Write a paragraph of 100to 150 words on 'nature has enough to satisfy everyone s need but has not enough to satisfy man's greed
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The Earth provides enough to meet everyone's needs
India's great moral leader Mohandas Gandhi famously said that there is enough on Earth for everybody's need, but not enough for everybody's greed.
Jeffrey D Sachs
March 2, 2011
analysis
Jeffrey Sachs
India's great moral leader Mohandas Gandhi famously said that there is enough on Earth for everybody's need, but not enough for everybody's greed. Today, Gandhi's insight is being put to the test as never before.
The world is hitting global limits in its use of resources. We are feeling the shocks each day in catastrophic floods, droughts, and storms - and in the resulting surge in prices in the marketplace. Our fate now depends on whether we cooperate or fall victim to self-defeating greed.The limits to the global economy are new, resulting from the unprecedented size of the world's population and the unprecedented spread of economic growth to nearly the entire world. There are now seven billion people on the planet, compared to just three billion a half-century ago. Today, average per capita income is $10,000, with the rich world averaging around $40,000 and the developing world around $4,000. That means that the world economy is now producing around $70 trillion in total annual output, compared to around $10 trillion in 1960.
China's economy is growing at around 10 per cent annually. India's is growing at nearly the same rate. Africa, long the world's slowest-growing region, is now averaging roughly five per cent annual GDP growth. Overall, the developing countries are growing at around seven per cent a year, and the developed economies at around two per cent, yielding a global average of around 4.5 per cent.
This is very good news in many ways. Rapid economic growth in developing countries is helping to alleviate poverty. In China, for example, extreme poverty has been cut from well over half of the population 30 years ago to around 10 per centor less today.
Yet there is another side to the global growth story that we must understand. With the world economy growing at 4-5 per cent annually, it will be on a path to double in size in less than 20 years. Today's $70 trillion world economy will be at $140 trillion before 2030, and $280 trillion before 2050 if we extrapolate from today's growth rate.
Our planet will not physically support this exponential economic growth if we let greed take the upper hand. Even today, the weight of the world economy is already crushing nature, rapidly depleting the supplies of fossil-fuel energy resources that nature created over millions of years, while the resulting climate change has led to instabilities in terms of rainfall, temperature, and extreme storms.
We see these pressures every day in the marketplace. Oil prices have surged to more than $100 per barrel, as China, India, and other oil-importing countries join the United States in a massive scramble to buy up supplies, especially from the Middle East. Food prices, too, are at historical highs, contributing to poverty and political unrest.
On the one hand, there are more mouths to feed, and with greater purchasing power on average. On the other hand, heat waves, droughts, floods, and other disasters induced by climate change are destroying crops and reducing the supplies of grains on world markets. In recent months, massive droughts have struck the grain-producing regions of Russia and Ukraine, and enormous floods have hit Brazil and Australia; now, another drought is menacing northern China's grain belt.