In a nutshell, people have fears of crisis-like developments on the periphery of world politics which, due to the growing interdependence of the world's regions, would also not spare the zones of peace and prosperity.

The German Federal government's 1994 White Book on defence policy no longer justified its concept of "extended security" by citing military threats, but by pointing to such global risks. Making the right assumption that further marginalising of the South and East would lead to a global destabilisation, the new policy was based on a "preventive security policy" through development policy and, in case this socio-political approach to crisis prevention failed, on "crisis reaction forces" able to operate worldwide. Politicians involved in development policy also used such security policy arguments ever more frequently in a bid to prevent their budgets being cut further. They quoted a maxim of Willy Brandt: "Today's development policy is the peace policy of tomorrow." The politicians built on that, although to no avail. Fears are more powerful than all appeals to international solidarity or a global ethic of responsibility.

Some prophets of doom, backed by TV footage from war zones, depict black, Nostradamus-like horror scenarios of spreading spheres of anarchy and barbarism. Jean-Christophe Rufin prophesied the bisecting of the world into a world of civilisation (in the North) and a world of barbarians (in the South). Hans Magnus Enzensberger dramatised unrestrained violence and brutality in civil wars breaking out around the world.

Such generalised scare stories, however, first of all hide the great differences in development from one region to another. In Latin America, Asia and the proverbial crisis continent of Africa, there is simply not only misery, decay and anarchy. There is also development and sustainability. Secondly, the doomsday scenarios suggest there is everywhere a progressive and irreversible impoverishment. This can be neither generalised nor projected into the future in the manner of Malthus.

Growing North-South gap

The latest report on human development substantiates with a wealth of data that there is a "global apartheid" in terms of opportunities for life and development. But this generalised picture relates mainly to the poorest of the poor and the statistical group of Least Developed Countries (LDCs). The poorest fifth of the global population has only a 1 per cent share of world income, while the richest fifth enjoys a share of 86 per cent. The per capita income gap between the 'OECD World' and the 'Fourth World', the 47 poorest countries, most of which lie in sub-Saharan Africa, has worsened to a ratio of 123:1.

Because access to knowledge is no less important for development prospects in the globalised world as is access to goods and capital markets, another comparative figure tells more about the unequal distribution of development opportunities. Whereas the richest fifth have 93 per cent of the world's Internet connections, the poorest fifth have only 0.2 per cent. Only privileged minorities have a share in the opportunities of globalisation.

Social indicators on life expectancy, child mortality, literacy rates, and school enrolments say more about living conditions than do the statistical indices of the North-South economic gap. But these statistics, in particular, show marked improvements in those conditions and contradict sweeping statements about the bankruptcy of development policy and the common wisdom that in the South there have been only steps backward and no progress.

Signs of relative progress

True, according to World Bank figures the number of poor has increased to more than 1.3 billion. Of those, about half - that is, equal to the populations of the EU countries and North America combined - live in "extreme poverty" below the level of an existence fit for human beings. But since the world population has grown from four billion to six billion during the last 25 years, the growth of poverty was markedly slower. Although the number of people suffering from chronic malnutrition is estimated to total almost one billion, on statistical average the food supply situation in the developing countries has greatly improved. This is due mainly to the Green Revolution, which turned India into a wheat exporter (while at the same time millions go hungry because they cannot afford to buy food), and also to increases in production in China.

So it is not true that at the global level "everything has got worse" and that Malthus was right after all. On the other hand, the picture is different when the statistical averages are broken down by regions. It can then be seen that sub-Saharan Africa and densely-populated South Asia have remained the proverbial poverty regions. Per capita food production has fallen most in sub-Saharan Africa. It is not only population pressure there that intensifies the scarcity of land and water and the ecological stress factors of soil erosion, desertification or salinisation, which in the short term can, of course, endanger food security. Besides recurring droughts, it is above all wars and civil wars which aggravate local or regional crises of supply. Everywhere in arid regions, the increasing lack of water could provoke 'water conflicts' on international lakes and rivers because water is the elixir of life for a growing population.

