Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-04-Speech-4-036"
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"en.20011004.2.4-036"2
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"Mr President, in 1979, Willy Brandt presented his famous "North-South Report, a programme for survival", in which he warned of the risk that in the year 2000 a large part of the population would continue to live in poverty. Shortly after that pronouncement some frightening statistics were published; every 24 hours, 35 000 human beings died of hunger in the world. In two years, hunger caused more deaths than the two world wars put together.
The year 2000 arrived and the situation has only got worse. According to the World Health Organisation, extreme poverty – misery – is the chief cause of suffering in the world and is also the one which each year claims the greatest number of human lives and yet we are still talking about poverty and how we are going to remedy it.
A few months ago, before the summer, at our Brussels headquarters, the United Nations together with the EU organised the Third Conference on the Least-developed Countries dedicated in particular to analysing the causes, consequences and solutions of poverty. We also set an ambitious target: to reduce poverty by half by the year 2005. Some studies lead to the conclusion, Mr President, that by what we are doing, with the plans and projects we intend to carry out and above all, with the resources we allocate and those which are intended to be allocated, that objective cannot be met.
Our concern now is to combat the international terrorism fostered by some notorious fanatics. True, that is the problem of the moment but, ladies and gentlemen, this is not the root of the problem. The problem is poverty throughout a large part of the world. Until we solve the problem of poverty, especially the extreme poverty – misery – in which hundreds of millions, around 1 500 million human beings, and I am using cautious figures, live, we will continue to be exposed to situations such as those we are experiencing now.
Between 13 and 19 September some of us were visiting some of the poorest regions of the planet, in the south of the African continent. Mozambique today has 19 million inhabitants but within 9 years only 13 million will still be alive; the remaining 6 will have died of Aids.
Today Mr Khanbhai in his report proposes a series of measures to combat Aids, malaria and tuberculosis in the context of reducing poverty. During a visit to a field hospital way out in the middle of the African savannah, my colleagues and I witnessed how victims of a cholera epidemic are dying – believe me, right now – in a Dante-esque spectacle such as occurred in Europe in the Middle Ages.
This is also happening at other hospitals which are not in the middle of nowhere. In Mocuba, there is a provincial hospital where women give birth next to patients with Aids, tuberculosis, leprosy, meningitis, and infectious diarrhoeas of all kinds.
For all these diseases which today can be cured and eradicated, there are drugs. It is a problem of resources, and above all, it is a problem of political will.
Mr Khanbhai, I congratulate you and thank you for the important contribution you have made in your report. But, Mr Bashir, you know your native Africa better than I do. Let us make no mistake, the problems of poverty in the world are today of such magnitude that these measures, with the present resources, are like a drop in the ocean. Some day we will realise this. Either we fight against poverty with all our energy and all our resources until we conquer it, or poverty with its many faces – now taking the form of terrorism – will conquer us."@en1
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