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RF Annual Report

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RF Annual Report PRESIDENT'S REVIEW & ANNUAL REPORT 1992 THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION © 2003 The Rockefeller Foundation 03 oaf OBI ^*~ ..... " nn fl?siIte|^faQnT«^i (03 fstosnflcff (TtTtfl (liftftt A'V*t (ED! © 2003 The Rockefeller Foundation The Rockefeller Foundation 1992 Annual Report © 2003 The Rockefeller Foundation Introduction THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION IS A PHILANTHROPIC ORGANIZATION endowed by John D. Rockefeller and chartered in 1913 "to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world." It is one of America's oldest private foundations and one of the few with strong international interests. From the beginning, its work has been directed toward identifying and attacking at their source the underlying causes of human suffering and need. • Today, the Foundation offers grants and fellowships in three principal areas: international science-based development, the arts and humanities, and equal opportunity. Within science-based development, the focus is on the developing world and emphases are on the global environment; on the agricultural, health, and popu- lation sciences; and on a very limited number of special African initiatives. The Foundation also has smaller grant programs in international security and U.S. school reform. • The Foundation concentrates its efforts on selected programs with well-defined goals, but tries to remain flexible by adjusting its course to reflect new needs and opportunities as they arise. In addition, the Foundation maintains the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in northern Italy for conferences of international scope and for residencies for artists and scholars. « The Foundation is administered by its president through a staff drawn from scholarly, scientific, and professional disciplines. An independent board of trustees, which meets four times a year, sets program guidelines and financial policy and approves all appro- priations. Information on how to apply for grants and fellowships begins on page 57. 12003 The Rockefeller Foundation The President's Statement A SERBIAN SOLDIER BEING HELD IN THE FORMER Yugoslavia for crimes that include rape and genocide described the Serbian operation there as ciscenje prostora - the cleansing of the region. "We were told that [it] must be a cleansed Serbian terri- tory ... that all the Muslims there must be killed.... It was an order, and I simply did what I was told." This year Los Angeles burned; stores were looted, and flames flickered across the city throughout the night. At the Foundation's Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, an Egyptian philoso- pher said to an American: "Why is the West's version of modernity being used as a yard- stick to judge Islam? Implicit in the question whether Islam is capable of modernity or pluralism is an accusation - as if you were the prosecutors and we were the accused. I know your civilization very well and your house is not in order." In India, in Northern Ireland, in Cambodia, in Somalia, in Iraq, in Israel - in a score of places around the world - people are trapped by old hatreds and diverted in deadly conflicts. Who among us can say that they are engaged meaningfully in an attempt to forge the common enterprise? Who belongs to the common enterprise? TWIN A foundation like ours operates primarily on issues with long lead times. But CHALLENGES when the magnetic field shifts, every direction must be reevaluated; every course EMERGE must be reassessed, and some must be re-charted. When the freeze of the Cold War lifted, there emerged a much more violent and uncertain world than we had hoped to find. Regional conflicts bloody the globe, fueled by ethnic antagonisms whose taproots run deeper than many had understood. And then at the global Conference on Environment and Development at Rio de Janeiro this past summer, the world learned again how interdependent we have all become on this fragile planet, how common are our problems, how inadequate our present institutions are for dealing with them. We can see emerging now the twin challenges of the next era. The task before us can no longer be defined as a challenge to a single country, culture, or bloc. At issue is human viability on this planet. The challenges that lie at the heart of the common enter- prise are framed by these two questions: Can we find and pursue a path to sustainable development consistent with individual rights and a more equal sharing of the world's resources? PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT © 2003 The Rockefeller Foundation Can we shape the institutions that will allow hostile communities to Junction together within a single global framework? The first is a matter of finding the technology, the ideas, and the institutions to let us attain a leveling off of the world's population, and to generate enough energy and grow enough food in ways that less critically burden the environment. The second is a matter of searching out the ideas and institutions that will allow bitterly inimical groups to bend their energies to the first task rather than to war genocid- ally and with increasing access to weapons of mass destruction. The evolution of new ideas is common to both tasks. Ideas shape our institu- tional arrangements, our sense of what is possible, and our assumptions about how to respond to crisis. These "ideas" are generally more powerful over the long run than we realize. Keynes said it well: "... the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scrib- bler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval.. soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil." Who belongs to the common enterprise? To answer this question we need to agree on an "idea" of what the common enterprise is. INTERLOCKING Our growth in numbers and destructiveness is on some general collision course TRIANGLE with the capacity of the planet to withstand us and feed us. That trajectory must o F i s s u E s be engaged and deflected. As Lewis Thomas said, we must move from being the subject of evolution and become its partner, not its victim. Let us look for a moment at the interlocking triangle of issues that constitutes the core of the sustainable-development challenge: population, food, and energy. If we assume that the trend toward smaller desired family size associated with development will continue, then quality family planning and related health services made available on a voluntary basis to every man and woman in the world could help the world's fertility rate to decline to the replacement rate of about 2.1 in two to three decades. This PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT © 2003 The Rockefeller Foundation in turn would mean that the world's population would probably level off at about 10 billion by the second half of the twenty-first century. The alternative path -to continue at present fertility rates - probably means leveling off after the end of the twenty-first century at a number closer to 20 billion. The world community's "idea" of how to approach this issue has been radically transformed over the past two decades by those concerned with basic individual rights and women's reproductive health. To those who were concerned only with numbers, they have demonstrated convincingly that the only basis on which to move forward is that of respect for the dignity, choice, and rights of the woman and the family; this is fundamental as a matter of right, and it is essential as a matter of practicality. No road can lead to a viable macro-outcome which respects human freedom unless it passes first through the microcosm of individual dignity, choice, responsibility for one's actions, and control over one's own body and future. This includes the number of children one chooses to have; the knowledge and tools to raise them so that they survive; one's ability to be self-sufficient in terms of food; and one's access to education and the means with which to escape disease. Within this philosophical framework, making available quality family planning and associated health services to those women around the world, but especially in Africa and Asia, who presently want but do not have access to such services could lead to a decline in the fertility rate over a decade to three from the present level of about four, or roughly half the distance we must ultimately travel. Helping women's groups, developing countries, international donors, and nongovernmental organizations to work together and mobilize the human, financial, technical, and organizational resources to achieve this will be the major objective of the Foundation's work in population in the years ahead. The world today produces about twice the amount of food it produced 30 years ago. The next 30 years will require more than another doubling i/the lower population figure of about 10 billion is attained, and considerably more than doubling if it is not. But even the task of doubling global food production looks more difficult to achieve over the next 30 years than it proved to be over the past 30. To feed a world population of 10 billion at modest levels of nutrition will require in the neighborhood of four billion metric tons of grain-equivalent per year - roughly 2 1/2 times the present level.
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