東京大学大学院法学政治学研究科・法学部 グローバル・リーダーシップ寄付講座（読売新聞社）
連続公開セミナー 第３回
サックス教授特別講演
「サハラ以南における貧困削減‐ミレニアム・ビレッジ・プロジェクトの成果‐《
Special Lectture by Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs
“Poverty Reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons Learned in the Millennium Village Projects”
Date: October 29, 2009 (15:30 – 17:30 )
Venue: Koshiba Hall, Hongo Campus, The University of Tokyo
Speaker: Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University
Commentator: Katsumi Hirano, Director General, Area Studies Center, Institute of Developing Economies - Japan External Trade Organization
Moderator ： Shinichi Kitaoka, Professor, Graduate Schools for Law & Politics and Faculty of Law, The University of Tokyo
Secretariat：
Good Afternoon ladies and gentlemen, students, thank you very much for coming to this special lecture by Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University. Now I`d like to introduce today`s moderator, Dr. Shinichi Kitaoka, Professor of Graduate School of Law and Politics, and also Chairman of the Steering Committee for the Yomiuri Shimbun Global Leadership Studies Program (GLS). Thank you Dr. Kitaoka.
Prof. Kitaoka：
Thank you very much everyone to come. It`s really a great pleasure and honor for us to have Professor Jeffrey Sachs, a friend of mine, and this is the second visit for him after last year. Last year we had the chance to invite him and this year again, we have a very great privilege of having him again. And then I remember when I was in New York as Ambassador to the United Nations, I was introduced to Dr. Sachs, Jeff, by my senior colleague, Dr. Kazuo Sugeno, former Dean of Law School. They were very good friends each other and he introduced us each other and we got to know in Autumn of 2004. I remember very well a phone call from Jeff one day in January 2005 from Kenya, Nairobi Kenya, he asked me on the phone whether or not I knew Olyset. Frankly speaking I did not know anything about Olyset. Olyset is a mosquito net with a special medicine in it to prevent mosquitoes from coming, and then it was the best device to prevent malaria from taking place. And then I learned that idea and I`m very happy to learn that and I try to help him by persuading people in Sumitomo Chemical, which was a major producer of Olyset mosquito net. That was one part of his strategy to fight against poverty in Africa.
That`s how we became very close each other, particularly my wife was became very much enthusiastic about participating in his plan and then she flew to Senegal to participate in an event to fight against malaria and then we are happy to be able to help him to establish his Millennium Villages Project with some financial contribution from the Japanese government.
Actually Dr Sachs is a very well known professor, I don`t think it is necessary to introduce him, but anyhow he studied in Harvard, BA, MA, PhD from Harvard, he was promoted to a full professor at the age of 29! No question about it, he`s a genius. And now he is Director of Earth Institute at Columbia University, he has been Special Advisor to the Secretary-General, starting from Kofi Annan and then to Ban Ki-Moon today. He’s a leading authority in Economics, particularly in the area of poverty reduction. He was very active in helping -starting from Latin American governments, Eastern European countries - there may be some guys from those countries here, Ukraine? I don’t know – and also very active in helping Russia and now very active in helping African countries. I always feel that I’m of course very much impressed by his knowledge and his academic achievements but I’m more often impressed by his devotion to the great cause. He’s a superman and a missionary to the great cause of poverty reduction for all human beings.
Another reason of my being a very great fan to him is in his idea, we can find many factors which are very similar to the development in Japan’s economy in modern times. We made the Meiji revolution, Meiji Restoration, and there was very rapid modernization process in the 19th century to early 20th century. There we can find many elements which he is having in his project, such as a focus on education, healthcare, agriculture, infrastructure, and whenever I see his plans I think I can find something similar to the policies which Japanese government did in the 19th century to 20th century and also even after the War. So that’s why I became a very strong fan and I try to be a supporter to his plan and then we have together with my wife and we established a small Non-Profit Organization in Japan, a kind of sister organization to Millennium Promise – ours is Millennium Promise Japan, it’s a much much smaller one but actually in the same spirit.
We are very happy to have a chance to listen to Jeff and then followed by comments by Dr. Hirano, who is one of the leading authorities in African studies, who is a researcher in JETRO Institute. And then first of all we are going to listen to Jeff’s talk, to be followed by a panel discussion among us and then the floor will be open. You will have ample time to discuss to raise your questions, to make your comments to Jeff and also to Dr. Hirano. So let’s invite Jeffrey Sachs here with your applause.
