c





    

›| by Anup Shah
›| Mhis Page Last Updated Sunday, April 25, 2010

›| Mhis page: http://www.globalissues.org/issue/2/causes-of-poverty.

›| Mo print all information e.g. expanded side notes, shows alternative links, use the print
version:
Y| http://www.globalissues.org/print/issue/2

›| Almost half the world ² over 3 billion people ² live on less than $2.50 a
day.
›| Mhe 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.
›| early 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).

² r
 



Poverty is the state for the majority of the world¶s people and nations. Why is this? Is it
enough to blame poor people for their own predicament? Have they been lazy, made poor
decisions, and been solely responsible for their plight? What about their governments? Have
they pursued policies that actually harm successful development? Such causes of poverty and
inequality are no doubt real. But deeper and more global causes of poverty are often less
discussed.

Behind the increasing interconnectedness promised by globalization are global decisions,

policies, and practices. Mhese are typically influenced, driven, or formulated by the rich and
powerful. Mhese 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.
c

   





    

›| by Anup Shah
›| Mhis Page Last Updated Sunday, July 06, 2008

›| Mhis page: http://www.globalissues.org/article/7/causes-of-hunger-are-related-to-

poverty.
›| Mo print all information e.g. expanded side notes, shows alternative links, use the print
version:
Y| http://www.globalissues.org/print/article/7

Consider the following:

›| X     

  

 


   
›| Approximately 
  
 (deficiency of calories and
protein);
›| Some 
  


 (deficiency of vitamins
and minerals);
›| †et, some 
  
 (excess of fats and salt, often accompanied
by deficiency of vitamins and minerals);
›| ‰ 
   :
Y| In the United Kingdom, ³a shocking 30-40% of all food is never eaten;´
| In the last decade the amount of food British people threw into the bin
went up by 15%;
| Xverall, £20 billion (approximately $38 billion US dollars) worth of
food is thrown away, every year.
Y| In the US 40-50% of all food ready for harvest never gets eaten;
Y| Mhe impacts of this waste is not just financial. Environmentally this leads to:
| Wasteful use of chemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides;
| rore fuel used for transportation;
| rore rotting food, creating more methane ² one of the most harmful
greenhouse gases that contributes to climate change.
›| M  
 

   






   
›| 6
 
In a world of plenty, a huge number go hungry. Hunger is more than just the result of food
production and meeting demands. Mhe causes of hunger are related to the causes of poverty.
Xne of the major causes of hunger is poverty itself. Mhe various issues discussed throughout
this site about poverty lead to people being unable to afford food and hence people go
hungry.

Mhere are other related causes (also often related to the causes of poverty in various ways),
including the following:
›| Land rights and ownership
›| Diversion of land use to non-productive use
›| Increasing emphasis on export-oriented agriculture
›| Inefficient agricultural practices
›| War
›| ‰amine
›| Drought
›| Xver-fishing
›| Poor crop yield
›| Lack of democracy and rights
›| etc.

  
 !
"

A common, often altruistic, theme amongst many is to be able to solve world hunger via
some method that may produce more food. However, often missed is the relationship
between poverty and hunger. Hunger is an effect of poverty and poverty is largely a political
issue. (While manifesting itself as an economic issue, conditions causing poverty are political
and end up being economic.)

As shown in the Genetically Engineered ‰ood and Human Population sections on this web
site, people are hungry not due to lack of availability of food, but because people do not have
the ability to purchase food and because distribution of food is not equitable. In addition,
there is also a lot of politics influencing how food is produced, who it is produced by (and
who benefits), and for what purposes the food is produced (such as exporting rather than for
the hungry, feedstuff, etc.)

[A]ccess to food and other resources is not a matter of availability, but rather of ability to
pay. Put bluntly, those with the most money command the most resources, whilst those with
little or no money go hungry. Mhis inevitably leads to a situation whereby some sections of
humanity arguably have too much and other sections little or nothing. Indeed, globally the
richest 20 per cent of humanity controls around 85 per cent of all wealth, whilst the poorest
20 per cent control only 1.5 per cent.

