Public intervention must for improving lot of poor: Sachs

New Delhi, Jan 22 (UNI) Eminent economist and director of the UN Millennium Project Prof Jeffrey D Sachs today said some problems related to poverty like lack of healthcare and undernutrition needed to be solved immediately instead of being sidelined in the interest of some long-term objectives.

''There are some problems that needed to be solved right now,'' said Dr Sachs addressing the inaugural session of Seventh Delhi Sustainable Summit here today.

To care for health of the poor, to feed them, to fulfill their other basic needs developing countries like India needed better and more effective technologies so that they could make efficient and sustaineble use of their resources, he said.

''The nostalgia for a simpler non-scientific world and a simpler economy is misplaced in a world of six billion people,'' said the economist, who is also Director of the Earth Institute, Columbia University US.

In Dr Sach's view there was no organic farming solution to the world's food problem. Society will have to depend on ever new technologies to feed its teeming billions.

In the coming years, the governments will have to scale up public interventions to adequately feed their poor and save the health of millions of their children, he stressed.

''We have to keep in mind solutions for short-term urgencies too,'' he added.

Dr Sachs was sad that while hundreds of millions were spent on armamments in the world, the eradication of malaria was waiting for lack of 300 million dollars.

Responding to preceding speaker United Kingdom Secretray of State for Environment David Miliband's observation that UK and US and rich countries should cut down their use of resources, Dr Sachs said the solution lies not in scaling down the standard of living of the developed world but in inventing and adopting appropriate technologies that reduce use of energy.

Earlier, Mr Miliband, in his remarks said climate change was a global problem and will require a global agreement.

'' In 2007, we must begin to agree the building blocks of an international framework that delivers a fair balance of responsibility between industrialised and industrialising countries,'' he added.

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