The World Summit on Sustainable Development began in Johannesburg this week, with South African President Thabo Mbeki calling for greater solidarity with the world’s poor as the leaders from 100 nations discuss water, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity. Over the week or so of meetings, the 40,000 delegates may find that these five contentious issues can be brought together by a sixth upon which most can agree.

Amartya Sen, master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the 1998 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, has spent a long career thinking about Third World development, and he emphasizes an issue familiar to anyone in Maine.

“I am aware that when I argue that basic education for all can transform the miserable world in which we live,

I sound a little like a Victorian gentlewoman delivering her favorite recipe for progress,” he said not long ago. “As it happens, however, extensive empirical studies have demonstrated the critical role of basic education in economic and social development in Europe and North America as well as in Asia, Africa and Latin America.”

When the developed world worries, properly, about the lack of clean water or medicine or the destruction of flora and fauna in poor countries, it begins worrying long after those caught in squalor have noticed both these problems and their lack of alternatives to worsening them. And while education cannot adequately address some specific issues – if developed nations want to encourage agricultural societies, they might open some more of their markets – it can provide opportunities for sustainable and diverse development not now possible.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said as the Johannesburg summit approached that poverty may have grown worldwide since Rio ’92. The reasons for this are complex, including internal corruption, disagreements among nations on trade, finance, development assistance and environmental restrictions, the sometimes cross desires of doing good work and creating markets for goods, with all of this operating under poverty-producing wars.

The Bush administration is almost nobody’s favorite government at the summit, but Secretary of State Colin Powell has committed the United States to some helpful aid programs. And though the administration is wrong not to take its responsibility for environmental degradation more seriously, the focus on what the United States is willing or not willing to do is an unneeded distraction. As Dr. Sen points out, real development has emerged from an educated populace, often despite what the rest of the world is doing.

In East Asia, he offers as examples Japan in the 19th century, and later China, Taiwan and South Korea. “Explanations of their rapid economic progress often cite their willingness to make good use of the global market economy, and rightly so. But that process was greatly helped by the emphasis all of these countries placed on basic education. Widespread participation in a global economy would have been hard to accomplish if people could not read or write.” The connection between education and the environment is especially clear in the effect education has on the number of children – and therefore the demands on resources – in a family.

This is not to suggest that providing basic education is a simple issue, only that it is imperative to the long-term goals of sustainable development. That so many wealthy nations might agree to support it in poorer countries makes it a real opportunity.