To the editor of Times magazine:
I anxiously read the article “ HOW TO END POVERTY” by Dr. Sachs in the latest issue of Times magazine. Long in rhetoric, it left me scratching my head that how such a renown economist missed the mark so badly on the issue of third world poverty.
In my trips to Central America and Asia, and discussing the issues with the economically bankrupt farmers, it becomes very clear that: the farmers of the third world can no longer earn a living and are forced to migrate to the cities to find employment at mostly $1 for 12 hour days to supply the rich nations with the “Dollar stores merchandize”!!
Just 35 years ago, in 1970, the income gap between the rich industrialized nations to poor agricultural based economies of the third world was 5 to 1. Another words for the job of same value, a Westerner would receive $5 per unit of work where his third world cousin would receive $1. By 1997, this gap has risen to 20 to 1, suggesting a four times increase in wages in the west when there was no such boost in the east!!
Acknowledging agriculture as the main engine of the third world economies and recognizing that the price of main agricultural commodities- wheat, corn, rice, cotton and sugar- have more or less remained at its 1970 prices while a barrel of oil has risen from $2 to $55 in 2005, one could see why there has been no rise in third world wages and why a large proportion of the population live in abject poverty.
How could it be that the main staples of farm production have not seen any price appreciation in 35 years? The answer is in the $390 billion that the rich nations spend yearly to subsidize their farmers since, you guessed it, 1970!!! Our tax dollars are hard at work pushing the farm based economies of the third world into abject poverty.
In my recent trip to VARANASI, India, a farmer was complaining that he receives less than $10 for 600 heads of cauliflower, when the price of gas was more than $3 per gallon. His fertile farm did not need fertilizer, better health care, or more schools. It just needed a better price for his cauliflower to be able to absorb the cost of gasoline and transportation to the city (30 miles away), to earn a living. By maintaining the unfair farm subsidy regime, we, the citizens of the rich industrialized nations, have sentenced our brothers and sisters, who happen to be born in the third world, to abject poverty.
Reza
Agent of Change,
Fair Trade
Changing the world one bean at a time
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