated about 10% of their national budgets towards the needs of their children, and if the portion of aid from the developed world that is allocated to basic needs were doubled from 10% to 20%.
Only about 8% of U.S. foreign assistance goes to meeting basic human needs. As an example, only 43% of our education assistance goes to basic education. While supporting universities in poor countries is a laudable goal, it is more urgent (and the dollars go much farther) to work towards universal literacy. We find the same problem throughout the assistance program: too little of the money reaches those most desperately in need of it. Redirecting our aid to poverty eradication, microenterprise lending, and basic human needs would comprise a foreign assistance policy that could break, instead of reinforce, the PPE spiral.