[US Aid] US will block Brown campaign to beat poverty with gold sale

Heather Stewart
Economics Correspondent
Sunday April 10, 2005
The Observer

Gordon Brown's year-long anti-poverty crusade is in jeopardy this week, as the US prepares to block his plans for a sale of International Monetary Fund gold reserves to raise cash for debt relief.

Striking a deal to sell or revalue some of the IMF's $9 billion of gold reserves in Washington, at the spring gathering of the IMF and World Bank, was meant to be the first victory in Brown's campaign to increase spending on aid, and offer debt relief to the poorest countries. But the Treasury is playing down prospects for a deal, and it is thought Brown could even give Washington a miss this week, to concentrate on the election campaign.

'Clearly, the US is the blockage on this,' said Jonathan Glennie, senior policy adviser at Christian Aid. But he accused the Chancellor of overplaying the chance of a debt deal in February, after he chaired a fractious meeting of G7 finance ministers.

An IMF feasibility study, commissioned by G7 finance ministers, has given the thumbs-up to gold sales. But the US Treasury has been urged to oppose the idea by gold-mining firms who fear that a sell-off could depress global prices for the metal.

Henry Northover, policy analyst at Cafod, said the US preferred its own debt relief plans, under which poor countries' debts would be written off against aid flows. 'I think there is little appetite for the gold plan in the US. They feel they've done enough.'

Failure to reach a deal this week will leave Britain with a tough timetable for agreement on its other anti-poverty proposals by the G7 summit at Gleneagles in July. A Treasury spokesman insisted: 'We've got lots of other meetings between now and then. The agenda's on track.'

[Global Poverty] World Bank leader says poverty a top issue

By Carson Walker
Associated Press Writer

Private ownership around the world is key to easing poverty, outgoing World Bank President James Wolfensohn said as he toured the Pine Ridge Reservation, one of the poorest areas in the country.

"To me what I'm seeing here isn't the poverty, it's the chance to see new businesses that are being established and meet entrepreneurs that are taking their future into their own hands," Wolfensohn said Saturday on the home of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

"The difficulties we're trying to solve around the world are to be found right here. The first is ownership. The second is lack of recognition," he said.

Wolfensohn visited the Pine Ridge reservation to encourage enterprises such as the Lakota Fund, which helps American Indians on the reservation start, maintain and expand businesses.

His visit also coincides with the creation of the Global Facilities Fund for Indigenous Peoples, an international loan program. He created it with the help of Rebecca Adamson, president of the First Nations Development Institute, which provides technical help, grants and other help to rural American Indian projects.

The goal of the fund is to help native people around the world financially benefit from their land, intellectual property and other assets, she said.

The industrialized world could learn much from native people, Wolfensohn said.

"I think many of us who've grown up in more of a Western tradition need to stand back in a world in which we're really screwing up and see what the older nations, the indigenous nations, could contribute," he said.

Wolfensohn, 71, is being succeeded by Paul Wolfowitz, the Bush loyalist and deputy defense secretary who helped plan the Iraq war, who won the unanimous approval of the World Bank's board on Thursday to be the next president of the development bank.

Wolfensohn said his conversations over the last week with Wolfowitz indicate he will continue the effort to help the world's poor.

"I think he has very much seized the issue that the most noble cause he has is to address the question of poverty. I don't think I solved it. I don't think Paul Wolfowitz will solve it. I think the World Bank can make a big difference in pushing the issue forward," he said.

[Global Poverty] Economist's heart and head guide mission to help end poverty

By Laura Berman
The Detroit News

Nobody in the Oak Park High School class of 1972 would be surprised to hear that Jeffrey Sachs -- the class valedictorian, the Harvard-bound student council president -- is today a prominent economist named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

His is a story of tapped potential and ambitions realized -- the logical outcome of outsize brains and ability combined with a family heritage of intellectual striving and emotional support.

Even so, it wows me.

And it does, not because an achiever didn't quit. (As his high school friend, I saved for the ages a postcard he sent of the White House, jauntily inscribed "Home at last.") But because today, Columbia University professor Jeffrey D. Sachs is staking his reputation as an expert on international economies -- and doing so for a cause equally out of fashion in the American city, suburb and academy. He's crusading to end poverty and needless death from starvation and curable disease in Africa.

His prescription to do so is a Time cover story (March 14, 2005) and the subject of his unexpectedly engaging new book, "The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time."

It's unexpectedly engaging because its thesis -- that developed nations can help wipe out suffering -- is at once informed and optimistic.

The economist who helped implement Poland's and Russia's switch to capitalism has enabled his career -- as professor, consultant to foreign leaders -- to evolve in unpredictable ways.

At 50, he recognizes that markets are only tools for mankind. In Africa, he was shocked by the extent of suffering and by his increasing awareness that so much of the poverty, disease and death are unnecessary. He could not, cannot turn away.

"These are not inert and helpless masses of humanity," he insists. "These are people who have the knowledge, the awareness of their situation ... they're ready to take actions to help themselves and they need the helping hand to accomplish that."

This message is sinking in at an uneasy American moment. But, he's discovered, people do want to give in direct and specific ways.

"I am resigned to this," he says. "When you hear the same thing a thousand times -- 'I want to help but I want my money to go to the village,' at some point, you have to listen."

He and a coterie of other influential people -- former President Bill Clinton among them -- are creating a way to channel dollars directly to African villagers.

While the theme -- that foreign aid can transform Third World economies -- has been his refrain for 20 years, his passion for spurring change in Africa is turning him into a grassroots operative.

Jeffrey Sachs was, in high school, the student who turned in a 40-page paper when the teacher asked for five.

Now, though, the macroeconomist is going micro -- working from the ground up, with soil scientists and agronomists, to change the world, one mosquito net at a time. Or one prime minister at a time.

You really can't ask more from the guy who always planned to fulfill his potential.