Conversation with Mother
(Page 4 of 11)
September/October 1986
By Lester Brown
BROWN: And I can say with confidence that five years from now the figure will be far larger. In fact, I think turning this situation around in Africa is going to take an enormous effort, one probably greater than the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe after World War II.
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The Marshall Plan was centered largely around the reconstruction of Europe's physical plant: the factories and homes destroyed in the war. Most of the institutions were already in place, and there was a skilled population on hand, as well. That job was a picnic in comparison to the rebuilding of Africa, which is faced, not with war destruction, but with the ecological destruction of its basic life-support systems. There, we're dealing with a continent that is far larger, with twice the population, and with countries that have neither the institutions nor the well-developed skills needed for modernization.
MOTHER: Are we going to just write off the whole continent?
BROWN: Well, the manner in which the international community responds to the progressive deterioration of that continent will tell us a great deal about its capacity to handle other crises in the relationship between people and environmental support systems where global cooperation will be required.
MOTHER: Your recent State of the World report made a connection between a country's prosperity and its treatment of women and children — the People's Republic of China being a positive example and some African countries, where women bear 75% of the workload, being negative ones.
BROWN: What we're seeing in Africa are essentially tribal societies that not too long ago were hunting societies. In the early stages of their transition to agriculture, men hunted and women grew food. But now the hunting options are largely gone, and men have been reluctant to do what was traditionally women's work. So either they don't become very involved in agriculture, or they migrate to the cities and towns to get jobs. Therefore, in Africa you have one extreme in the role that women are playing, while China is pretty close to the other extreme.
China's done a great deal to provide opportunities for women. The educational system is wide open to them, and women are provided with family-planning services, so they are able to limit the number of their children — indeed, they're encouraged to do that. Because of these factors, they're able to take advantage of the opportunities in society to move ahead.
So what we're seeing in China is a combination of economic, environmental, and social policies that are leading to broadly based social improvements, including one of the highest life expectancies of any country in the Third World, an infant mortality rate that's dropped sharply, and literacy rates that have increased dramatically.
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