The Unequal World: How Inequality Harms the Poor and What Can Be Done About It
•Als PPT, PDF herunterladen•
0 gefällt mir•2,078 views
The document provides an overview of key issues related to inequality discussed in a forthcoming book. It notes that inequality is shaped by factors like gender, race, income and education. While inequality has fallen in some countries, it has risen in many others. The document argues that redistributing power, opportunities and assets is needed to address inequality and poverty. Effective states and active citizens are important to drive development. The urgency of addressing inequality and poverty is increased by threats like climate change.
Empfohlen
Empfohlen
Weitere ähnliche Inhalte
Was ist angesagt?
Was ist angesagt? (20)
Ähnlich wie The Unequal World: How Inequality Harms the Poor and What Can Be Done About It
Ähnlich wie The Unequal World: How Inequality Harms the Poor and What Can Be Done About It (12)
Mehr von CSO Programe,Oxfam China
Mehr von CSO Programe,Oxfam China (20)
Kürzlich hochgeladen
Kürzlich hochgeladen (20)
The Unequal World: How Inequality Harms the Poor and What Can Be Done About It
- 1. Introduction title Introduction: The Unequal World
- 2. Book image
- 6. So what’s the problem? Inequality
- 8. Inequality is falling in some countries… Annual % Gini Change 0 -1 -2 -3
- 9. … but rising in many more Annual % Gini Change 4 3 2 1 0
- 11. What’s happening with inequality?
- 12. The answer? Redistribution Of Power
- 13. Of Opportunities The answer? Redistribution
- 14. Of Assets The answer? Redistribution
- 15. What's needed: Active Citizens
- 16. What's needed: Effective States
- 19. Section 2 Power and Politics
- 21. And rights are about power - Picture Development is about rights
- 24. How change happens: the Chiquitanos
- 29. How change happens: winning women’s rights in Morocco
- 32. The importance of land reform to equality and growth
- 36. Dilemma: are Effective States compatible with Active Citizens?
- 38. Section 3 Poverty and Wealth
- 41. Economics for the 21 st Century
- 44. How change happens: winning ‘pond rights’ in India
- 46. Decent work
- 50. Average annual growth 1990-2005
- 53. Section 4 Risk and Vulnerability
- 56. Causes of death worldwide
- 58. How change happens: India’s employment guarantee scheme
- 66. How change happens: t he Treatment Action Campaign
- 72. Section 5 The International System
- 76. Finance
- 83. How change happens: the Gleneagles agreement
- 90. Carbon intensity: falling too slowly, and has now gone into reverse
- 91. What level of technology transfer is required? 1.6 Billions of Tons Carbon Emitted per Year Current path = “ramp” Historical emissions Flat path 0 8 16 1950 2000 2050 2100 16 GtC/y Eight “wedges” Goal: In 50 years, same global emissions as today 15 Wedge Strategies in 4 Categories Fuel Switching (1) CO2 Capture & Storage (3) Renewable Fuels & Electricity (4) Forest and Soil Storage (2) Energy Efficiency & Conservation (4) Nuclear Fission (1)
- 94. How change happens: the landmines ban
- 96. Conclusion A New Deal For A New Century
Hinweis der Redaktion
- e.g. recent graduates; people who are still making up their minds - A long term exercise – change the way future leaders think about development aka, what do you read after Naomi Klein?
- Photos: Crispin Hughes/Oxfam
- Photos: Crispin Hughes/Oxfam
- Top 500 billionaires earn as much as 416 million poorest people Average global income is $9,500 – 25 times more than that of the bottom billion So there is enough money to go round – that is no longer a problem But problem is not primarily about global redistribution, but about domestic power and politics- come to that in a moment
- What is happening with inequalities? This map shows the degree of income inequality within countries, going from those with the most equal income distributions (green – mainly northern Europe) through to the most unequal (deep red: Latin America and Africa). NB grey= no data. This is just a static picture. What is happening over time?
