Washington National Cathedral

Bishop Chane, distinguished religious leaders, and the wonderful community that has gathered here, let me say what a deep privilege it is, what an honor to meet with you and to ponder an issue that really is central to all of our fates, certainly the well-being of our country, our world, and the world of our children. It is thrilling to contemplate the gathering of religious leaders that you’ve brought together here for this reflection, the largest gathering that, as you’ve said, has ever taken place; and it is quite stunning and not coincidental that you’ve chosen days that immediately precede what will be the largest gathering of political leaders in the history of the planet, who will be assembling at the United Nations September 14 to 16 at what’s called the World Summit. It now appears that about 185 leaders, perhaps even more, will be coming to that remarkable session.

It is a testimony to both the high anxieties in our world today and the aspirations of our world that such a gathering is taking place. And of course it’s notable that we’re here on the fourth anniversary of September 11, which was a shattering experience for our country but not necessarily one that we interpreted right in its immediate aftermath, and one where the requirement of reflection continues, and I would suggest a different approach from the one that we’ve taken.

And finally, it’s quite stunning that all of this has taken place in the aftermath of the greatest natural disaster that our country has ever experienced, and indeed it’s an experience that calls into question our daily language. When Bishop Chane said that we need to look out to see the poor in the world the same way we see the poor in our own society, I think it’s fair to say that the most important lesson of all of [Hurricane] Katrina is that the poor in our own society have been invisible.

They’ve been invisible to the politicians who take votes. They’ve been invisible to the Wall Street Journal that declared the day after the hurricane struck that all is well because everybody left. They have been invisible in our political process that has cut taxes and cut taxes and cut taxes and raised military spending but has not addressed the needs of our own society, especially the needs of those who have the most critical of all needs.

This is the place to talk about these issues. The great religious traditions have been behind every great movement for human dignity and justice, and in the last two centuries the religious traditions spearheaded the campaign to end slavery, spearheaded the campaign for civil rights, spearheaded the campaigns for peace over war, and now need to spearhead the campaign to end extreme poverty on our planet: a goal that is as eminently achievable as fortifying the levees of New Orleans before disaster hits.

But we don’t want political leaders to tell us in the future that, “Oh, we had no idea that that was an issue.” Because it’s only a shocking disregard for the vulnerability of the poor that could lead to such neglect in the face of the such immense knowledge that we have about what we can do, about how to go about doing it, and about the results that can be achieved.

I don’t want to hear presidents of the United States in future years saying, “Oh, no one ever thought about controlling malaria before.” And yet that’s how we’re acting right now, ladies and gentlemen: we are not acting.

The meeting of world leaders that will take place at the World Summit will consider the Millennium Development Goals. It’s a summit that was called on the fifth anniversary of the establishment of those goals at the start of the millennium, in what was itself a remarkable meeting of 147 heads of state, in September 2000, at the time the largest gathering in history of political leaders—only to be surpassed by the meeting that will take place this week.

The world leaders rightly said that the new millennium can start better than the old one ended, and that it was an occasion not only for reflection but an occasion for action to ensure that that would be the case. Pope John Paul II and many other world religious leaders had said for years up to the beginning of the new millennium that this was indeed a special jubilee year and an occasion for exercising that preferential option for the poor.

And the world leaders listened, and for once they responded. And they adopted a declaration that included among it eighteen specific targets for cutting extreme income poverty, hunger, deaths from AIDS, malaria, TB, for ensuring access to essential medicine, for ensuring access to safe drinking water, for facing the pandemic of mothers dying in childbirth—half a million, almost every one of whom lives in a poor country, and facing the pandemic spread of slums, unsafe, unhealthy, unsatisfactory living conditions in which now more than a billion people on the planet live.

They adopted the Millennium Declaration. It had special import in my view because it did two things exactly right. First, it addressed poverty, not in a simple measure of income, but rather poverty in all its dimensions: lack of equity between men and women, boys and girls; hunger; disease; lack of access to basic needs. Second, and crucially, it set a timetable. It said that these specific, measurable, monitorable targets should be achieved by the year 2015.

There has been some important good news since the Millennium Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals within that Millennium Declaration were adopted, and the good news is that the voices of the poor in the world are increasingly being heard. And I’ll give you evidence for that in a moment.

