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DATA ABOUT POVERTY..IF YOU WISH TO WRITE ABOUT POVERTY.
Hunger and World Poverty
About 25,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related
causes, according to the United Nations. This is one person every three and a
half seconds, as you can see on this display. Unfortunately, it is children who
die most often.
Yet there is plenty of food in the world for everyone. The
problem is that hungry people are trapped in severe poverty. They lack the
money to buy enough food to nourish themselves. Being constantly malnourished,
they become weaker and often sick. This makes them increasingly less able to
work, which then makes them even poorer and hungrier. This downward spiral
often continues until death for them and their families.
There are effective programs to break this spiral. For adults,
there are “food for work” programs where the adults are paid with food to build
schools, dig wells, make roads, and so on. This both nourishes them and builds
infrastructure to end the poverty. For children, there are “food for education”
programs where the children are provided with food when they attend school.
Their education will help them to escape from hunger and global poverty.
Note: The world hunger map display above is representational
only and does not show the names and faces of real people. The photographs are
computer composites of multiple individuals.
·
Almost half the world — over 3
billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day.
·
The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of
the 41 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (567 million people) is less than the
wealth of the world’s 7 richest people combined.
·
Nearly a billion people entered the
21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.
·
Less than one per cent of what the
world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by
the year 2000 and yet it didn’t happen.
·
1 billion children live in poverty
(1 in 2 children in the world). 640 million live without adequate shelter, 400
million have no access to safe water, 270 million have no access to health
services. 10.6 million died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (or
roughly 29,000 children per day).
Behind the increasing interconnectedness promised by globalization are global decisions, policies, and practices. These are typically influenced, driven, or formulated by the rich and powerful. These can be leaders of rich countries or other global actors such as multinational corporations, institutions, and influential people.
In the face of such enormous external influence, the governments of poor nations and their people are often powerless. As a result, in the global context, a few get wealthy while the majority struggle.
These next few articles and sections explore various poverty issues in more depth:
13 articles on “Causes of Poverty” and 6 related issues:
Last updated Monday, September 20,
2010.
Most of humanity lives on just a few
dollars a day. Whether you live in the wealthiest nations in the world or the
poorest, you will see high levels of inequality.
The poorest people will also have
less access to health, education and other services. Problems of hunger,
malnutrition and disease afflict the poorest in society. The poorest are also
typically marginalized from society and have little representation or voice in
public and political debates, making it even harder to escape poverty.
By contrast, the wealthier you are,
the more likely you are to benefit from economic or political policies. The
amount the world spends on military, financial bailouts and other areas that
benefit the wealthy, compared to the amount spent to address the daily crisis
of poverty and related problems are often staggering.
Some facts and figures on poverty
presented in this page are eye-openers, to say the least.
Last updated Sunday, November 28,
2010.
Cutbacks in health, education and
other vital social services around the world have resulted from structural
adjustment policies prescribed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
World Bank as conditions for loans and repayment. In addition, developing
nation governments are required to open their economies to compete with each
other and with more powerful and established industrialized nations. To attract
investment, poor countries enter a spiraling race to the bottom to see who can
provide lower standards, reduced wages and cheaper resources. This has
increased poverty and inequality for most people. It also forms a backbone to
what we today call globalization. As a result, it maintains the historic
unequal rules of trade.
Last updated Sunday, January 02,
2011.
Around the world, in rich or poor nations, poverty has
always been present.
In most nations today,
inequality—the gap between the rich and the poor—is quite high and often
widening.
The causes are numerous, including a
lack of individual responsibility, bad government policy, exploitation by
people and businesses with power and influence, or some combination of these
and other factors.
Many feel that high levels of
inequality will affect social cohesion and lead to problems such as increasing
crime and violence.
Inequality is often a measure of
relative poverty. Absolute poverty, however, is also a concern. World Bank
figures for world poverty reveals a higher number of people live in poverty
than previously thought.
For example, the new poverty line is
defined as living on the equivalent of $1.25 a day. With that measure based on
latest data available (2005), 1.4 billion people live on or below that line.
Furthermore, almost half the
world—over three billion people—live on less than $2.50 a day and at least 80%
of humanity lives on less than $10 a day:
Last updated Monday, September 20,
2010.
Images © UNICEF
Over 22,000 children die every day
around the world.
That is equivalent to:
- 1 child dying every 4 seconds
- 15 children dying every minute
- A 2010 Haiti earthquake occurring almost every 10 days
- A 2004 Asian Tsunami occurring almost every 10 days
- An Iraq-scale death toll every 18–43 days
- Just under 8.1 million children dying every year
- Some 88 million children dying between 2000 and 2009
The silent killers are poverty,
easily preventable diseases and illnesses, and other related causes. Despite
the scale of this daily/ongoing catastrophe, it rarely manages to achieve, much
less sustain, prime-time, headline coverage.
Last updated Sunday, August 22,
2010.
Meaningful long-term alleviation of
hunger is rooted in the alleviation of poverty, as poverty leads to hunger.
World hunger is a terrible symptom of world poverty. If efforts are only
directed at providing food, or improving food production or distribution, then
the structural root causes that create hunger, poverty and dependency would
still remain. While resources and energies are deployed to relieve hunger
through technical measures such as improving agriculture, and as important as
these are, inter-related issues such as poverty means that political solutions
are likely required as well for meaningful and long term hunger alleviation.
Last updated Monday, December 10,
2007.
Food aid (when not for emergency
relief) can actually be very destructive on the economy of the recipient nation
and contribute to more hunger and poverty in the long term. Free, subsidized,
or cheap food, below market prices undercuts local farmers, who cannot compete
and are driven out of jobs and into poverty, further slanting the market share
of the larger producers such as those from the US and Europe. Many poor nations
are dependent on farming, and so such food aid amounts to food dumping. In the
past few decades, more powerful nations have used this as a foreign policy tool
for dominance rather than for real aid.
Last updated Sunday, November 21,
2010.
Food and agriculture goes to the heart of our civilizations.
Religions, cultures and even modern civilization have food and agriculture at
their core. For an issue that goes to the heart of humanity it also has its
ugly side.
This issue explores topics ranging
from the global food crisis of 2008, to issues of food aid, world hunger, food
dumping and wasteful agriculture such as growing tobacco, sugar, beef, and
more.
Last updated Sunday, January 02,
2011.
Last updated Sunday, November 07,
2010.
We often hear leaders from rich countries telling poor
countries that aid and loans will only be given when they show they are
stamping out corruption. While that definitely needs to happen, the rich
countries themselves are often active in the largest forms of corruption in
those poor countries, and many economic policies they prescribe have
exacerbated the problem. Corruption in developing countries definitely must be
high on the priority lists, but so too must it be on the priority lists of rich
countries.
Last updated Sunday, April 25, 2010.
In 1970, the world’s rich countries
agreed to give 0.7% of their gross national income as official international
development aid, annually.
Since that time, billions have
certainly been given each year, but rarely have the rich nations actually met
their promised target.
For example, the US is often the
largest donor in dollar terms, but ranks amongst the lowest in terms of meeting
the stated 0.7% target.
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