- Photo: Renato Guimaraes/Oxfam
- Photo: Aubrey Wade/Oxfam
- Photo: Toby Adamson/Oxfam
- Photo: Renato Guimaraes/Oxfam Jeronima: ‘ My father never realised about our rights. We just did what the white people told us – only they could be in power, be President. We couldn’t even go into the town centre – people swore at us. But then we got our own organisation and elected our own leaders and that’s when we realised we had rights.’ Feudalism and football teams Growing struggles and linking up with highland Indians Election of Morales 2006 1m hectares July 2007 Power within: Gender: . ‘We used to meet separately as women, but now we meet with the men – we’re no longer afraid,’ Indigenous: ‘ILO Convention 169 [on indigenous rights] was important, it made our indigenous part wake up’ Why Active Citizens? Recognizes agency of poor people Starts from multidimensional nature of poverty Builds on Oxfam’s identity as a rights-based agency Builds on instrumental benefits of AC, eg in preventing famine or encouraging good governance
- Photo (right): Ryan Kenward Botswana: The world’s fastest growing economy from 1960-2000, breaking all the rules – arid, landlocked, small, nat resource dependent, regional conflict and African. Independence: 13km of paved road, handful of graduates, $300 per cap 40 years on: $6,000 per cap How? Effective state and luck Why Effective States? Lessons of history – East Asia and others (aka developmental states) Definition: Effective, accountable states Have powerful and insulated technocracies that establish stable and enforce inclusive ‘rules of the game’ on politics, taxation, law and the working of markets Have determined, skilled and nationalist business elites Protect the vulnerable (eg social protection) Mediate and resolve conflicts
- A low carbon growth path is a huge challenge. According to Sir Nicholas Stern at the LSE, a fair global deal means establishing an annual carbon allowance of 2 tonnes per person per year by 2050, falling to one tonne in the longer term. Carbon emissions in the US are currently 20 times that amount.
- Photo: Annie Bungeroth/Oxfam
- Photo: Annie Bungeroth/Oxfam
- Photo: Annie Bungeroth/Oxfam
- Photo: Annie Bungeroth/Oxfam
- Photo: Renato Guimaraes/Oxfam n.b. People in photo are not actually Chiquitanos
- Photo: Renato Guimaraes/Oxfam
- Photo: Geoff Sayer/Oxfam
- Photo: Jim Holmes/Oxfam
- Photo: Paul Thompson Margaret Mead: ‘ Never doubt that a group of concerned citizens can change the world – indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’
- Photo: resistingwomen.net ‘ Never doubt that a group of concerned citizens can change the world – indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’
- Photo: resistingwomen.net
- Photo: Gilvan Barreto/Oxfam In Papua New Guinea (PNG) over 97 per cent of land is under such traditional ‘customary’ title, and there is a significant push, including from the Australian government and the World Bank, to reform land ownership systems on the premise that customary title is an impediment to development.
- Source: World Bank, World Development Report 2006
- Photo: Crispin Hughes/Oxfam In 1900, New Zealand was the only country with a government elected by all its adult citizens. By the end of the century, despite a number of severe reversals (including fascism and communism and succeeding waves of military coups against elected governments), there were ostensibly 120 electoral democracies in place.
- Photo: Crispin Hughes/Oxfam
- Photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Parliament_House%2C_Dec_05.JPG In the early 1960s, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) had a national income per capita twice that of South Korea. Both countries had hungry, illiterate populations; both received substantial US aid; both were devastated by conflict. Since then, Korea has become one of the great development success stories of recent times, transforming the lives of its people, while the DRC has slid further into economic decline and civil war. The German philosopher Georg Hegel described the state as a ‘work of art’. As works of conscious design, the greatest constitutions and states stand comparison with the finest achievements of civilisation in visual arts, music, philosophy, or poetry. They are the collective manifestation of the human imagination, and often surpass individual achievements in the extent to which they have transformed people’s lives.
- Photo: PA Photos
- Photo: PA Photos
- Photo: Rajendra Shaw/Oxfam
- Photo: Crispin Hughes/Oxfam
- Photo: Rajendra Shaw/Oxfam Between 1980 and 2004, spending on agriculture as a share of total government expenditure fell in Africa (from 6.4 per cent to 5 per cent), in Asia (14.8 per cent to 7.4 per cent), and in Latin America (8 per cent to 2.7 per cent). In recent years, Malawi has shown what state action can achieve in terms of poverty reduction, if not yet in terms of broader economic take-off. After a series of poor harvests left almost five million Malawians facing food shortages, the government defied pressure from the country’s aid donors and introduced subsidies on seeds and fertilisers to pre-empt famine. The results were spectacular, more than doubling the national maize harvest and averting widespread hunger. The first wave of supermarkets hit developing countries in the early 1990s, appearing in major cities in the richer countries of East Asia (outside China), Central Europe, and Latin America. By 2000, they accounted for 50–60 per cent of retail sales, close to their share in the USA or France. They soon expanded to smaller and poorer countries in Central America, the Andes, and Southern and then Eastern Africa. Their take-off in Asia is now registering even faster growth than in Latin America. According to China’s Ministry of Commerce, 70,000 supermarkets opened in rural areas of the country in 2005. [1] The phenomenon is now beginning to be seen in South Asia and West Africa.