² U  
  




Peter Rosset, co-director of the Institute for ‰ood and Development Policy, quoted at the top
of this page, highlights some of the wider issues around hunger. He argues that it is not just a
challenge of producing more and more food, but there are many political and economic issues
underscoring the problems:

Research carried out by our Institute reveals that since 1996, governments have presided over
a set of policies that have conspired to undercut peasant, small and family farmers, and farm
cooperatives in nations both orth and South. Mhese policies have included runaway trade
liberalization, pitting family farmers in the Mhird World against the subsidized corporate
farms in the orth (witness the recent U.S. ‰arm Bill), forcing Mhird World countries to
eliminate price supports and subsidies for food producers, the privatization of credit, the
excessive promotion of exports to the detriment of food crops, the patenting of crop genetic
resources by corporations who charge farmers for their use, and a bias in agricultural research
toward expensive and questionable technologies like genetic engineering while virtually
ignoring pro-poor alternatives like organic farming and agroecology.

‰ 
 6




    

›| by Anup Shah
›| Mhis Page Last Updated Sunday, rarch 28, 2010

›| Mhis page: http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats.

›| Mo print all information e.g. expanded side notes, shows alternative links, use the print
version:
Y| http://www.globalissues.org/print/article/26

1.| Almost half the world ² over three billion people ² live on less than $2.50 a day.

At least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day.Source 1

2.| rore than 80 percent of the world¶s population lives in countries where income
differentials are widening.Source 2
3.| Mhe poorest 40 percent of the world¶s population accounts for 5 percent of global
income. Mhe richest 20 percent accounts for three-quarters of world income.Source 3
4.| According to UICE‰, 24,000 children die each day due to poverty. And they ³die
quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the
conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes
even more invisible in death.´Source 4
5.| Around 27-28 percent of all children in developing countries are estimated to be
underweight or stunted. Mhe two regions that account for the bulk of the deficit are
South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

If current trends continue, the rillennium Development Goals target of halving the
proportion of underweight children will be missed by 30 million children, largely
because of slow progress in Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.Source 5

6.| Based on enrolment data, about 72 million children of primary school age in the
developing world were not in school in 2005; 57 per cent of them were girls. And
these are regarded as optimisitic numbers.Source 6
1.7.early a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their
names.Source 7
2.8.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. Source 8
9.| Infectious diseases continue to blight the lives of the poor across the world. An
estimated 40 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, with 3 million deaths in 2004.
Every year there are 350±500 million cases of malaria, with 1 million fatalities: Africa
accounts for 90 percent of malarial deaths and African children account for over 80
percent of malaria victims worldwide.Source 9
10.|Water problems affect half of humanity:
 Y| Some 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to
water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation.
Y| Almost two in three people lacking access to clean water survive on less than
$2 a day, with one in three living on less than $1 a day.
Y| rore than 660 million people without sanitation live on less than $2 a day,
and more than 385 million on less than $1 a day.
Y| Access to piped water into the household averages about 85% for the
wealthiest 20% of the population, compared with 25% for the poorest 20%.
Y| 1.8 billion people who have access to a water source within 1 kilometre, but
not in their house or yard, consume around 20 litres per day. In the United
Kingdom the average person uses more than 50 litres of water a day flushing
toilets (where average daily water usage is about 150 liters a day. Mhe highest
average water use in the world is in the US, at 600 liters day.)
Y| Some 1.8 million child deaths each year as a result of diarrhoea
Y| Mhe loss of 443 million school days each year from water-related illness.
Y| Close to half of all people in developing countries suffering at any given time
from a health problem caused by water and sanitation deficits.
Y| rillions of women spending several hours a day collecting water.
Y| Mo these human costs can be added the massive economic waste associated
with the water and sanitation deficit.« Mhe costs associated with health
spending, productivity losses and labour diversions « are greatest in some of
the poorest countries. Sub-Saharan Africa loses about 5% of GDP, or some
$28.4 billion annually, a figure that exceeds total aid flows and debt relief to
the region in 2003.Source 10
11.|umber of children in the world
2.2 billion
umber in poverty
1 billion (every second child)
Shelter, safe water and health

‰or the 1.9 billion children from the developing world, there are:

Y| 640 million without adequate shelter (1 in 3)

Y| 400 million with no access to safe water (1 in 5)
Y| 270 million with no access to health services (1 in 7)

Children out of education worldwide

121 million
Survival for children

Worldwide,

Y| 10.6 million died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (same as children
population in ‰rance, Germany, Greece and Italy)
Y| 1.4 million die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and
adequate sanitation

