Sydney Morning Herald, Wednesday 15 September 1999

By ADELE HORIN

If every Australian sacrificed a cappuccino a week it would put a dent in world poverty, an international conference in Sydney was told yesterday.

Mr Julian Disney, world president of the International Council on Social Welfare, said the United Nations had estimated that worldwide access to safe water, adequate nutrition and basic education would cost less than $US100 billion a year. Each Australian’s share would cost less than a cup of coffee.

"Of course, the two richest people in the world could raise the whole amount between them and still have many billions to spare," he said.

He said the loss of a cappuccino would surely not induce severe withdrawal symptoms.

Mr Disney, a former head of the Australian Council of Social Service, was addressing 300 delegates from the Asia-Pacific region at the 28th regional conference of the International Council on Social Welfare, which represents welfare organisations in over 80 countries.

The conference was relocated to Australia after the original host nation, Malaysia, withdrew because of the effects of the Asian economic crisis.

Mr Disney said 1.5 billion people (about one in four) had incomes of less than $US1 a day, and the numbers in the Asia-Pacific region had risen considerably because of recent economic downturns.

He called for a boost in overseas aid and greater debt relief for poor countries. They had been treated more "harshly than the directors and shareholders of multinational companies which had made bigger mistakes". He criticised the International Monetary Fund’s "ignorance of Asian circumstances" for having imposed "ill-informed" policies on the region in the wake of the 1997 financial crisis.

"Now that the stopgap measures have achieved sufficient market stability to protect the wealthiest countries, there seems little stomach for addressing fundamental weaknesses in the international financial system," he said.

The council’s first initiative in the new millennium was to form an International Poverty Alliance with the aim of halving the proportion of people in abject poverty by 2015