- Photo: Rajendra Shaw/Oxfam
- Photo: Rajendra Shaw/Oxfam
- Photo: Toby Adamson/Oxfam
- Photo: Toby Adamson/Oxfam In 1982 the government of Bangladesh began to promote export-oriented manufacturing; within two years, the garment industry took off. By 2004, an estimated two million people worked in the garment factories. Woman garment worker: ‘In my mother’s time … women had to tolerate more suffering because they did not have the means to become independent. They are better off now, they know about the world, they have been given education, they can work and stand on their own feet. They have more freedom.’ In La Paz, where 60 per cent of the workforce is now in the informal economy, there is one street trader for every three families.
- Photo: Toby Adamson/Oxfam SMEs played a central role in Taiwan’s spectacular growth, built on exports that rose a hundredfold between 1965 and 1987. When labour costs rose in the 1980s, the government actively pushed SMEs to upgrade into ever higher-technology products such as computers, particularly for export. When India’s Tata Motors launched its ‘people’s car’ in 2008 it followed in the footsteps of the Volkswagen Beetle or the Model T Ford, promising to bring cars to new generations of consumers by exporting $2,500 Nanos to the rest of the developing world. D eveloping country TNCs are more likely to use ‘intermediate’ technologies that are more labour-intensive, and so create more jobs. However, the poor performance of southern TNCs regarding social and environmental responsibility is a cause for concern, and may be due to the absence of strong government or civil society scrutiny at home.
- Photo: Renato Guimarães/Oxfam Global trade is booming, growing much faster than the world economy as a whole. Global exports of manufactured and agricultural products increased by 15 per cent in 2006, to a value of $11.8 trillion. Trade in services such as banking and tourism rose by 11 per cent, reaching $2.7 trillion In manufacturing, countries with successful growth records – such as South Korea, Taiwan, Viet Nam, China, and Mauritius – have developed core industries behind protective barriers. When they were at the same level of development as sub-Saharan Africa is today, the USA had an average tariff of 40 per cent, Japan 30 per cent, and EU members 20 per cent, far higher than the levels currently being contemplated in today’s trade negotiations.
- Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators 2007
- Photo: Toby Adamson/Oxfam New Economics Foundation: In the 1990s it took $166 of global economic growth, with all the associated environmental costs, to achieve just $1 of progress in reducing poverty, while in the 1980s this figure was $45. Any proponent of the Washington Consensus visiting Latin America and China in the mid-1980s would reasonably have concluded that Latin America was bound for prosperity, whereas China was doomed. Latin America at that time was moving into a liberalising overdrive, privatising state firms and opening up to trade. In China, meanwhile, tariffs and non-tariff barriers remained high, and the government showed little appetite for ending its deep involvement in crucial areas of economic management such as the banking system.
- Photo: Gustav Liliequist
- Photo: Morris Herson/Oxfam Voices of the Poor conclusion: ‘Anxiety emerges as the defining characteristic of insecurity, and the anxiety is based not on one but on many risks and fears: anxiety about jobs, anxiety about not getting paid, anxiety about needing to migrate, anxiety about lack of protection and safety, anxiety about floods and drought, anxiety about shelter, anxiety about falling ill, and anxiety about the future of children and settling them well in marriage.’ Egs of reinforcement: Studies in Malawi show how the famine of 2001–02 drove desperate women and girls to sell sex to survive, greatly increasing their chances of contracting HIV. More than 50 per cent of Africa’s food crises can be explained by armed conflict and the consequent displacement of millions of people
- Photo: Ami Vitale/Oxfam In 2007, a c ombination of child support, disability payments, and pensions was reaching approximately 13 million South Africans, out of a total population of 48 million. Total spending in 2007 amounted to $9bn – 3.4 per cent of GDP. Kyrgyzstan’s social protection system now comprises a social insurance fund from which old age and disability pensions are paid; a health insurance fund, which covers the costs of health treatment for the working population and for children and older people; and a social assistance system, which provides small amounts of cash assistance on a means-tested basis to people living below the poverty line. Although far from perfect, it shows that even a very poor country (in 2005 Kyrgyzstan’s annual per capita GDP was US$319) can run a social protection system that helps protect the most vulnerable. World Bank analysis suggests that, without the system, the extreme poverty headcount would have increased by 24 per cent, the poverty gap by 42 per cent, and the severity of poverty by 57 per cent. Furthermore, these levels of social protection do not represent an unsustainable drain on public resources: in 2002, they cost 3 per cent of GDP.
