America and Britain should join forces to end poverty: both nations "believe that peace and security are the foundation of any progress … that creating the right climate for economic growth … is the best way … to raise the finances needed to defeat poverty."

Pres. Bush recently commented that "Fighting global poverty reflects this country's values.... We know that when a neighbor needs assistance, we have an obligation to help provide it." The President is right. The truth is this: Here we are at the beginning of the 21st century, and we know that, in the developing world, pregnancy and childbirth claim the life of a woman every minute--women who die alone and afraid on the floor of a darkened hut with no midwife or doctor to help them. We also know that 6,000 children will die today from a lack of clean water to drink; each and every year, malaria kills 1,000,000 people, tuberculosis, 2,000,000, AIDS, 3,000,000--every one a human life extinguished, potential unrealized.

Because we see these things, we cannot claim any more that we do not know what is going on--and we have a choice. Either we say: We are sorry about the condition of humankind, but we cannot do anything about it; or we ask: Can we do something about this? Well, I think we can. It is the story of my country. Go back 200 years to a time of enormous change in British society--the movement from the land to the towns and cities as the Industrial Revolution created a technology that transformed the world and begot great social reformers who helped to transform things, pioneers of local government who built the water pipes and the sewers which did so much to improve life expectancy, and the dreamers who dared to believe that one day every child in Britain would be able to go to school.

It was the same process here in America. The Founding Fathers created checks and balances in a Federal system that made local government the building block of a great nation--because power always should lie with the people. The U.S.'s tremendous social reformers, from Harriet Tubman helping to bring slaves north to freedom through the Underground Railroad (which, incidentally, passed through my mother's hometown), to Susan B. Anthony, the leader of the women's suffrage movement, being found guilty of voting illegally for a Re publican presidential candidate, to Rosa Parks refusing to be treated as a second-class citizen, serve as inspiration to us all. That is how both our countries changed and, the troth is, we are going through exactly the same process now, but on a global scale.

The progress has been remarkable. For instance, in the past 40 years, life expectancy in the developing world has increased by 25%. In the past 30 years, illiteracy has fallen by half. In the past 20 years, 400.000,000 individuals have been lifted out of absolute poverty. We have beaten smallpox, and we nearly have done the same with polio. Yet, there is so much more to do, and the task has become more difficult due to three key factors: climate change (least caused by the countries that will be worst affected by it), world population (projected to increase 50% over the next two generations), and the mass migration from rural to urban areas (by 2020, most people in Asia will be living in urban centers, and the same will be true of Africa 10 years later).