Dailies and periodicals” “

“In the southern hemisphere poverty is not longer a fatality”. That’s the front-page headline in “ La Croix” (9/7), that dedicates a dossier to the annual Report of the United Nations on human development, published in recent days; it aroused a considerable response in the main international dailies. In the document, comments the French Catholic daily, evidence is presented of “ the rapid progress made by numerous large countries in the South, such as China, India and Brazil. But this fact is offset by the fact that other nations, especially in Africa, continues to grow poorer”. “There are three worlds…on the earth”, writes the paper’s editor Bruno Frappat. “The UN’s 2003 Report (based on data relating to 2001) confirms – he writes – the existence of three types of country: those that have long enjoyed prosperity (though this does not prevent them from comprising pockets of poverty); those that live in the obscurity of confirmed, i.e. aggravated, poverty (twenty-one countries, according to the last report); and those that are situated in some sense on the fringes of this situation and are in the process of emerging from it. The existence of this latter category demonstrates that human poverty is not a fatality and that life may be improved (…). The most striking examples are China and India. In the first of these countries it is estimated that around 150 million inhabitants have been rescued from poverty over the last ten years”. An appeal to the “rich nations” to help “the poorer states” is made by the Herald Tribune (10/7), in which Jeffrey D. Sachs argues: “All Americans must share responsibility for this effort, not just for humanitarian reasons, but also for practical reasons of public health (…). Our world is dangerously unbalanced if just a few hundred people in the USA have a larger income than 166 million people in Africa put together – with millions of poor people dying each day as a result of their impoverishment”. “The Nineties: Africa behind in everything”, is the headline in Avvenire (9/7), in which the Catholic daily notes that “the situation that emerges in the 2003 Report of the UN programme of development is dramatic: the number of states, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, that have seen the parameters of their growth plummet, has grown at least fivefold in the course of the last decade (…). The dossier classifies 173 countries on the basis of a series of social indicators: Sierra Leone remains in bottom place, Sweden in top place. Some 15 percent of the world population continues to suffer from hunger, while AIDS is further reducing life expectancy”. “Mr. Bush in Africa”: that’s the title of an editorial in Le Monde (9/7), in which it is stressed, with regard to the UN Report, that “the African disease can be summed up in one large shortage: the lack of State. (…). Hence the recent intervention of Great Britain in Sierra Leone, of France today in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Ivory Coast, and tomorrow undoubtedly that of the USA in Liberia”.