A call for "constructive, targeted anger" to remedy the development problems of the world was made yesterday by the former president and former UN high commissioner for human rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, writes Deaglán de Bréadún, Foreign Affairs Correspondent.
"We need a constructive, targeted anger," she told a conference on "The Global Development Challenge", organised by the newly-founded Institute for International Integration Studies at Trinity College Dublin.
Speaking on the subject "Good Governance - The Key to Sustainable Development", Mrs Robinson, who is also Chancellor of the University of Dublin and executive director of the New York-based Ethical Globalisation Initiative, said development was "a life-and-death issue and we shouldn't get too polite, we should also be passionate about it".
"The divides in our world are shocking," she said, suggesting that instead of "The Global Development Challenge", the conference should be entitled "The Global Development Shame".
Ireland had risen from 18th to 12th place in the UN's Human Development Index but "must be chastened" by having the second-highest poverty level in the Western world.
During her term as UN human rights chief, she tried to develop the connection between human rights and development, she said.
She had observed positive developments in this respect during recent visits to China, Cambodia and East Timor.
The Millennium Development Goals agreed by world leaders at the UN three years ago were vitally important commitments, she said, but she stressed the need to mobilise grassroots support.
Mrs Robinson said there was resistance to reducing the protection of domestic industries in the richer countries. "Let's get angry," she said. "We are not talking about a challenge in an abstract way, we are talking about life-and-death issues."
Prof David McConnell from the Smurfit Institute of Genetics at TCD said that, unlike the US, Europe was suffering from "science anxiety". Good ideas were not put into practice because political and public opinion was wary of modern science.
This was extremely frustrating for scientists, and as a result he and others, including scientists from the developing countries, had set up a consortium called EAGLES, which stood for European Action on Global Life Sciences.
GM technology was safe, but European scientists had been prohibited or inhibited from developing GM solutions to Third World problems.
"It's a truly wonderful technology," he said. For example, Vitamin A deficiency caused six per cent of the blindness in the world. But biotechnology had developed Golden Rice, using genes from daffodils, which incorporated Vitamin A, Prof McConnell said.
Prof Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at New York's Columbia University and a special adviser on development issues to the UN Secretary-General, said the term "sustainable development" captured the essence of the global challenge.
Development meant alleviating the suffering of the world's poorest people and countries by getting rid of "the poverty that kills", which took lives by the million every year. Sustainable meant creating a framework in which development took place without damaging the eco-systems of the world.
Both of these goals were achievable, he said, but he pointed out it was now only 12 years to the target date of 2015 for achieving Millennium Development Goals such as cutting in half the proportion of absolute poor in each country. In the poorest of the poor places, they were seeing the least improvement of all. Thus, life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa had fallen to an estimated 46 years, mainly due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Life expectancy was between 75 and 80 years in almost all of the high-income countries.
Prof Sachs called for "good ideas", "dollars" and good governance to promote sustainable development and condemned the "shocking, ignorant disdain" for the UN and global co-operation in his own country, the US.