- Photo: Rajendra Shaw/Oxfam
- Photo: Rajendra Shaw/Oxfam
- Photo: Howard Davies/Oxfam
- Photo: Howard Davies/Oxfam The growth of microfinance institutions has been spectacular, with the total number of borrowers rising from 13.5 million in 1997 to 113.3 million in 2004, of whom two-thirds were people living on less than $1 a day. The vast majority of these people are in Asia, where over one-third of poor families have access to microfinance.
- Photo: Reuters
- Photo: Reuters
- Photo: Glenn Edwards/Oxfam Half of global cancer deaths are in developing countries, including (due to late diagnosis and lack of treatment) 95 per cent of deaths from cervical cancer
- Photo: Shailan Parker/Oxfam HIV and AIDS: In 25 years the disease has spread to virtually every country, with 65 million people infected with HIV and 25 million deaths from AIDS. In 2005, there were 38.6 million people worldwide living with HIV and AIDS: 4.1 million were newly infected with HIV that year, while 2.8 million people died from AIDS. Of the 2.3 million children living with HIV and AIDS globally, two million are African. Women aged 15–24 are six times more likely to carry the virus than men in the same age group
- Photo: AP/PA Photos
- Photo: Mi rjam van den Berg/Oxfam Novib
- Photo: Mi rjam van den Berg/Oxfam Novib Inequality: January 2001 was a bad month for earthquakes, with major tremors striking in India, El Salvador, and the northwest USA around Seattle. These three earthquakes were of similar orders of magnitude, but killed 20,000 people in India, 600 in El Salvador, and none in Seattle. Even allowing for geological differences, the explanation for such a huge disparity lay not in nature, but in poverty and power. Nature is neutral, but disasters discriminate. On average, the number of people affected by disasters in developing countries is 150 times higher than in rich countries, whereas the population is only five times greater. December 2004 tsunami: Over 227,000 people lost their lives and some 1.7 million were displaced. A massive, media-fuelled global response resulted, producing an estimated $13.5bn in international aid, including $5.5bn from the public in developed countries. Disaster Preparedness: Two months after Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans in 2005, killing around 1,300 people, Hurricane Wilma, at one point the strongest hurricane ever recorded, struck Cuba. The sea swept 1km inland and flooded the capital Havana, yet there were no deaths or even injuries in the city. Nationwide, 640,000 people were evacuated and only one life was lost. The six major hurricanes that rolled over Cuba between 1996 and 2002 claimed only 16 lives.
- Photo: Mi rjam van den Berg/Oxfam Novib The World Health Organization suggests that the warming and precipitation trends attributable to man-made climate change over the past 30 years already claim more than 150,000 lives a year – most of them in poor countries The UN warns that, without action now, there could be over 150 million environmental refugees by 2050, due to the likely effects of global warming
- Photo: HDPT Central African Republic Attitudes and beliefs on violence against women: In South Asia, We Can’s campaign to end violence against women works through people-to-people contact and a massive network of over 1,800 civil society organisations. Individual ‘change makers’ sign up to the campaign, promising to change themselves and to influence their family, friends, and neighbours on the need to end domestic violence and change attitudes towards women. They are armed with some basic materials, including resources suitable for those unable to read, such as posters addressing everyday forms of violent discrimination. In a process reminiscent of viral marketing, those they ‘convert’ become change makers themselves. So far, just over one million people have signed on. The campaign’s target is five million. In August 2002 in Nigeria’s Kaduna state, the epicentre of the country’s inter-communal violence where both Muslims and Christians see themselves as economically and politically marginalised, former militants from each community encouraged twenty senior religious leaders to sign a declaration of peace. Since then, these leaders have been credited with helping to restrain violence during state and federal elections, and have intervened in disputes in Kaduna schools, preventing minor arguments from turning into major incidents. 40 per cent of countries collapse into war within five years of signing peace deals.
- Photo: David Vinuales/Oxfam Disasters are also ‘political moments’ that can make as well as break movements for change. They highlight corruption and political bias: in Nicaragua, popular outrage at the theft of relief money by the Somoza dictatorship after the earthquake of 1972 was a ‘tipping point’ in the upsurge of protest that led to the Sandinista Revolution seven years later. The feeble response of the Mexican authorities to the earthquake of 1985 galvanised independent social movements and weakened the stranglehold of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had ruled the country since 1929. Catastrophic famines in Bangladesh in 1971 and in Ethiopia in 1985 led respectively to independence and the fall of a dictatorship. The 2004 Asian tsunami set the stage for a resumption of peace talks between the separatist Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, or GAM) and the Indonesian government, culminating in the signing of a peace agreement in August 2005 that officially brought a 30-year conflict to an end.
- Photo: UNA-San Diego
- Photo: Craig Owen/Oxfam
- Photo: Aaron Mallett http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/04/15/2217414.htm
- Photo: Aaron Mallett By one calculation, banking and financial crises have wiped 25 per cent off the economic output of developing countries over the past 25 years. ‘ Citizens’ confidence is measured every four years with an election. The market measures business confidence every four seconds.’ Brazilian academic, Marcus Faro de Castro ‘ Transfer pricing’ involves under- or overcharging for trade within different company affiliates in order to minimise tax. One study revealed companies recording internal transactions of TV antennas from China priced at $0.04 and Japanese tweezers priced at $4,896.
- Photo: Renato Guimarães/Oxfam Taxpayers provide a mere 25,000 US cotton farmers and corporations with annual subsidies of up to $4bn, resulting in overproduction and dumping on world markets that cost ten million poor farmers in West Africa between 8 per cent and 20 per cent of their income An average of two bilateral investment treaties are signed every week. Most alarming among the EU’s bilateral and regional negotiations are the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.
- Since 2001, for example, competition among Indian generics producers has driven down the cost of first-line antiretroviral medicines from $10,000 per patient per year to the current level of less than $100 per patient per year. Thailand’s decision to issue a compulsory licence for its second-line HIV medicine Kaletra prompted Abbott Pharmaceuticals to de-register seven new medicines from the Thai market. Abbott was charging patients nearly $2,200 per year for the drug. Biopiracy: in 1995, when two researchers from the University of Mississippi Medical Center were granted a US patent for using turmeric to heal wounds, an art that has been practised in India for thousands of years. To get the patent repealed, the claim had to be backed by written evidence – an ancient Sanskrit text Similar patent disputes have broken out over attempts by US firms to patent basmati rice (a tasty variety perfected over generations by Indian farmers), ayahuasca (an Amazon rainforest plant sacred to Colombia’s indigenous peoples), the neem tree (an Indian plant traditionally used to produce medicines and pesticides), and extracts of black pepper. In 2005, the Peruvian government accused Japanese scientists of trying to patent the extract of camu-camu , a pale orange fruit found in the Amazon that has the highest concentration of vitamin C of any known plant, 60 times greater than lemon juice.