Prof. Sachs：
Thank you so much Prof. Kitaoka and Rieko Suzuki for a partnership which means an enormous amount to the people of Africa, and for hosting me here., it`s always wonderful to be at Tokyo University and I`m very excited to be among friends and to have a chance to share with you the work that we have underway in Africa, in the Millennium Villages, and also a chance to share with you the ideas that underpin this project. I`m going to start specifically with the project and then I’m going to turn to the broader issues of African Development, because this project focuses on one part of an overall puzzle.
But I`m very glad you mentioned the Meiji Restoration, which is a theme that we’ve talked about for a number of years. In my view, the Meiji Restoration was the most successful economic reform in world history. It set the mark for how to do economic reform in a very quick, very decisive way and it was a peaceful transformation that put Japan on the path for rapid industrialization and it provides a kind of role model. One of the aspects of the Meiji Restoration of course was to try to adopt best practices in many different sectors simultaneously, and the reforms as you just heard, went across a number of sectors simultaneously in the economy for a major economic transformation, and I do believe that that`s basically the kind of approach that is needed when a region is in economic crisis. The crisis can have different causes; in Eastern Europe where I worked, the crisis came from the imposition of a central planning model over a period of nearly fifty years, and when the political situation finally allowed for the end of one-party rule, these countries had the chance for a quick, rapid, across-the-board reform and that was the kind that I advocated.
When I began to work in the African situation, the context was very very different, because as I’m sure all of you know, Africa is today by far the poorest part of the world - the only part of the world that is comparable in terms of poverty would be parts of the rural areas of South Asia. But in general, Africa is even poorer than South Asia and the situation is quite different of course therefore in Africa from any other part of the world. For example, the level of infrastructure is certainly the weakest in Africa; the roads generally don`t exist or they are not available all year round because they are simply dirt roads and when the rainy season comes, the area becomes impassable.
The electricity still does not reach more than 90% of the villages of rural Africa. It’s almost unimaginable for us. Think of every single thing in this room depending on electricity, and yet here are hundreds of millions of people who do not have electricity in their lives, except now in the battery in their mobile phone (because that is one technology that has somehow broken through even the relative lack of infrastructure), and other major basic systems such as healthcare and education are not available, especially in rural areas. So when I faced the question of how to address the challenge of extreme poverty in Africa, I felt it was a different circumstance from anything that I had seen, and that the tendency say in Washington, to believe that simply focusing on reforming the market process would be sufficient in this case was not convincing to me. I believed that we faced a basic challenge of investment that needed to be targeted to address the major gaps in roads, power, clinics, schools, agriculture, and that a big strategy therefore was how to integrate a multi-sector investment approach in places that have very little to start.
Of course, in my view, the development assistance has to play a big role in this, because the very poor communities don’t have the internal resources that they would need in order to make these investments, and so to help get them started over a threshold of extreme poverty I believe is a responsibility of the international community to partner with the very poor areas. My argument has been that these places are so poor that they require special help. Now later on I`m going to talk about why this one part of the world seems to have been so much harder to develop than other areas of the world, but before I get to that set of questions, I want to get to the more immediate puzzle, which is the puzzle that we`re addressing in the Millennium Villages. So the puzzle is (and I`ll say it to the students like an exam question or an essay question):
You come into a very poor area, maybe you`ve taken a truck to get to the edge of the road. The road has stopped and you continue into the bush for another hour or two or three hours. When you get there, there are huts around, probably most of these huts are just built by the local materials, probably not even brick; twigs are put up and then mud, then other building materials are built around, and the roof is just a thatched roof of straw. The cooking area is just three stones, maybe the household owns one pot, of course there is no running water so you have to walk an hour or two hours to get to water. When you get to the water, it`s not necessarily very clean or safe water. Cooking material does not come through natural gas into your stove - you have to collect the fuel-wood, and so a woman`s life in these communities is seven or eight or nine hours every day collecting water, collecting fuel-wood, building a fire, cooking…if one of her children is sick, maybe spending several hours walking to the closest health dispensary which may be 10km away, and therefore over many hills and across rivers – and maybe four or five hours to walk to.
