Green Options

By Lester R. Brown

The social and economic gap between the world’s richest 1 billion people and its poorest 1 billion has no historical precedent. Not only is this gap wide, it is widening. The poorest billion are trapped at subsistence level and the richest billion are becoming wealthier with each passing year.

One way of narrowing the gap between rich and poor segments of society is by ensuring universal education. This means making sure that the 72 million children not enrolled in school are able to attend. Children without any formal education are starting life with a severe handicap, one that almost ensures they will remain in abject poverty and that the gap between the poor and the rich will continue to widen. In an increasingly integrated world, this widening gap itself becomes a source of instability. Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen focuses the point: “Illiteracy and innumeracy are a greater threat to humanity than terrorism.”

In the effort to achieve universal primary education, the World Bank has taken the lead with its Education for All plan, where any country with a well-designed plan to achieve this goal is eligible for Bank financial support. The three principal requirements are that a country submit a sensible plan to reach universal basic education, commit a meaningful share of its own resources to the plan, and have transparent budgeting and accounting practices. If fully implemented, all children in poor countries would get a primary school education by 2015, helping them to break out of poverty.

The Humane Society released a rather shocking video that was filmed at Hallmark Meat Packing in Chino, CA. The video shows downed cattle being lifted with a forklift and prodded in order to get them on their feet to pass USDA inspection. (Warning, the footage is graphic in showing the abuse of the animals). It’s difficult to link to this, but it is important information that parents of school-aged children need to know about.

Perhaps most shocking of all is that this company had been a leading supplier of beef for the National School Lunch program, meaning that the meat from potentially diseased animals, animals too sick to stand, was processed and sold to schools, 100 million pounds of beef since 2002 in fact.