Brazil's Lula lashes out

a week ago today, march 27, brazil's president spoke at the 8th conference of parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP8) in curitiba, brazil... he pointed out some of the very same things i've been repeatedly pointing out on this weblog, the most recent of which was yesterday...

Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva . . . castigated the wealthy and technologically advanced countries of the world for failing to live up to their responsibility in tackling poverty and environmental degradation on the planet.

[...]

In his speech at a ministerial-level meeting on biodiversity, the popular Brazilian leader, known widely as "Lula", also criticised the West for what many economists consider unsustainable patterns of consuming the world's resources, which are contributing to an alarming level of poverty. In 1980, the rich had 30 times more wealth than the poor, noted Lula. Now that ratio has almost doubled.

"The industrialised nations spend about 900 billion dollars to defend their national borders," the Brazilian president said. "But they allocate less than 60 billion dollars for development in poor countries, where hunger has become a silent weapon of mass destruction."

Lula told delegates that the developed world is willfully neglecting the widening gulf between the rich and poor because it continues to cling to a model of development that has no room for collective sharing of resources and lacks concern for environmental degradation.

590 million people in latin america will have gone to the polls by early 2007... that's over 80% of the population... as ever more countries in the region make a left turn, it would behoove the u.s. and the rest of the so-called "first world" to listen a bit more closely to those who are articulating displeasure with their policies...

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