And your question is: how do you help economic development in a community like this? That is not an unusual circumstance unfortunately, that’s a circumstance that describes well the conditions of maybe 300 million people living in the rural, most poor parts of Africa, and this was the puzzle that we tried to address in the Millennium Villages Project. I think some of you or all of you saw some video clips that gave you a visual impression at least, of the communities, and now I want to give you an analysis of how we view the situation and how we have proposed to address the challenge of extreme poverty. And this is a project with very much help from Japan, especially in getting the projects started in eight of the first ten countries.
And by the way this is not an advertisement this is a reality – the opening picture of the women holding the bed-nets of Olyset – this is the Sumitomo Chemical Company’s anti-malarial bed-nets, this is part of the motivation of the project to start with, the idea that the disease burden in these communities is very high and yet controllable and here was a company ready to use its great engineering know-how to make a better bed net. The whole idea of this project is that we know, because of improved technology, the kinds of investments that can be made. The problem is creating a system in which those investments can really help to lift the wellbeing of the poorest people, so just in a moment let me discuss the bed-net as a starting point.
This is a basic idea of course that you sleep under a net to protect yourself from the mosquito whose bite causes malaria. It was discovered already about 20 years ago that the net by itself wasn`t quite good enough, because mosquitoes are very persistent, nasty little animals and so if you sleep under the net and you put your arm next to the net the mosquito will come in and bite right through the net. And so not only do you need the physical protection of a net, but the net should be treated with an insecticide. And so starting maybe 15 years ago, these insecticide treated nets started to be tested for their ability to control malaria, and it was found that indeed if the net was well treated with insecticide, the mosquito were shunned away. Either they would die because they touched the net or they`d smell the insecticide and they would stay away from the net. Either way, that was the operational effect. But, the original breakthrough was to take a net, and put it in a bucket filled with insecticide and treat it, and then sleep under the net. But after a while these nets become dirty and they have to be cleaned, and for the original nets, when you washed them, that washed away the insecticide and then the net was no longer useful, even though people continued to sleep under it because they didn`t know it was no longer useful. But they would then get bitten and malaria would return.
So the Sumitomo Chemical engineers created something very clever, and that is that they put the insecticide into the chemical that makes the net, not treating over the net but right into the resin that is then excreted to knit the net together. And when they did that, the net could be washed twenty times and still have the insecticide in it, and twenty times roughly was long enough to last five years and the field evidence is that these nets actually last from between five and seven years. This was a huge breakthrough – something so simple, because now if a poor household got these nets they didn’t have to worry about re-treating them, which they could not afford to do, or maybe didn`t even understand how important it was to do. Now the net would last for five to seven years.
Well, the whole project of the Millennium Villages came because there is a long list of good ideas of things to do that can change the life of very poor people very quickly if these targeted investments are well designed and well applied in a community strategy. And in 2002 I was asked by the then Secretary General Kofi Annan to help devise a strategy to achieve the MDGs, and essentially what we did in that project, the Millennium Project, was to bring together experts in all of the relevant areas of poor people: their health, their education, their livelihoods, their credit situation and so forth, and in every area there were very clever things that could be done. Essentially, the experts would say:
“We know how to help them double their food production!” Or the engineers would say,
“We can double the water supply.” Or the public health specialists would say,
“We could bring malaria down.”
And in general, as an economist, I would ask the question: If these ideas are so good, why aren’t they happening already? And the answer actually always came back to the same thing, which was: people are so poor, they can’t afford even the very low-cost solutions. So this is the concept of a poverty trap, that you might know what to do but you can`t afford to do it. You can`t save and make these investments because you don`t have enough income even to stay alive, much less to save for the future. This idea really came home to me when we started the Millennium Villages Project.
We decided in 2004 that we would try to do something in one village in Western Kenya and we had a meeting in that village, which became the first Millennium Village. And I`ll never forget the meeting that took place, because about 250 of the villagers came to meet us, and we had a group discussion for about three hours. And I asked a lot of questions, because I`m a professor, so I was asking them about their lives, and they were giving me very clear answers. Not a lot of confusion, very clear answers. I asked about fertilizer,
“Oh yes, Professor, we like fertilizer.”
How many of you use fertilizer? No hands raised. Well why not?
“Well, because we can`t afford it, we don`t have any cash to use fertilizer.”
