The turn of the worm
I have been scratching my head to think of any other 87-year-old who could have held an audience of over 4,000 in his thrall for an hour and a half as Jimmy Carter did last night on London’s South Bank. The former president allowed himself to be lightly grilled by me and then by questioners in the audience.
I suppose by now he has the right to say: ‘I was right’. Certainly his own presidency, regarded as something of a one-term failure at the time, has matured with age.
History may well view it as more benign than any that followed and to have achieved more than many – a long lasting Israeli-Egyptian peace; a treaty to give the Panama Canal to Panama; a period of history in which no American army was in the field of war; a concept of human rights at the heart of foreign policy.
Talking to him on stage last night, he proved refreshingly direct, interestingly critical of Obama on the Middle East, and damning of Tony Blair on Iraq.
But it was when he was asked by a member of the audience what single achievement he now sought, that he was at his most enthusiastic.
His Carter Centre – which works for human rights, democracy and health in the developing world – has been at the forefront of the battle to eradicate ‘Guinea Worm’. This is an horrific three foot long organism that enters the human body through contaminated water supplies.
In 1986, when Carter set out his ambition to eradicate it, there were 3.5m cases in 21 countries. Today there are around a thousand in two countries – Chad and South Sudan.
The reduction has been achieved not by vaccine but by the distribution of small filter pipes – looking line penny whistles, through which people filter their water. It has also been achieved through the vast provision of clean water well systems.
Carter needs £60m to finish the job by 2015. The UK’s aid arm at Department for International Development has pledged £20m, Bill Gates has contributed, others are thinking about it.
If Guinea worm disease is eradicated it will be only he second worldwide disease to have been got rid of from the planet after smallpox, and the first parasitic disease to have been beaten.
Carter proves to be a remorselessly driven visionary, who has used past presidency as few before him. He lives modestly in the same small bungalow on his peanut farm from which he rose to the Governorship of Georgia and the Presidency of the United States.
Unlike some, he has not sought to enrich himself, But make no mistake, he knows just how good he is, and isn’t shy about enjoying it.
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