This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures.

This lecture in the series Bursting at the Seams, given by Geoffrey Sacks, was originally broadcast in 2007.

Hello and welcome to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, so as, as it's more commonly known.

It's part of London University and its Britain's leading academic

institution dedicated to the study of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. It's an appropriate place

to be holding the fourth of this year's Reith Lectures as Geoffrey Sachs turns his attention

to one of the defining problems of those parts of the world, extreme poverty, to give it its economic

definition, people who are forced to live on less than a dollar a day. As the world converges and

grows richer, its newfound wealth, argues Sacks, threatens to be fatally undermined by the vastness

of the terrible poverty it leaves behind. We have to rescue the poor

and the failing communities in which they live if we're to enjoy the fruits of economic

globalisation. It can be done, he says, to explain how and why. Please, would you welcome the BBC

Reith Lecturer 2007 2007, Jeffrey Sachs?

Thank you very much, Sue, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

It's a great honor to be with you this evening.

The end of poverty by the year 2025. It seems like an outlandish claim, an impossible dream.

But it's within reach.

It is a scientifically sound objective.

And it is the most urgent challenge of our generation. In fact, if we in the rich

world failed to take up this challenge, we will imperil ourselves in the world. A crowded world,

one that is bursting at the seams, cannot afford to leave millions to die each year of extreme poverty without imperiling all the rest.

President John F. Kennedy, whose vision of the possible, inspires these lectures, put it this way in his inaugural address in 1961.

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