Bill Clinton has an idea about how to solve the world’s most pressing humanitarian problems: It’s the systems, stupid.
Addressing a panoply of world issues from climate change and alternative energy to food security and AIDS yesterday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the former president argued that creatively rethinking and reorganizing current global problem-solving methods would vastly improve civilization.
Clinton’s sober hour-long conversation with Jane Wales, his former White House aide who is currently vice president of philanthropy and society at the Aspen Institute, took place before an overflow crowd at the Institute’s Greenwald Pavilion. The audience included Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, seated front and center.
“It’s a simple little thing that philanthropists should be doing anywhere: Change the business model,” the former president said while discussing a market-based solution for distributing affordable HIV/AIDS drugs in the developing world. Clinton explained how, by changing the system of drug production and sales, his Clinton Foundation was able to cut their costs drastically while still allowing manufacturers to turn a profit.
He took a similar tack on addressing starvation in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions facing food shortages. Clinton said America needs to “get the show on the road” by aiding farmers and developing native agriculture in ailing nations, rather than simply dumping American foodstuffs on them.
“It’s crazy for us to keep using the old way of delivering food aid,” he said, explaining how Canada now devotes half of its outgoing aid to cash for farmers. Even the current suffering in Zimbabwe, he argued, could be alleviated by implementing a system that effectively tapped into its natural resources for food production. “This was a nation that could have been Africa’s bread basket,” he said.
America could both save its ailing economy and tamp down its carbon emissions, Clinton argued, by developing a new enviro-economic workforce — putting millions of people to work retrofitting buildings to be energy-efficient. “The money is there to be made, the environmental gain is there to be made,” the former president said, “but we are not organized to make it.”
Clinton’s remarks, void of applause-lines or partisan rhetoric, seemed to mark a return to the humanitarian mission that has driven his post-presidency, after spending much of this year on Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Clinton did not address the Obama-McCain presidential match-up, his former first lady’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination, or his reported reconciliation with Sen. Barack Obama last week. He did drop a playful reference to his primary politicking, however, while discussing the value of ethanol fuel: “I spent a lot of time in corn country this year.”
The former president is a frequent guest of the Aspen Institute, and has become a staple of the Aspen Ideas Festival. The Institute also popped up earlier this summer in a controversial Vanity Fair piece that unflatteringly profiled Clinton’s post-presidential personal behavior and reported that the Institute was the setting of an eyebrow-raising liaison with a woman who was not Mrs. Clinton.
Clinton arrived in Aspen on Thursday and had dinner with about a dozen friends and associates at Matsuhisa. The next day, the Fourth of July, he was spotted walking on the downtown mall and later having dinner at Campo de Fiori. Chelsea joined him to celebrate the nation’s birthday. Clinton is scheduled to fly out of Aspen today after a round of golf.
The week-long Ideas Festival wraps up this afternoon.
Aspen Daily News Staff Writer Troy Hooper contributed to this report.
andrew@aspendailynews.com
