World Bank condemns Defense Spending by David Fickling The Guardian / UK 10:29am 15th Feb, 2004   February 14, 2004    The president of the World Bank condemned the amount developed countries spend on defense yesterday, saying it was "madness" compared with the sums committed to aid projects.    James Wolfensohn told an audience in Australia: "We are spending 20 times the amount on military expenditure than what we are spending on trying to give hope to people."    He added: "If a Martian came to earth and read the [UN's] millennium development goals, and then looked at what we're doing, you'd think we were mad. We are spending a trillion dollars a year on defense    "We talk about freeing trade and we've got $300bn to $350bn being spent in ... agricultural subsidy or tariffs, and we're spending maybe $50bn on development.    "The world is spending less now that it was spending 40 years ago, percentage wise, in terms of development. We have got it tremendously wrong in the way in which we are addressing the questions of poverty, development and its importance."    Mr Wolfensohn, who has headed the World Bank since 1995, said that population growth and increased freedom of movement meant that rich countries could no longer afford to see themselves as separate from the developing world.    "The world is not two worlds of the rich and poor, it's really one world, in which we are connected by trade, and by finance, by environment, by crime, by drugs, by health and even by terror," he said.    "I think people now recognize, when one saw the image of the World Trade Center collapsing, that this imaginary wall that divided us in the world had collapsed."    In an article in yesterday's edition of the newspaper the Australian he quoted figures showing that only 50m of the two billion people to be born in the next 25 years would be born in rich countries.    "The vast majority will be in the poorer nations: born with the prospect of growing up into poverty and unemployment and disillusioned with a world that they will inevitably view as inequitable and unjust," he wrote.    One sixth of the world's six billion people owned 80% of its wealth, while another sixth earned less than a dollar a day.    © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
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