I asked them: how many of you use bed nets? Maybe 5 hands raised, in a room like this, with about 250 people. So I thought, maybe they don`t know what a bed net is, so I asked them how many of you know what an anti-malaria bed net is, and all the hands shot up in the room. And so then I thought well maybe they don`t like the nets, they’re too hot or uncomfortable or they don`t believe in them, so I asked how many of you would like to use bed nets? All the hands shot up in the room, at which point an older woman in the front of her room raised her hand, took the microphone and through the translator said:
“But Mr., we can`t afford the bed-nets!”
So I said “You’d like bed-nets?” All the hands went up so I said “OK I promise you, everybody in this community will get bed-nets.” And I got a lot applause, so I learned that if you want to be mayor in an African village, promise free bed-nets: this is the first principle, first lesson of politics! The second lesson is then call Prof. Kitaoka, who was Ambassador to the United Nations: “Help! We need bed-nets!” and basically I explained the idea that here was an opportunity to demonstrate how effectively these nets could be used, and fortunately Sumitomo Chemical, a wonderful company, the whole company rallied to the cause and donated 350,000 bed-nets to this effort right from the beginning, and that meant that when we had the Millennium Villages Project, every single person in every single Millennium Village was protected from malaria right from the start. And that`s the story of the first picture.
And this is a woman and her young son in Uganda, one of the MVs, under the net which is then put up in the hut.
So what is the Millennium Village Project? It is to demonstrate that the Millennium Development Goals and human security, which is Japan`s concept that it is promoting for the international peace and harmony, that the Millennium Development Goals and human security can be achieved at a low cost, even in the poorest villages of the world. How did we pick the Millennium Villages?
We took a map, literally this map, which I always thought to be a very beautiful map. What it is is a map which shows the different kind of farm systems in Africa.
Africa is a very, wonderfully diverse continent with many different ecological conditions, and the basic idea of the climate of Africa is relatively straightforward, and that is that at the equator it`s wet, and as you move away from the equator it becomes drier and drier, until you move to the deserts in the North and the South. So, here, Zone 16 is forest-based. This is the Congo Basin right at the equator, this is all rainforest, so this is year round rainfall, on the western side. As you move North and South you get to what’s called the savannah climate, which means that it’s wet in the summer and dry in the winter (relatively – there’s no snow). But the rainy season is in the summer months of the Northern Hemisphere here, and the summer months of the Southern Hemisphere in the Savannah. Then as you move again away from the equator north here, you arrive at another farm system, which is getting drier and drier, and as you move to the next level, this area Number 4 is called the Sahel. In fact by this point it’s almost too dry to farm so most of the agriculture is livestock. And then, as you move further north here, you get to the Sahara desert. As you move south you have the same lines: the Savannah, and then the dry Savannah and the `Sahel Sudan` climate, and then you get to the desert, which in the south is the Kalahari desert, and in the north is the Sahara (here’s the Kalahari, in Botswana).
So, Africa just spreads out from the equator North and South to drier and drier. And we decided that we would pick Millennium Villages in every one of these farm systems – so we would have one in the dry zones here, we would have one in the highlands of Ethiopia, we would have one in what’s called the `uni-modal`, which means single rainy season, here. (This is a bi-modal rainy season here - there’s a long rain and a short rain.) But the idea of the project was, let`s understand how each ecological zone works, because each ecological zone is distinct: the agricultural challenge is different, the disease burden is different, the water challenge is different, the drought frequency is different, and we wanted to use this project to understand these ecological differences. As a general matter let me say the drier you are, the bigger the problem – that is a general principle of development. If you`re very dry, then your only real solution is: you have sand, you better have OIL under the sand. But if you`re dry and you don`t have oil under the sand, then you`re really in trouble – those places are places such as Somalia and Yemen, which are very dry, no oil, and they are the biggest crisis spots of the world, because without water for agriculture, and without oil or some other very high value mining resource, you tend to have crisis. In Southern Africa of course, one of the countries is Botswana, that’s a desert economy but it’s a little bit better off because it has diamonds, so it has a somewhat higher income level.
But most of our villages are not in the desert of course, they’re in some variation between the wet to the quite dry zones. This is one of the examples of a rather dry area here. This is in Mali, near the city of Timbuktu, a very dry zone, though it has potential for irrigation along the Niger river. So we looked at the map, we looked at where there was peace, because we didn`t want to do this in a war zone, then we negotiated with the national governments – would they be interested in the project? Then we identified impoverished regions, because the idea was to go to the poorest places, and we`ve made a kind of bet, and that was: “You show us an impoverished area and it will still be possible to figure out how to achieve the Millennium Development Goals in such a community” - that is the idea of the project. It would`ve been easier to go to the easy places, near the rivers, near the ports, near the highways, and say let`s start development here, that`s where a business would tend to go, to someplace that already has an advantage. But unfortunately 300 million people don`t live in such places, they live in the more remote places, so we wanted to try to help those people.