But there’s also been something so shockingly wrong it’s hard to understand, and it’s an issue for every one of us in this room. As far as I know, President Bush has not once used the phrase Millennium Development Goals. He has not once told us about our national commitment. He has not once mobilized his government for this.

And just two weeks ago the new UN ambassador of the United States, Mr. Bolton, came to the other 190 countries and tried to extinguish the very phrase Millennium Development Goals from the declaration that is being negotiated now.

I have to tell you I have no deep or even superficial understanding of what could be motivating our national leadership in this regard. I can’t think of a more dangerous track. I can’t think of a more mistaken approach to our national security. I can’t think of a more surefire way to undermine our foreign policy objectives than to look straight in the face of the world’s poor and say, “Not only do we not accept these goals; they don’t even exist.”

The delegates were so shocked that for a few days it was as if the earthquake had hit, and then they regrouped, and it became clear that the position to expunge the Millennium Development Goals was not shared by even one other country among 191 members of the United Nations. And in recent days the United States government has backed down. The phrase will appear. It would have appeared by a vote of 190 to 1. But now it will appear with the United States government in agreement as well.

But today I’ve been already on the phone all day with delegates trying to understand why the United States is objecting to the free distribution of anti-malaria bed nets to the world’s poorest people. Why the United States was trying to keep out language about access to free health services for the poorest of the poor, even though it’s fair to say that eight million people will die this year because they lack even the most rudimentary access to essential health services.

Every step of the way has been a fight with our government. It can’t represent the spirit of our country. Something is terribly wrong as we’ve come to view the poor as our enemy and come to view the Millennium Development Goals as something to subvert rather than the most wondrous and amazing opportunity of our generation to have a shared global commitment that goes to the heart of human dignity, survival, and security for every country in the world, including our own.

The voices of the poor are being heard because the United States government could no longer expunge the Millennium Development Goals.

The voices of the poor are being heard. What are they telling us?

They’re telling us that they want to survive, that they want their children to survive, that they want their children to be healthy enough and to have enough food so that they can sit in a classroom, and that they can do this reliably enough over six or nine or twelve years, so that their children have a prospect of growing up to be productive members of a now global society rather than trapped in disease, in despair, and in violence.

They’re telling us that they want us to be partners with them. Not so that they can shake us down for our money; we don’t have to be afraid of the poor. They want us to be partners with them as human beings, to respect their dignity as they respect our dignity.

They want some help because under current conditions one billion people on the planet are fighting for their survival every single day.

What do I mean by that? It sounds bizarre. Sounds like hyperbole. Can’t be very precise to be fighting for survival every day.

Could it be? And yet it is.

One billion people, day in and day out, do not have enough to eat to meet minimum prudent caloric and protein intake standards, and to receive adequate micro-nutrients to be healthy.

One billion people do not have access to safe drinking water, so they may walk—and it’s not they, it’s the women and the children who walk an hour or two hours every day—to a water hole or to a puddle or to a polluted spring to carry back water that with shocking regularity gives dysentery, diarrheal disease, cholera, helminthic infections, schistosomiasis, and other killers.

One billion people do not have the most rudimentary access to essential health services.

Three million of those, almost all children, will die this year because they don’t sleep under an insecticide-treated bed net that would keep the anopheles mosquitoes which transmit malaria away from the sleeping sites. It’s been shown now in repeated scientific studies undertaken all over the world, and repeatedly in Africa, that when villages sleep under long-lasting insecticide treated bed nets, the malaria burden can be brought down by seventy or eighty percent. That means perhaps two million children surviving this year. It’s also been shown that when the right medicines are there—and there are a series of pills over three or four days that cost about $1.20 for a pediatric dose that is for that four-day treatment—that malaria is a hundred percent treatable disease.

Three million children will die of malaria this year. The disease will ravage their mothers and fathers almost invariably at the planting season, at the harvest season, because that’s the rainy season when the mosquitoes come. Economies will be turned upside down. And yet for three dollars from each of us in the rich world—from one billion of us living in the rich world, so a three billion dollar annual fund—that would be enough to provide bed nets, effective medicines, and community health workers to save more than two million children this year.

Yet the United States government is working overtime for you on your tax dollars this Sunday morning to keep the word “free” away from access to malaria commodities. That’s what our government’s doing in our name today.

