has led to the neglect and destruction of the other two organizing principles—ecology and survival—which maintain and sustain life in nature and society.

Modern economies and concepts of development cover only a negligible part of the history of human interaction with nature. For centuries, principles of sustenance have given human societies the material basis for survival by deriving livelihoods directly from nature through self-provisioning mechanisms. Limits in nature have been respected and have guided the limits of human consumption. In most countries of the South, large numbers of people continue to derive their sustenance in the survival economy, which remains invisible to market-oriented development. All people in all societies depend on nature’s economy for survival. When the organizing principle for society’s relationship with nature is sustenance, nature exists as a commons. It becomes a resource when profits and accumulation become the organizing principles and create an imperative for the exploitation of resources for the market. Without clean water, fertile soils and crop and plant genetic diversity, human survival is not possible. These commons have been destroyed by economic development, resulting in the creation of a new contradiction between the economy of natural processes and the survival economy, because those people deprived of their traditional land and means of survival by development are forced to survive on an increasingly eroded nature.

People do not die for lack of incomes. They die for lack of access to resources. Here too Jeffrey Sachs is wrong when he says, “In a world of plenty, 1 billion people are so poor, their lives are in danger”. The indigenous people in the Amazon, the mountain communities in the Himalaya, peasants whose land has not been appropriated and whose water and biodiversity has not been destroyed by debt-creating industrial agriculture are ecologically rich, even though they do not earn a dollar a day. On the other hand, even at five dollars a day, people are poor if they have to buy their basic needs at high prices. Indian peasants

who have been made poor and pushed into debt over the past decade to create markets for costly seeds and agrichemicals through economic globalisation are ending their lives in thousands. When seeds are patented and peasants will have to pay $1 trillion in royalties, they will be $1 trillion poorer. Patents on medicines increase costs of AIDS drugs from $200 to $20,000 and cancer drugs from $2,400 to $36,000 for a year’s treatment. When water is privatized, and global corporations make $1 trillion from commodification of water, the poor are poorer by $1 trillion.

The movements against economic globalisation and maldevelopment are movements to end poverty by ending the exclusions, injustices and ecological non-sustainability that are the root causes of poverty.

The $50 billion of “aid” from North to South is a tenth of the $500 billion flow from South to North as interest payments and other unjust mechanisms in the global economy imposed by the World Bank and IMF. With privatization of essential services and an unfair globalisation imposed through the W.T.O, the poor are being made poorer. Indian peasants are losing $26 billion annually just in falling farm prices because of dumping and trade liberalization. As a result of unfair, unjust globalisation,which is leading to corporate takeover of food and water, more than $5 trillion will be transferred from poor people to rich countries just for food and water. The poor are financing the rich. If we are serious about ending poverty, we have to be serious about ending the unjust and violent systems for wealth creation which create poverty by robbing the poor of their resources, livelihoods and incomes.

Jeffrey Sachs deliberately ignores this “taking,” and only addresses “giving,” which is a mere 0.1% of the “taking” by the North. Ending poverty is more a matter of taking less than giving an insignificant amount more. Making poverty history means getting the history of poverty right. And Sachs has got it completely wrong.

The poor are not those who were left behind; they are the ones who were pushed out and excluded from access to their own wealth and resources.