Many of my colleagues say well if it`s so tough they should move, but this is not such an easy proposition in the world, it’s so not easy to move. The world is pretty much filled up right now, so if you try to move, there`s someone else where you`re trying to move to, and they don`t like you coming by the way! In general, migration is not only painful for the person leaving but it is opposed by the area that is receiving and it often is a source of conflict actually. So we wanted to try to identify how to help in places where people are actually living, and very quickly what we did was identify the MDGs and then we set the objectives for the villages. So whether it`s eliminating hunger, how can this be done? Well, by increasing food production. Improving incomes, how can that be done? Partly by raising farm incomes and by helping with small business development outside of agriculture. Providing education, how can that be done? Well, building more classrooms, that’s what’s needed or using incentives such as midday school meals to bring the children into school. Improving health services, how could this be done? Most of the communities did not even have clinics to start with, and so literally the first step was to build a clinic then to recruit a medical officer or a nurse, then to train Community Health Workers and step by step to build a basic health system. Restore environmental resources, provide safe water, improve connectivity, because these are isolated villages.
Now one of the most exciting things in economic development these days, maybe the most exciting thing period, is that mobile telephones are reaching in even to the poorest places of the world. This is the biggest single development in my opinion that is making possible the end of poverty. Of course the bed-nets are wonderful and many other interventions are wonderful, but the telephone is ending isolation and that is a huge factor for every single thing one wants to do, including the business development. And finally, improve community capacity. This is a project that is based on the community, it’s not based on the individual, because everyone is poor and we need community wide investment. So it’s not simply helping a series of individuals, it`s making sure the community can operate to meet its basic needs – in health, education, in infrastructure. And even when you have farmers, they need to be organized, and Japan has a historical concept which I like very much called the “One Village One Product” model, and the idea was to build up for every village here something that could be sold to the marketplace that would provide an income for the village. We are following a similar kind of strategy, which is to identify which cash crop can be part of the solution for the Villages.
So, we chose sites in ten countries, worked with the governments, worked with the local area, and then the idea is a public investment strategy led by the community, and I’ll leave the slides for interested students so you’ll have the presentation to look through afterwards. But the idea is to take the big problem and separate it into practical steps: how to build a health system, how to build an education system, how to improve agriculture, and the truth is - all of these things are achievable. By our calculation, this requires $60 per person per year to make the required investments directly from the outside donors, and it requires around $40 per person investment by the government and the community, and it requires another $20 of investment by partners, like the business sector – like Sumitomo Chemical. So this is an alliance that is an alliance of philanthropists, it`s an alliance of government donors, it`s an alliance of corporations, it`s an alliance of the local government, the national government, and the community itself to put all these pieces together and make these investments.
And this slide shows that we provide in the projects $60, some of that came from JICA, some of it came from private philanthropy, then we look to NGOs and businesses for another $20, then we look to the government for $30 and to the community for another $10, and it adds up to $120 per person per year over the first five years. And there are a lot of words on these pages, so what I’m going to tell you is basically what’s happened so far. We`re in the fourth year of the project - the fifth year for the single village in Kenya and the fourth year for everybody else. And what`s happened is that the food production has increased usually by a factor of at least 2, and sometimes as much as 5 times. A that`s through technology – help the farmers with better seed, fertilizer and small scale equipment and they can go from hunger to food surplus within a year. So that`s objective number one.
Second is health. The health situation has improved quite significantly, though we`re only just now measuring precisely the gains. But we know for example that malaria, one of the great killers, has come down. When we measured it in Kenya, the reduction of malaria was 90%, and that`s because of the bed-nets and the medicines and the community health workers who can help deliver those solutions. We know that enrolment in schools has gone way up. I believe the school meal is the most important single initiative to get kids in school and we should have school meals everywhere to do that. We also have a big improvement of infrastructure – better roads, electricity (not everywhere but at some main points like at the clinic and the school to get started.) We have connectivity through cell phones in all of the villages now, and we have microfinance and micro-lending.
