(Big puff piece on Jeffrey Sachs in the NY Times, who comes across as a missionary trying to help the poor African peoples through a combination of foreign aid and a "green revolution" of the sort that has not solved the problems of India and other countries where it was tried out. Sachs looks everywhere for solutions except in the transformation of class relations. Of course, there are big bucks to be made offering band-aid solutions out of the academy.)
NY Times, November 7, 2004 Spend $150 Billion Per Year to Cure World Poverty By DAPHNE EVIATAR
Jeffrey Sachs is standing on a dusty brown hillside in Nazareth. Not the Nazareth of biblical renown, but the Nazareth of ancient Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, one of the poorest and most godforsaken places in the world.
Surrounded by skinny, dirt-caked children, Sachs looks awkward in a navy blazer, white dress shirt and tan slacks. Balanced carefully on a rock, he stands in brown loafers that offer just enough traction to keep him from sliding into the mounds of dirt that surround him. Although Sachs's eyelids droop, he seems to be listening intently. His brow furrows, he nods, he cups his chin as if deep in thought.
An ash-colored woman with a creased face is mumbling in Amharic, Ethiopia's main language, pointing with a broken stick to rows of trenches, shrubs and stones. A translator offers a muddled explanation.
When the presentation is over, the odd mix of about 20 Ethiopian peasants, international aid workers and Columbia University academics respectfully applauds and starts back down the hill. Sachs scrambles after Lee Bollinger, Columbia's president and Sachs's boss. Blond and tanned, in jeans and sneakers, Bollinger shakes his head, looking perplexed.
''It's their G.I.S.,'' says Sachs without hesitation -- as in Geographical Information System, a sort of computerized 3-D map. ''She's showing how the community uses trees and builds terraces in the hills to stabilize the land and prevent soil erosion.''
Though Sachs has been in the countryside for less than half an hour, it takes him just minutes to place this scene in the larger story he has come to tell. ''Right now, these are just survival mechanisms,'' he says, referring to the puppet-size project. ''But small things on this scale get washed away. It's like giving subtherapeutic levels of drugs to a dying patient.'' He steps around the dried cow dung that litters the path toward the row of waiting Toyota Land Cruisers. A small boy in sweatpants lingering by the dirt road looks up at Sachs curiously, then stretches out a tiny cupped hand. Sachs looks over at me. ''We need something much bigger,'' he says.
Sachs is nothing if not a big thinker. And in July, the renowned macroeconomist and special adviser to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan was in Ethiopia on a world tour advancing his most ambitious project yet: the elimination of global poverty. While others tinker with incremental steps, Sachs has no patience for the small scale. Ethiopia and sub-Saharan Africa have slid deeper into poverty in the last 20 years, and whereas many economists stress the failures of local leadership, Sachs is telling a different story. In his version, Africa, through no fault of its own, is trapped. Held back by geographical impediments like climate, disease and isolation, it cannot lift itself out of poverty. What Africa needs, then, is not more scolding from the West. It needs a ''big push'' -- a flood of foreign aid -- to boost its prospects and carry it into the developed world.
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Sachs isn't just expecting rich nations to fork over the cash, though. He's traveling the world to rally poor countries to draft plans showing what they need and how they'll spend it. Hunger, for example, can be eliminated with the right science and technology, he says, which can be purchased with foreign aid. So in July, Sachs convened in Ethiopia a United Nations conference on hunger to persuade African leaders to see it that way. Ambitious as ever, Sachs aimed to start an African ''green revolution.''
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/magazine/07SACHS.htm
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