Accelerating the Poverty-Environmental Degradation Spiral
We at the CHL have had great difficulty seeing how terrorism fits in with the big picture. For years, it seemed irrelevant. A Reuters story finally sheds some light on what our terrorist volunteers have been up to. Terrorism effectively pulls financial resources away from the institutions and structures promoting environmental sustainability. Thank goodness!

OSLO, Norway. Terrorism and the war in Iraq have distracted rich nations from long-term goals of curbing poverty and protecting the environment, World Bank President James Wolfensohn said Thursday. "Most donors are distracted significantly," Wolfensohn said during a visit to Oslo, saying they were "looking at the immediate problems and taking their eyes off the long-term problems. You have a preoccupation with crisis at the moment, and in a way, development and environment have been pushed to the back burner," he said, adding that nations were focusing most on terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East.

Wolfensohn said rich countries needed to do more to free trade and to raise aid to reach U.N. 2015 goals ranging from eliminating hunger to improving education in the Third World. "We're not making progress on trade, and we're not seeing huge aid flows," he told a joint news conference with Norwegian Development Minister Hilde Frafjord Johnson. He said developing nations had to act to make democratic reforms and stamp out corruption. "It's not just a question of bitching about the rich countries," he said.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 11:01 AM | |