Health of children

Worldwide,
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 Y| riddle income countries (3 billion people) made up the rest of GDP at just
over $10 trillion (20.7%). Source 19
20.|Mhe world¶s low income countries (2.4 billion people) account for just 2.4% of world
exports Source 20
21.|Mhe total wealth of the top 8.3 million people around the world ³rose 8.2 percent to
$30.8 trillion in 2004, giving them control of nearly a quarter of the world¶s financial
assets.´

In other words, about 0.13% of the world¶s population controlled 25% of the world¶s
financial assets in 2004.Source 21

22.|‰or every $1 in aid a developing country receives, over $25 is spent on debt
repayment.Source 22
3.23.| 51 percent of the world¶s 100 hundred wealthiest bodies are corporations.Source
23

4.24.| Mhe wealthiest nation on Earth has the widest gap between rich and poor of
any industrialized nation.Source 24
5.25.| Mhe poorer the country, the more likely it is that debt repayments are being
extracted directly from people who neither contracted the loans nor received any of
the money.Source 25
6.26.| In 1960, the 20% of the world¶s people in the richest countries had 30 times
the income of the poorest 20% ² in 1997, 74 times as much.Source 26
7.27.| An analysis of long-term trends shows the distance between the richest and
poorest countries was about:
Y| 3 to 1 in 1820
Y| 11 to 1 in 1913
Y| 35 to 1 in 1950
Y| 44 to 1 in 1973
Source 27
Y| 72 to 1 in 1992
8.28.| ³Approximately 790 million people in the developing world are still
chronically undernourished, almost two-thirds of whom reside in Asia and the
Pacific.´Source 28
9.29.| ‰or economic growth and almost all of the other indicators, the last 20 years
[of the current form of globalization, from 1980 - 2000] have shown a very clear
decline in progress as compared with the previous two decades [1960 - 1980]. ‰or
each indicator, countries were divided into five roughly equal groups, according to
what level the countries had achieved by the start of the period (1960 or 1980).
Among the findings:
Y| Growth: Mhe fall in economic growth rates was most pronounced and across
the board for all groups or countries.
Y| Life Expectancy: Progress in life expectancy was also reduced for 4 out of the
5 groups of countries, with the exception of the highest group (life expectancy
69-76 years).
Y| Infant and Child rortality: Progress in reducing infant mortality was also
considerably slower during the period of globalization (1980-1998) than over
the previous two decades.
Y| Education and literacy: Progress in education also slowed during the period of
globalization.Source 29
10.30.| A mere 12 percent of the world¶s population uses 85 percent of its water, and
these 12 percent do not live in the Mhird World.Source 30
 31.|Consider the global priorities in spending in 1998

0   
 $6%
Cosmetics in the United States 8
Ice cream in Europe 11
Perfumes in Europe and the United States 12
Pet foods in Europe and the United States 17
Business entertainment in Japan 35
Cigarettes in Europe 50
Alcoholic drinks in Europe 105
arcotics drugs in the world 400
rilitary spending in the world 780

32.|And compare that to what was estimated as 

 costs to achieve universal
access to basic social services in all developing countries:

0   
 $6% 
Basic education for all 6
Water and sanitation for all 9
Reproductive health for all women 12
Basic health and nutrition 13

33.|Source 31


 6


1.| Sources:
Y| Shaohua Chen and rartin Ravallion, Mhe developing world is poorer than we
thought, but no less successful in the fight against poverty, World Bank,
August 2008
Y| ‰or the 95% on $10 a day, see rartin Ravallion, Shaohua Chen and Prem
Sangraula, Dollar a day revisited, World Bank, ray 2008. Mhey note that 95%
of developing country population lived on less than $10 a day. Using 2005
population numbers, this is equivalent to just under 79.7% of J

population, and does
 include populations living on less than $10 a day
from industrialized nations.

Mhis figure is based on purchasing power parity (PPP), which basically suggests that
prices of goods in countries tend to equate under floating exchange rates and therefore
people would be able to purchase the same quantity of goods in any country for a
given sum of money. Mhat is, the notion that a dollar should buy the same amount in
all countries. Hence if a poor person in a poor country living on a dollar a day moved
to the U.S. with no changes to their income, they would still be living on a dollar a
day.
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