So, in just four years, we see a tremendous transformation taking place and I think it`s been so exciting for the host countries that almost everywhere where this project is operating the governments are saying please help us do more! And that`s why the work of Millennium Promise Japan and Millennium Promise in the United States is I think so important, because we have the opportunity to expand the reach and the demonstration power of this project, through corporate partnerships, through philanthropy and engagement of universities, because the knowledge, the technical knowledge, coming out of the universities is playing a very important role in providing advice.
Now finally let me talk about the more general issue of African Development. Africa is the poorest place in the world. These communities that I`ve been describing are the poorest parts of the poorest region of the world. And there`s a big puzzle for an economist or an economic historian to ask:
Why is this one region so lagging behind most of the rest of the world?
And there are many theories on this and I happen to take a view that says the specific challenges that Africa faces, because of its geography and partly because of its history, have made the conditions harder than any place else in the world. And it`s interesting if you look at Adam Smith`s Wealth of Nations written in 1776. In the very first book of the Wealth of Nations, he says that the interior of Africa is the least developed part of the world – that was 225 years ago. And Adam Smith says that that was because transport conditions are the worst in the world in Africa, not because of roads mind you but because the only way in previous history that you would make transport for trade into the interior of the continent, would be through river navigation. But Africa does not have navigable rivers where you could run from the ocean into the interior, and that`s because of two reasons, one is that there aren`t that many rivers to begin with, not as many as in Asia, because of the physical topography. Asia has great rivers like the Indus, and the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Yellow River, the Yangtze, the Salween, and the Irrawaddy river - all of the rivers come from the Himalayas. But Africa doesn`t have such as river system, it has the mountains in Guinea which give rise to one river, the Niger river; it`s got a few small rivers in the East Coast; it`s got the Nile which is the main river, which is not navigable past Egypt because of the waterfalls; and it`s got the Congo River which is also not navigable from Kinshasa to the ocean.
And so Adam Smith said it was transport, my theory is that it is three conditions that are the most pertinent basic conditions for Africa. One is, transport is very tough. Second is agriculture tends to be quite difficult because of the water conditions mainly - high temperatures and long dry seasons and very little irrigation mean that you have rain fed agriculture, very vulnerable to drought conditions. And so agriculture is solvable but it’s not as easy as in other places. When the Green Revolution came to India and China and to other parts of Asia in the 1960s and 70s, it came for irrigated agriculture - in the Punjab, for example, or along the Yangtze River or the Yellow River. But it did not come for rain fed agriculture at the beginning. And so I think that Africa`s rain fed agriculture makes it more difficult. The third condition that I think is special for Africa is the disease burden of Africa`s tropical environment. Malaria is by far the worst in Africa of the whole world, and many other tropical diseases are very high burden in Africa, diseases both of the humans and of the animals, like sleeping sickness for the cattle. And so, in my opinion, Africa has always been burdened economically by:
1. Difficult transport conditions.
2. Difficult agriculture conditions.
3. Difficult health conditions.
Now with modern technology, all of these are solvable. Nothing is unsolvable now, because agriculture can be improved, disease can be controlled, and transport can be solved by building modern roads and rail. BUT if you are stuck in extreme poverty you don`t have the resources to solve those problems on your own. So my proposal is: identify the problem, make the investment, and get the international help to end the poverty trap. And that is the Millennium Village philosophy but I believe that is one fourth of the total Africa-wide strategy. Rural strategy is the Millennium Village strategy. Urban strategy is a little bit different because that`s on a coast, so that’s building up a port area, and it’s the kind of development that has taken place throughout East Asia. Then there needs to be a national infrastructure strategy, for instance these days deploying solar power, building roads and rail, large-scale irrigation. And then the fourth part of the strategy is population control, because Africa`s population continues to rise too rapidly. In the rural areas, African women are still having five or six children on average, sometimes seven, and that can`t continue, because it leads to a population that has been doubling roughly every 25 years or so. And so over the last 60 years the population increased from 200 million to around 800 million people. Africa is on a trajectory to reach 1.8 billion people by 2050 unless the population control is much more decisive. So I propose a four-part strategy, and I think I will stop at this point so we can hear Professor Hirano, a great expert in Africa, make some comments and then we can enter into discussion.
Thank you very much.
平野教授コメント・質疑応答へ(Comments from Prof.Hirano and Q&A Session)