"The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (the UK) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts."
More than half a century before anyone had even considered the term "sustainable development", Mahatma Gandhi warned of the dangers facing a rapidly developing world.
Eight years ago this week, in September 2000, more than 100 presidents, prime ministers and leaders of the world's nations met in New York and unanimously agreed upon the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
These goals focused predominantly on providing nutrition, energy, water, education, healthcare and environmental protection for one half of the world's one billion poorest citizens, by 2015.
Having now passed the halfway point to 2015, heads of government will meet in the UN General Assembly in New York this week to assess progress towards achieving those goals.
"silent tsunami", Josette Sheeran, executive director of the UN World Food Programme, described the impact of the food and energy crises like this: "Those people living on less than $2 a day cut out health and education, and kill or sell their livestock.
"Those living on less than $1 a day cut out protein and vegetables from their diet.
"Those living on less than 50 cents a day cut out whole meals, and sometimes go days without meals."
Our planet will clearly need to practice a different type of development, one that is sustainable.
Such a model was agreed at the 1992 Earth Summit, in Rio. Governments there recognised "common, but differentiated, responsibilities"; in other words, that rich countries need to reduce consumption while poorer countries have a right to develop, but must do so sustainably.
Part of the increase in food prices has been caused by the negative impact of growing corn to provide biofuels for energy - a linkage that had been overlooked by policymakers.
This failure illustrates the importance and difficulty of co-operating between sectoral areas and specialties.
It shows why development, environment, trade, and economics must all be incorporated in order to formulate effective policies.
Contrary to the campaign pledge proudly proclaimed on the eve of the Rio summit by then US President George Herman Walker Bush, the consumption-driven American lifestyle must indeed be negotiable.
Adequately funding the MDGs could provide precisely the kind of global economic stimulus (given its investment in energy, food and water infrastructure, and its infusion of income to the poorest consumers) that could help lift all economies out of recession - including developed countries.
Gandhi described human beings as behaving like locusts - but he did so in order to encourage humans to turn in a different direction.
We, as a species, no longer have 80, 50 or even 20 years to take that turn.
It is time for all individuals to reconsider their attitudes regarding their consumption patterns.
It is time for political parties to be honest about the options the world faces.
It is time for governments and the UN to take action necessary to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and to pioneer a development path on which all the world's billions can survive sustainably on this one planet.
MEASURING HUMAN ACTIVITY AND RESPONSIVE ACTIONS:
"Human Activity" - it is the one true measure of the entire ball of wax; and remains the product of (number of individuals) x (individual impact)
The effects of increasing future population is dwafted by the far more rapidly increasing individual impacts of the people already here. We don't need to worry about what happens when the population hits 9 billion, or 12 billion. The increasing impact of the 6 billion already here is going to do all the fatal damage, and it will happen far faster; Intel are expecting 2 billion - 33% of the human race to rush out and buy a computer in as little as 5 years; effectively doubling the number of people living high impact, planet damaging Western lifestyles - that effectively doubles the damage, and in as little as 5 years.
And Ghandi was right; we have - past tense - have (already) stripped the world like locusts. It is all interlocked and interelated; environment and economics - and economics does kill people. That is the lesson of the Irish famines; it was not a failure of the potatoe crop. But rather that the industrial revolution in England had sucked all the money out of the rural Irish economy, and when the one crop failure did come, there was no money left to pay for food.- Janet, Chippenham
taken from BBC NewS titled : Sacrificing Millennium Goals would be a Real Crisis.
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