- Photo: Tomas Castelazo When Ecuador suffered an economic crisis in the late 1990s, thousands of people left the country, many for Spain, and remittances rapidly expanded to 10 per cent of GDP – a vital lifeline for a country in crisis. Without immigration, the Spanish economy would have stagnated over the past five years, and in 2005 immigrants paid in €5bn more in taxes than they received in services
- In 2007, Wal-Mart’s sales came to $345bn, more than the GDP of all 49 least developed countries put together, or of major economies such as Saudi Arabia, Poland, or Indonesia. All told, the universe of transnational corporations (TNCs) now spans some 77,000 parent companies with over 770,000 foreign affiliates. In 2005, these foreign affiliates generated an estimated $4.5 trillion in value added, employed some 62 million workers, and exported goods and services valued at more than $4 trillion. Corruption : World Bank figures suggest that $1 trillion in bribes is paid annually by international companies to secure lucrative deals. In the USA, pharmaceutical companies spent $759m to influence 1,400 Congressional bills between 1998 and 2004, and they employ 3,000 lobbyists
- Aid’s most tangible successes have been in health, where vaccinations have eradicated smallpox and have saved 7.5 million lives from 1999–2005 simply by halving deaths from measles Malawi: With 90 per cent funding from the UK and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis, Malawi’s Ministry of Health increased salaries by 50 per cent for 5,400 existing front-line health workers, recruited 700 new health staff, expanded and improved training schools and trainers, and plugged critical gaps with expatriate volunteers. ‘ In 2003, resignations of nurses were at one or even two a week. It was shocking,’ said Dr. Damison Kathyola, director of Kamuzu Central Hospital in the Malawian capital Lilongwe. ‘Since we introduced incentives, we’ve somehow stemmed it to one or two a month.’ Quality: a proliferation of international ‘ financing mechanisms’, including 90 global health funds set up to address specific diseases or problems. Uganda has over 40 donors delivering aid in-country. Government of Uganda figures show that it had to deal with 684 different aid instruments and associated agreements between 2003/04 and 2006/07, for aid coming into the central budget alone. St. Vincent (population 117,000) was asked to monitor 191 different indicators on HIV and AIDS
- Photo: Kieran Battles/Oxfam
- Photo: Kieran Battles/Oxfam
- Photo: Kieran Battles/Oxfam
- Photo: Howard Davies/Oxfam
- Photo: Swan Ti Ng/Oxfam Oxfam has developed an ‘Adaptation Financing Index’ as an indication of what each country should pay. On this basis, Oxfam has calculated that the USA, the European Union, Japan, Canada, and Australia are responsible for over 95 per cent of the financing needed. It estimates that the USA is responsible for over 40 per cent, the European Union for over 30 per cent, and Japan for over 10 per cent. Within the European Union, the top five contributors to adaptation financing should be Germany, the UK, Italy, France, and Spain. Carbon trading: relatively small, covering less than 5.5 per cent of global carbon emissions in 2006 Thanks to industry lobbying, caps were initially set far too high in Europe’s flagship scheme, and the price of carbon duly collapsed, removing incentives to cut emissions. Ongoing industry lobbying threatens to undercut proposals to introduce auctioning of emissions permits into the ETS. The price of carbon has been too volatile to prompt the long-term investments in areas such as renewable energy are required if emissions are to be reduced. Because carbon trading seeks reductions in greenhouse gas emissions at the lowest possible overall cost, it channels private sector efforts toward the cheapest reductions rather than those that are vital in the long-term, such as changes to infrastructure, new technologies, and dispersed emissions sources (for example, transport and housing).
- Photo: Swan Ti Ng/Oxfam
- Photo: Ian K. Rogers
- Photo: Ian K. Rogers
- Photo: Crispin Hughes/Oxfam Graph source: Adapted from www.princeton.edu/wedges/presentation_resources/
- Photo: Jim Holmes/Oxfam A media-driven global system that raised over $7,000 per person affected by the 2004 tsunami, but only $3 per person affected by that year’s floods in Bangladesh. Food aid: high oil prices, transport can eat up much of the food aid budget – up to 40 per cent in Canada’s case in 2004, which helped to prompt a policy change to allow increased local sourcing. In addition, a third of the global food aid budget is wasted because the USA insists on processing food aid domestically and shipping it via national carriers. An OECD study found that t he actual costs of tied food aid transfers were on average approximately 50 per cent higher than local food purchases and 33 per cent more costly than procurement of food in third countries (so-called triangular transactions).
- Photo: Peter Goodbody In November 2001 around Kisangani, the scene of intense fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo that involved many civilian deaths, Amnesty International found ammunition cartridges for North Korean, Chinese, and Russian heavy machine-guns, Russian revolvers, South African assault rifles, Chinese anti-aircraft weapons, and Russian, Bulgarian, and Slovak automatic grenade launchers. At the time, the DRC was subject to EU and UN arms embargoes, which should have prevented the sale of all of these weapons. International efforts at arms control have long focused on nuclear and other sophisticated weapons systems, yet small weapons and light arms are the true weapons of mass destruction, responsible for some 300,000 deaths in 2003. C ollectively, countries in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa spent $22.5bn on arms during 2004, a sum sufficient to put every child in school and to reduce child mortality by two-thirds by 2015.
- Photo: Sean Sutton/MAG
- Photo: Sean Sutton/MAG
- A low carbon growth path is a huge challenge. According to Sir Nicholas Stern at the LSE, a fair global deal means establishing an annual carbon allowance of 2 tonnes per person per year by 2050, falling to one tonne in the longer term. Carbon emissions in the US are currently 20 times that amount.