Robert Buddan, Contributor

This is a time when we wish each other a prosperous year ahead. But, what does prosperity mean, how is it achieved, and is the world doing better or worse at achieving it?

Prosperity means leading long, healthy and creative lives. This is how the 'Human Development Report' of the United Nations defined it, in 1990. Noted economist, Paul Streeten emphasised that prosperity is about the quality of life, saying that national income by itself is not a good measure of people's lives.

People must have adequate nutrition, safe water, better medical services, more and better schooling for their children, supportive family, cultural expression, and a sense of purpose and of belonging. It is this idea that drives the U.N. Millennium Development Goals to global prosprity.

The difficult part is how to achieve it. China's premier, Wen Jiabao, is right to say that global prosperity requires peace and stability to create the environment for growth, a new political and economic order in which there are greater mutual benefits, greater support by developed countries for developing ones in debt management and technology transfers, and greater mobilisation of people and organisations around the world against poverty.

Wealth

The good news is that the world as a whole is producing enough wealth to pay for the means by which people can prosper. The bad news is that this wealth is unevenly divided with great extremes of wealth and poverty.

International conferences usually say much the same things about what undermines prosperity and who is to be blamed. The general agreement though is that we can have prosperity if we change the way governments think and work, and if we make people see that they can do more by themselves.

Governments can spend on better priorities. For instance, for the price of two fighter aircraft, they can build 300,000 hand pumps in villages to provide safe drinking water for millions of people. Clean, safe drinking water is vital to control diseases such as diarrhoea, cholera and typhoid. At the cost of two military aircraft alone, millions of people would be on their way to a prosperous year.

It is not just governments who spend too much on war, but some people spend too much on themselves. Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics, calculated that the richest 10 per cent of the people in the world can afford to cover the cost of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals many times over and still have enough to be materially prosperous.

The prosperity of half the world's people lies in the hands of this 10 per cent. If we take America's super rich alone, they could more than make up for the gap in U.N. funds for what was required to meet the cost of the millennium goals for 2006 by contributing just one-third of their incomes.

Global social capital

Some people might not like the word 'contributing'. They would ask why the rich should give away their hard-earned dollars to the poor. The Nobel Prize-winning economist, Herbert Simon, says that 90 per cent of what the rich makes really comes from planetary resources, technology invented by others, the work of governments, the skills of the community all of which, the dubious laws of private property apart, belong to or are supplied by the world's people as social capital. There is no such thing as the self-made millionaire.

Probably Bill Gates realises this. He did not invent the computer, and even if he did, he did not own the resources that went into building computers. He capitalised on computers by creating software programmes.

Through the Gates Foundation, he has become one of the world's most generous philanthropists, contributing billions of dollars to fight global poverty. He still remains one of the wealthiest men on the planet despite this. Gates realised that for the cost of money that he would not miss, he could provide vaccines against a virus that caused diarrhoea that killed half a million children each year. Gates and the children he has saved live more prosperous lives. Still, according to United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), 30,000 children die each day from avoidable poverty-related causes.

Prosperity means a long and healthy life. Indeed, there is enough food to feed everyone. There is enough money to pay for longer and healthier lives for everyone. There is enough technology to spread progress in everyone's lives.

Technology exists that can save the overstressed environment, feed the 35,000 who starve to death every day, eliminate most diseases among the 800 million who have no access to health care, extend life spans in a world where the average person lives for only 50 years, enhance human capability among the 450 million who have mental or physical disability, and even alter the course of human evolution for better among the planet's six billion people.

However, the developed world controls over 90 per cent of all patents and therefore the technology and human knowledge bound up in it; and it controls private markets, in which products and services (produced from global social capital) are too expensive for the poor to afford. While western consumer technology has been sufficiently diffused around the world ironically, productive technology remains expensive and exclusive

Jeffrey Sachs, a director of the U.N. Millennium Project, says that the Green Revolution in agriculture did help Asia to produce higher yield rice and wheat crops, but by the time the technology for maize or cassava became available for tropical crops suited to Africa, it had been too expensive. As a result, African farmers are getting one fifth to one third of the yield they could be getting. The technology is there.

It is not only weak governance that is behind Africa's woeful condition, but selfish markets for western technology is too.

Food production

The Green Revolution of the 1960s onwards helped India and China to feed enough of their people to make them productive so that these countries could emerge as economic powers. Increased food production is the entry point to break out of poverty.

The U.N.'s Millennium Villages food project is showing very promising signs in some African villages, but Africa remains the poorest continent and most of its people will not have a prosperous year.

The road to prosperity is straightforward if the global good is our main concern. But, the twisted logic of personal and national selfishness prevails instead.

The premier of China, Jeffrey Sachs of the U.N., and governments of the South have agreed for a long time that the strategy for prosperity lies in mutual interests.

Sachs says that abundant evidence shows that positive inducements have huge long-term benefits for nations. Negative inducements, like war and exploitation, lead to nationalist resistance, fear and suspicion. Unresolved poverty in turn leads to conflict.

Better use of knowledge and science will lead to prosperity. But, they must have a foundation in ethics. The motto of the Gates Foundation provides a good ethical direction

"All lives, no matter where they are being led, have equal value." If enough people believe this, then we can have a more prosperous instead of another preposterous New Year.

Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, Mona campus, UWI. Email: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm.