BYLINE: George Papandreou

Every night, 2 billion humans go to bed with chronic pangs of hunger and the despair of knowing they'll face yet another day with little or no hope. The U.N. Earth summit in Johannesburg, wrapping up tomorrow, is about alleviating the misery of those people > by promoting sustainable economic growth, ending hunger and malnutrition, ensuring safe drinking water, and conquering dread diseases already vanquished in Europe, Japan and North America.

Yet sadly, few, if any, of the world's poor are among the 100,000 or so attending this summit. There are thousands of government officials and politicians. Representatives from non-governmental organizations concerned with the environment, the rights of women, labour conditions, and trade and globalization abound. But we could use some personal input from those who are missing.

I'm thinking about the schoolteacher fighting illiteracy in a Vietnamese village, the farmer from Costa Rica seeking new agricultural techniques to improve his crop yield, the herder in sub-Sahara Africa whose child desperately needs medical treatment and the Chinese university student worried about the environmental effect of industrialization.

Sometimes the best solutions to the Earth's problems come from the people forced to deal with them daily.

That's why I'm looking forward to the results of the first Online Global Poll on the Environment being conducted in conjunction with the summit.

It's available at www.NetPulseGlobalPoll.com. It's a historic chance for the globe's 6.2 billion citizens to register their opinions and advance their ideas on a wide-range of crucial issues facing a shrinking planet. The results of the poll, when released in the next few weeks, will give summit delegates and government officials across the world a better idea of how people view environmental conditions in their own country and hopefully suggest workable ways to improve them.

The feedback obviously won't be a perfect reflection of public opinion since only a small percentage of people have access to a telephone, let alone the Internet. But it is an important beginning, a way to usher in a new era of understanding public opinion on a global level.

The International Marketing Council of South Africa is sponsoring the poll.

The overall project was organized by the Andreas Papandreou Foundation of Greece.

As a Greek, I take great pride in knowing that the basic principles of democracy were first developed in the Golden Age of Greece, 2,500 years ago. The great promise of "digital democracy" is that we can find new ways to strengthen and reinvigorate our current democratic institutions and processes, and extend them to all peoples everywhere.