Despite a lack of water, shrinking arable land and ecological degradation of soil fertility which impede increases in cereals production, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) believes apocalyptic famine disasters can be avoided. The FAO puts its faith in still unused agro-technological potential, purposeful promotion of food cultures instead of foreign currency-earning export cultures, agricultural reforms that will be able to activate smallholders and the landless, and finally in the miracle of the 'Bio-Revolution' of genetic manipulation. True, the latter is still confronted by fundamental criticism of genetic technology. But its defenders promise that if it is applied properly it could solve the problem of food security.

Necessity is the mother of invention and gives the essentials of life priority over concern about possible risks, which can be diminished by critical science, an alert public, and the growing internationally networked development lobby. The food problem can in no way be solved by food aid. Although it can in fact alleviate hunger here and there, as a donor facility it creates hunger because it paralyses the recipients' own efforts for food security and robs local producers of their market prospects and incentives to produce.

There has always been poverty and there always will be. Even this banal statement was contradicted by Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, who comes from Bangladesh, a country which is frequently held up as hopeless case. In a speech in St. Paul's Church, in Frankfurt/Main, he said: "I firmly believe that we can create a world free of poverty if only we want to... In such a world, the museum would be the only place where one could still see poverty." Poverty certainly cannot be banished to the museum of world history. But the question arises of whether all kinds of horror scenarios could not be avoided - "if only we want to".

The World Social Summit in Copenhagen in 1995 announced "war against poverty". But only a few countries fulfilled the conference's "20-20 initiative", which committed donor and recipient countries to invest, respectively, 20 per cent of their development aid and their public spending in basic social services. However, in its development policy strategy for the 21st century, the OECD says that given purposeful deployment of national and international resources in such services, the number of poor could be halved by 2015.

Cuts in development aid

This bold objective was even surpassed in the Human Development Report of 1997, which said: "Eradicating poverty everywhere is more than a moral imperative and a commitment to human solidarity. It is a practical possibility." The prerequisite, however, is a marked increase in development assistance. But instead of more development aid, there is ever less. Almost all OECD countries have cut their development budgets and subsidies to UN organisations working in poverty-oriented programmes. In Germany, contrary to the Federal government coalition agreement between the Social Democrats and the Greens, which announced an increase in development assistance, the 'red-green' austerity package made disproportionate cuts in the development budget.

The goal of eliminating poverty worldwide is illusory, and particularly so if all hopes are placed in more development aid. More outside assistance is not enough, and can in fact be counterproductive if it paralyses self-help. For instance, according to the World Bank, Latin America could mobilise enough money to eliminate its worst poverty problems by a slight raise in taxation of the highest income groups. But the poorest and in addition, highly indebted countries are unable to do that because their over-indebtedness restricts their scope for socio-political action. Realistically, in this case it cannot be a matter of a complete 'elimination of poverty', but rather about alleviating 'extreme poverty' to a level fit for human beings. This presupposes the satisfaction of human, rather than merely animal needs, or, in other words, the realisation of basic human rights. "Professor of the Poor" Yunus, of Bangladesh, was probably thinking of that, too.

If the 'OECD World' wants to achieve its goal of halving the number of poor by 2015, it must not only increase its development budget and at the same time focus it on combating poverty. It must also remedy the disadvantages of the South in trade and financial policies. "Trade instead of aid" can help only if the industrialised nations open their markets, dismantle protectionism, and go in for a new trade system that establishes a fair balance of interests between the 'OECD World' and the rest of the world. The industrialised nations must recognise that it is in their long-term interest to dismantle these global disparities and thus prevent the risks arising from them for their own security and global stability. What their decision-makers are currently doing or omitting is akin not only serving notice to the global ethics of responsibility, but also to a refusal to realise what national interests mean in the era of globalisation.