When I recommended to the administration that maybe they could do more to fight malaria this year, well, they announced two million dollars a year when we need three billion from the world, and where the US share would be a billion. They announced two hundred million. It’s three or four hours of our military spending stretched out over a year, and they think that somehow that choice to spend one and a half billion dollars a day on the military, and two hundred million over the year for malaria, is a prudent exercise of foreign policy on behalf of our national security.

It’s unimaginable to anybody that knows or that cares to look. The only way we could come to this is if you take the decision never to look, and I’m afraid that’s the world we’re living in right now.

Our own government has taken the decision not to look.

Three years ago Secretary General Kofi Annan asked me to pull together a network of people who do look, leading scientists and development practitioners from around the world, to ask what can be done to actually meet these goals. Poor man, he got more than he asked for when we delivered 2,700 pages of documents to him at the beginning of this year in fourteen volumes: one on malaria, one on tuberculosis, one on AIDS, one on safe drinking water, one on urban slums, one on access to essential medicine, one on hunger, one on gender equity in schooling, one on school completion rates, one on the mobilization of science and technology for the poorest of the poor, one on the international trading system, one on environmental sustainability and how that is a crucial component of any approach that attempts to address the needs of impoverished people who live right on the land and survive or die depending on how much food they grow or how much product they can collect from the forests or from the fisheries—forests and fisheries and land that is severely being degraded now because of lack of basic investments in soil nutrient replenishment or tree stands or fisheries management, because with poverty, you take what you can get and you don’t have a surplus to reinvest. You’re trying to survive.

What we found indisputably was that these goals are achievable, because in every area—whether it’s feeding people in Africa, fighting malaria, helping people with AIDS to stay alive—there are practical, proven, low-cost interventions that can accomplish the tasks but simply do not reach the poorest of the poor, who live in conditions where their governments are bereft of funds and where the rich world, starting with our own, has simply not followed through on commitments that have been made for years to help finance these basic needs and thereby to help finance the escape from poverty.

There is nothing mysterious about any of these goals or about what to do.

The tools are not perfect but they’re mighty powerful. You’ve probably read about Niger’s food crisis this year. I visited fourteen African countries this summer, went to the villages in each, and I can tell you that Niger’s food crisis is matched all over Africa. It’s just which gets the headline at any moment.

And I can also tell you, because I traveled with agronomists who know what they’re doing and suffer through the no doubt silly questions of a city boy like myself, that at every one of these sites, there are ways to double or triple the food production at low cost through the basic application of known and proven scientific agronomy, something often nothing more than using fertilizer—organic or chemical—and improved seed varieties.

Every one of these villages was beset by malaria, not a bed net to be found because your government on your behalf has been trying to sell bed nets for years to people that have no money. Because our government tells the poorest people in the world, “We’re sure you won’t value these bed nets unless we sell them to you.” Because the only thing of value that you get for free, it seems, are tax cuts.

Everything else you have to make the poorest of the poor pay. That’s the philosophy.

And so I went throughout the villages of Mali, Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Malawi.

I didn’t see a bed net in most of those places.

I saw people with malaria. I saw children dying of malaria.

I didn’t see the U.S. government there helping to save those children.

What we discovered in particular was that what the villages of the poorest of the poor—whether it’s in Uganda or Malawi or Rwanda or Guatemala—need is help in an integrative package of measures to help them fight disease, have basic access to infrastructure, safe drinking water, rural electrification, transport, communications, have school meals so that their children can go to school, and that if these steps are taken, the sum cost of this, of all of those interventions—the clinic in the village, schools that are working, a truck for the village so that it’s not just women head loading commodities and walking hours every day almost as beasts of burden but rather connection to markets so you can earn a livelihood—the cost of all of those interventions together is about $110 per villager. And the cost that would be needed from us, from the rich world, is on the order of about seventy dollars per villager per year.

And what that would do is not charity, as much as that may be needed. This is investment in the ultimate escape from poverty. This is the permanent way out. It’s not the food handout. It’s growing food to feed the community right there by raising the productivity of the poorest of the poor.

It turns out that that’s seventy dollars per capita if you look across the world. The total cost of that would be about one-half of one percent of the gross national product of the rich world. One-half of one percent. We found that convenient because the rich world has promised for thirty five years, because President George Bush personally signed the Monterrey Consensus in March 2002, committing to 0.7% of the gross national product.

This is a measure of fear of the poor. We’re talking about something less than one percent of our income, 0.7% of one percent, seventy cents of our national income out of every one hundred dollars.

