COPENHAGEN WHAT?

BY JUAN L. MERCADO

Suppose you had $50 billion. How would you spend it? Will throwing money at problems free millions - Filipinos among them - locked into grinding poverty and stunted lives?
"People say I'm touched in the head," Imelda Marcos told Time magazine. But the Marcos Foundation would soon unload it's billions, the former First Lady said. Fraying at the edges at 77, she insists: "I'll come up with a project that will wipe out poverty here in two years." That'd be 22 years after People Power chased the Marcoses into exile.
Some 23.8 million Filipinos scrounge below the poverty level of P34 a day, the new National Statistics Coordination Board report reveals. In Imelda's home province of Leyte, 34 out of every 100 families are dirt poor. Did she forget the Master from Galilee's counsel: "The poor you will always have with you."
Imelda's strutting followed news reports that American businessman Warren Buffet donated $37 billion, of his $44 billion fortune, to the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation. It will go for charitable work, mainly in health and education.
Buffet's donation is equal to the gross domestic product of oil-rich Kuwait. It jacks up the Gates Foundation assets to $60 billion "There are many ways to get to heaven," Buffet chuckled as he signed the transfer papers. "But this is a great one."
Imelda agrees. But the source and size of Buffet's fortune is known. Marcos' wealth is a secret. Buffet signed the check. All Imelda has given are promises. "Talk does not cook rice," the Chinese proverb says.
Every centavo that Filipinos got from the Marcoses were not donations. They were squeezed through court decisions: from $638 million, seized from shell foundations abroad, to the US District Court in Hawaii's decision: $36.4 million of seized Marcos wealth be paid to martial law victims.
So, how should wealth be used?
At the United Nations, ambassadors from China, India, the US and five other countries kicked around one question: Suppose the UN had $50 billion" - $10 billion less than what the Gates Foundation has. What priorities should govern it's spending?
Impetus for the brainstorming came from the abrasive American ambassador to the world body: John Bolton. Too often at the UN, Bolton said, "everything is a priority." Secretary-General Kofi Anan is strapped with implementing 9,000 mandates: from preventing nuclear war, ensuring water for all to curbing child labor, he noted. "And when you have 9,000 priorities, you have none."
The ambassadors first listened to experts explain ten global crises, namely: climate change, communicable diseases, war, education, financial instability, governance, malnutrition, migration, clean water and trade barriers. They then ranked 40 ways of tackling them. Finally, they cobbled priorities.
"The top four (priorities) were: basic health care, better water and sanitation, more schools and better nutrition for children. Averting climate change came last", the Economist points out. "Their conclusions were strikingly similar to the Copenhagen Consensus."
The Copenhagen what? In 2004, economists (including three Nobel Laureates) gathered, in the Danish capital, invited by environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg. They debated one issue: What would be the most cost-effective ways of using limited resources to ease human squalor? "How do you get more bang for the buck?"
The priorities they drew up is now known as the "Copenhagen Consensus" Most of our politicians would stare blankly. But the accord found that that efforts to fight malnutrition and disease would save many lives at modest expense.
Global warming is a real growing threat, they said. Benefits of implementing the Kyoto Protocol would probably outweigh the colossal costs, but not until 2100.
It's wiser to spend money on things that would work, agreed the ambassadors, at the UN brainstorming, "Promoting breast-feeding, for example, costs very little. And it's been proven to save lives," the news reports said. "It helps infants grow up stronger, more intelligent adults." Vitamin A supplements cost as little as $1. They save lives and stop people from going blind, etc. .
These priorities are, in fact, spelled out in the "Millennium Development Goals." What's that?, our parochial politicians will again ask. They are eight goals that over 170 countries, the Philippines included, pledged to meet by 2015.
Goal 4, for example, would reduce by two-thirds, infant mortality by 2015. (Out of every 1,000 live births here, 29 infants die. The comparative figure for Singapore is only five.)
Goal 7 seeks, among other things, to "halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water." (Only 35% of families in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao can obtain water from a safe source. It is 69% in Western Visayas and 87% in the Ilocos).
There's no need to wait for Imelda. What the poor desperately need is known. The problem lies in the skewed priorities that arise from the tunnel vision of our so-called "leaders." Most can not think beyond the next polls. The ceaseless impeachment treadmill symbolizes this.
And few have Warren Buffet's willingness to share. "Transporting gold to the grave" obssess many.
"It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world," Thomas More tells Richard Rich, the man who betrayed him in exchange for a lordship. "But for Wales?

(E-mail: juan_mercado@boholchronicle.com)