The Real Truth, a magazine restoring plain understanding

The Reality of Global Poverty

BY JEFFREY R. AMBROSE

April 10, 2008

The dollars and cents of poverty beyond the shores of North America is sobering beyond words. According to the United Nations-commissioned Millennium Project, “More than one billion people in the world live on less than one dollar a day. In total, 2.7 billion struggle to survive on less than two dollars per day. Poverty in the developing world, however, goes far beyond income poverty. It means having to walk more than one mile every day simply to collect water and firewood; it means suffering diseases that were eradicated from rich countries decades ago. Every year, eleven million children die—most under the age of five—and more than six million from completely preventable causes like malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia.

“In some deeply impoverished nations less than half of the children are in primary school and under 20 percent go to secondary school. Around the world, a total of 114 million children do not get even a basic education and 584 million women are illiterate.”

Living on less than a dollar or two per day—well below the earning potential of a homeless panhandler in a large North American city—equates to a life that most Americans would rather not think about, much less experience.

But this is reality for roughly 40% of the human beings on the planet!

The scourge of poverty affects every country to a degree, but in certain parts of the globe, it is the rule rather than the exception.

Poverty in Asia

A resident of a dying fishing village near Pakistan’s increasingly polluted Manchar Lake told interviewers for the United Kingdom group Panos, “We have been living here since the beginning. Seven generations have lived and died here…We, who are standing on the edge of death now, have seen our hair grow white here.

“Today again, my mother-in-law has an upset stomach and is vomiting. This is an injustice to us: the water of Manchar has turned to poison. Children go to bathe in this water and…even if one drop of this water enters their mouth, they will lose their lives…

“Recently three of our women, who each had eight-month-old babies, died due to the poisonous waters. In our homeland…there is only misery for us…We have no livelihood…there are only small fish. We now survive by begging.

“In the times of our forefathers, the water was so sweet that if you…drank water out of the small hollows left in the ground by the cattle’s footprints, even that was sweet. The water has been bad like this since the last 10, 15 years…now even dogs will die if they drink it, let alone human beings…”

In China, which has made great strides in developing an urban middle class, there are still millions who live in miserable conditions. “When she gets sick, Li Enlan, 78, picks herbs from the woods that grow nearby instead of buying modern medicines.

“This is not the result of some philosophical choice, though. She has never seen a doctor and, like many residents of this area, lives in a meager barter economy, seldom coming into contact with cash.

“‘We eat somehow, but it’s never enough,’ Li said. ‘At least we’re not starving.’

“In this region of southern Henan Province, in village after village, people are too poor to heat their homes in the winter and many lack basic comforts like running water. Mobile phones, a near ubiquitous symbol of upward mobility throughout much of this country, are seen as an impossible luxury. People here often begin conversations with a phrase that is still not uncommon in today’s China: ‘We are poor’…” (International Herald Tribune).

A recent World Bank study suggests that 300 million in China live in poverty—three times as many as the bank previously estimated (ibid.).

India

The largest city on the Indian subcontinent—and the world’s largest city proper—holds millions of impoverished residents within its confines: “All cities in India are loud, but nothing matches the 24/7 decibel level of Mumbai, the former Bombay, where the traffic never stops and the horns always honk. Noise, however, is not a problem in Dharavi, the teeming slum of one million…where as many as 18,000 people crowd into a single acre (0.4 hectares).

“By nightfall, deep inside the maze of lanes too narrow even for the putt-putt of auto rickshaws, the slum is as still as a verdant glade. Once you get accustomed to sharing 300 square feet (28 square meters) of floor with 15 humans and an uncounted number of mice, a strange sense of relaxation sets in” (National Geographic).

Those who live in the country fare little better. According to an affiliate of The Wall Street Journal, “India still has the world’s largest number of poor people in a single country. Of its nearly 1 billion inhabitants, an estimated 350-400 million are below the poverty line, 75 per cent of them in the rural areas” (IndiaOneStop).

South America

In a resurgent Latin America, with countries such as Venezuela rising in wealth on the crest of oil profits, many have not yet felt the flush of success. “The poverty rate in Venezuela was about 50 percent when [President Hugo] Chavez’s presidency began in 1999, according to the government’s own figures. Since then, roughly equal numbers of people have fallen into and out of poverty at various times, with a spike to more than 60 percent in 2003 and a drop below 40 percent in 2005…

“Many experts on poverty prefer to measure outcomes like literacy, infant mortality and life expectancy, rather than—or in addition to—purchasing power.

“By those metrics, which are similar to the ones used in the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index, Venezuela’s progress isn’t too dramatic. Its reduction in infant mortality through 2004...was just below the regional average of 17 percent, and the percentage of babies born underweight or under height has increased…

“...research showed only a small decline in illiteracy, with most of the drop due to changing demographics” (IHT).

Africa

On a continent with a name that is nearly synonymous with poverty, the statistics are stunning.

According to the Millennium Project:

• More than 40% of Africans are unable to obtain sufficient food daily.

• In 1960, Africa was a net exporter of food; today, the continent imports one-third of its grain.

• Declining soil fertility, land degradation and AIDS have led to a 23% decrease in food production per capita in the last 25 years, despite dramatic population increase.

• Conventional fertilizers cost African farmers two to six times more than the world market price.

• More than 50% of Africans suffer from cholera, infant diarrhea and other water-related diseases.

• A child in Africa dies of malaria every 30 seconds—more than one million child deaths per year.

Conditions are particularly bad in the Sahel, the countries on the southern border of the Sahara Desert, stretching from Senegal to Ethiopia. In many regions there, more than half of all children under age five are underweight, according to the Center for International Earth Science Information Network.

The View From a Distance

In the developed world—where typical daily obstacles may include an extended wait at a red light, a slow commute, spotty cellphone coverage and rising gasoline prices—it is nearly impossible to comprehend a world where an open sewer may run past one’s front door. Where a simple latrine exists nowhere near one’s home. Where the most basic necessities such as food and water may be available tomorrow—but may not. Where going to bed hungry is a given.

Those who care enough to think about this at any length cannot help but throw up their hands and ask, “What can be done?”

This fundamental question remains unanswered in most minds: Is there a solution?

The Templeton Foundation posed a related question to a number of notable figures: “Will Money Solve Africa’s Development Problems?”

Dr. Donald Kaberuka, president of the African Development Bank and former minister of finance of Rwanda, replied in part: “Alone, money cannot solve Africa’s development problems. Proof, if any was needed, is the fact that many of Africa’s natural resource-rich countries score very low on human development indicators.”

William Easterly, a professor of economics at New York University, shared the same opinion: “…after fifty years of trying and $600 billion worth of aid-giving, with close to zero rise in living standards in Africa, I can make the case for ‘No’ pretty decisively. Aid advocates talk about cheap solutions like the 10-cent oral rehydration salts that would save a baby dying from diarrheal diseases, the 12-cent malaria medicine that saves someone dying from malaria, or the $5 bed nets that keep them from getting malaria in the first place.

“Yet despite the aid money flowing, two million babies still died from diarrheal diseases last year, more than a million still died from malaria, and most potential malaria victims are still not sleeping under bed nets.

“Clearly, money alone does not solve problems.”