That’s the fear that has this administration running from these commitments.

What is 0.7% of GNP? Something that we showed could save eight million people a year? 0.7% of GNP is what you and I pay for the Iraq war each year, just to give you a scaling. 0.7% of GNP is one-seventh of what we pay each year for the total military budget, five hundred billion dollars, five percent of GNP, and this we think is going to get us security.

The administration wants us to believe that we’re doing our part. It says we’ve doubled aid to Africa.

Let me put it in perspective for you. The entire effort of the U.S. government on the military this year will be five hundred billion dollars. The cost in Iraq will be about 85 billion dollars. The cost for recovery in Katrina—because no one had ever thought that the levees might break—no one, that is, in the White House, may end up being two hundred billion dollars.

The amount that we’re spending for 750 million Africans struggling for survival, six to eight million each year dying of their poverty, hunger rampant, that’s three billion dollars total.

That’s three cents out of every hundred dollars of our national income. Three cents out of every hundred dollars of our national income is our efforts for the poorest of the poor.

That’s why they want to run away from the Millennium Development Goals, it seems, because if you close your eyes hard enough, the problem will go away.

Because they say we never committed to 0.7%, and yet they signed a document in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002, which says—and you can download it on the website, it’s called the Monterrey Consensus—in paragraph 42, “We urge all developed countries that have not done so to make concrete efforts toward the target of 0.7% of gross national product as official development assistance.” As clear as can be.

But there are no concrete efforts other than trying to expunge the commitment itself.

Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know enough about politics to know when and if this will change, but I do want to propose something different.

I think we have to act if our government will not.

We have to find ways to rise to this challenge, to make commitments and to take action. Of course part of that is calling on our leaders to represent our values, to follow through on commitments to make our planet truly safer, not more militarized.

But it also means individual actions that actually deliver right on the ground, right where it’s needed.

I toured the United States this year, spoke all over the country, met thousands of Americans, almost every one of whom told me, “We want to do something. We need to do something.” I’ve been working with a broadening group of partner non-governmental organizations—Save the Children, Junior Achievement, Rotary International—and I look forward to partnership with the religious movements and specifically their aid efforts represented here, because they are among the most magnificent on the planet, to forge a partnership of private and voluntary action.

If our government won’t act, then we have to act in its stead.

And we can do it.

Tomorrow I’ll have the opportunity with many of these partners in New York to launch Millennium Promise. Millennium Promise aims to be an open, broad partnership of like-minded people who say it’s time for leadership through action. Millennium Promise will feature two main initiatives in its early campaign. First, it will give people the opportunity to save children from malaria by simply a ten-dollar contribution for a bed net, the simplest technology, the shame that it’s not already there.

We have to help make it happen.

Rotary through voluntary actions is nearly that close to polio eradication, and Rotary will work with us, as will others, and we can do the same to bring this scourge of malaria with our African brothers and sisters dramatically under control. There is no excuse for three million children dying each year of a largely preventable and one-hundred-percent treatable disease.

The second initiative that Millennium Promise will champion are what we call Millennium Villages. This is the idea of an integrated strategy for the escape from poverty at a scale where it works, village by village across the thousands of rural communities in the impoverished countries. We’ve shown in our own work putting into practice the wisdom of this scientific network of more than 250 specialists in food and public health and AIDS and malaria and water and hydrology and so on, that investing that seventy dollars per capita can quadruple the food crop, can bring all the children to school, can indeed, deliver the bed nets to all in the community and get malaria under control.

And so we’re calling on all groups to join together, to partner to spread these Millennium Villages, so that people aren’t viewed as “they need water” and “they need health” and “the third ones need AIDS” but rather understanding that people live in fullness of their lives and they need to see poverty in all its aspects addressed and this can be done successfully.

We’re looking for businesses, universities, civic groups, religious institutions to partner with African villages based on the kind of wisdom and guidelines that this broad scientific consensus has identified as the most effective approach to enabling the poorest of the poor to escape definitively from this trap that claims their lives and claims their hope and leads to so much instability and despair.

I can’t finish without a website: www.millenniumpromise.org. I hope you’ll watch it as it launches tomorrow. I hope you’ll join us, ladies and gentlemen. It’s time for us to act. It’s time for us to build the safer world that we all so desperately want. Thank you very much.