Jeffrey Sachs is standing in the thick red dirt of a field in Kenya, surrounded by gleaming waist-high cassava plants, and one begins to picture him in a white lab coat.
Imagine him lifting a narrow test tube to the light, squinting one blue eye while he swirls the contents: Sprinkle in a fistful of fertilizer, stuff in the gossamer panels of a mosquito net. Scrape in a plate of beans, some plastic tarp, a pill or two, some gaunt and weary Kenyan grannies. Add water. Shake briskly.
End poverty.
The village of Sauri, not far from the shores of Lake Victoria, is the famed U.S. economist's test tube, the pilot site for an audacious experiment in poverty alleviation he plans to roll out all over Africa.
It is Sauri that, a year and a half after the experiment began, is showing the results Prof. Sachs says vindicate his claims: Malaria is down by half, school performance has shot up, harvests have tripled.
"Things are very different for us now," Edwina Odit, a hunched and weathered 58-year-old farmer, said with simple understatement.
The conventional wisdom on aid these days is that it doesn't work. Only trade and economic growth will lift people out of poverty. It's the "rising tide" theory, that the prosperity born of globalization will come to lift all boats.
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Although Prof. Sachs is a fan of the free market, he argues — everywhere he can, including in his bestseller The End of Poverty, reissued in paperback last week and this week edged out by Adam Hochschild's anti-slavery chronicle, Bury The Chains, for the annual Lionel Gelber Book Award — that market remedies don't apply for the 1.6 billion poorest people in the world, including most of sub-Saharan Africa.
Caught in a trap of depleting their limited resources just to subsist, he says, they are in no place to benefit from trade, and in fact get steadily poorer.
Not only do they have no boat to catch the tide, they are stranded hundreds of kilometres inland, in dusty, arid villages. And so, he says, they need good old-fashioned aid to get them "on to the first rung of the ladder."
But they don't need multimillion-dollar World Bank megaprojects. Rather, the tab in Sauri clocks in at about $100 (U.S.) a head — enough money for better seeds, some fertilizer, a bed net to fend off malarial mosquitoes, a share in a protected water source, a school lunch for the kids, a solar lantern.
Just that, more or less, is enough to stop people from deforesting or exhausting their soil, to give them a food surplus and some crops to grow for cash, better health and the energy to stay awake at school.
Not a handout, Prof. Sachs says, but an investment — in simple, proven technologies, to increase productivity and access to markets. His ideas are a return to what is viewed as the failed idea of, well, giving poor people things.
If he were anybody else, his plan wouldn't be getting any attention at all.
Over the past 25 years, Jeffrey Sachs has done the near-impossible, injecting the world of economics with a quality that verges on glamour. He is the jet-set, go-to economist, with the ear of governments and powerful people, squashing inflation here and yanking a creaking communist economy into the market era there. Tickets to his lectures are scalped on eBay.
There is certainly nothing glamorous about his appearance. He's short and slight, with a big head and puff hair, appalling fashion sense and an astonishingly loud voice that twangs with a middle-American accent.
But he is a veteran at radically reshaping countries and economies. In 1985, as a tenured professor at Harvard University at the unprecedented age of 28, he was listening in on a seminar about the 25,000-per-cent inflation that then plagued Bolivia. Then he stood up and said to the visiting Bolivian economists, in effect, "I can fix that."
