To talk about the Millennium Development Goals drives us to numbers, numbers and the sorrow in confirming that despite the advances in the fight against poverty, 5 years before the deadline established we are still far from achieving the main goals of eradicating poverty in the world. 

Just remember that about 1 billon persons do not accede to clean water and 2.4 billon people lack access to sanitation. Women in poor countries take more than 4 hours per day to bring water for their families. And 24,000 children die every day in developing countries from preventable causes like diarrhea contracted from unclean water.

The Millennium Development Goals are quite far from being reached. And probably it happens because we only talk about poverty, but not inequality. We do not talk really about the distances that separate human beings one from another; leaders do not face the discussion about the real causes.

The 500 richest families in the world have more than the poorest 500 million people together in the world. The most powerful 20 economies include not only countries but also big transnational corporations. Gaps between rich and poor people break the essence of humanity; gaps between rich and poor countries denounce the large historical debt to the poorest in the world. Even inside the rich countries there are also too many poor people and the gaps are broadening with the deepening of this capitalist and consumer society.

And poverty does not come alone, it is linked to vulnerability.

We can see it thru the impacts of climate change that are getting worse every day. Just in eight months in 2010, after the frustrating Copenhagen Summit, too many climate calamities all over the world affected the poorest: Russia, Pakistan, Central America, South America just to quote some. And those tragedies increased the numbers in poverty and vulnerability. It is undeniable. 

Those events are recalling us that the risks we are facing now are different than 10 years ago, the risks are too strong and will impact on the MDGs severely if rich and developed countries do not substantially reduce their greenhouse emissions, honor their historical debt by transferring substantial financial and clean technologies support to the developing countries and give back the planet the ¨space” to breathe again.

Coming from La Paz Bolivia, I can tell you that we are losing our glaciers faster than we thought and it will affect millions of peoples in our access to water and in the access to food, because hundreds of rural communities depend on the ecological balances given by the ice capped mountains. In the Andean Region millions of persons will be affected by the glaciers melting. Scientists say that our glaciers have no more than 50 years left. And we did not cause the climate crisis. 80% of the greenhouse gases in the air is produced by the 20% of the world population concentrated in developed countries. The richest countries and the richest people in the world are eating this planet conceiving that it is just a Resource; meanwhile common sense cries that it is our Home.

So we are convinced that we cannot fight against poverty if we not face the necessity to restore the equilibrium with nature and if we do not propose to ourselves to change the bases of the mercantile society, surpassing the great distances between human beings to avoid the danger of self-destruction. We need a real change of the system.

It seems nice to nourish ideals of richness and success, but not everybody at the same time can reach the wealth that is sold every day thru the TV or the media. We cannot keep on fostering dreams of individual success and richness without thinking in the global community of the common wealth, and without the consciousness that we cannot grow “forever”. We already know that if everybody in this world would live at the same level of consumption of the medium current average in the rich countries, we would need far more than three planets to survive.

That is why the Bolivian people is beginning to build a new concept that promotes the principle of the SUMA QAMAÑA the words in Quechua that mean LIVING WELL. It is now inside our new Constitution.  With that concept the idea prevails that we have to expect to live well, not better; because the word “better” suggest the endless growing, the unlimited enrichment that for us do not exist. It is not possible simply because it would consume all the biodiversity and the life on the planet and would deepen the gulfs between people. We have to begin to conceive development and wealth in a different way: as equilibrium and equality, as harmony with nature, as empathy between people.

If words could change the world, we could have been living in a real different world decades ago. People have the will to change but we need to convince our governors to really be committed to the claims of the planet and to be coherent at every moment with these efforts. We cannot fight poverty investing more in wars and weapons than in people. One cannot talk about the MDGs and at the same time increase racial intolerance and marginalization. The world leaders now have the decisions on their side, we ask them to do it correctly.

New York, September 2010

- Elizabeth Peredo Beltran – Bolivia: Intervention during the STAND UP and TAKE ACTION - SUNDAY 19 September, at Lincoln Center in NY.

(English revised by ALAI)