More than 1.4 billion people live in poverty so extreme that they can barely survive, and around 25,000 people die from hunger each day whilst a new billionaire is created every second day. The call for a global safety net has never been so urgent - and compels the international community to transform economic priorities and guarantee the universal securing of basic human needs.
The world is on track to meet the Millennium Development
Goal on halving the number of people living below the poverty line by
2015. The trouble is that this line – set at a dollar a day – is a
deeply flawed and unreliable measure. We need a radical, new rights-based approach to defining poverty, argues David Woodward.
More than ten years on, global poverty reduction strategies introduced by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have failed to deliver on the basic promises made to the world’s poorest people, says a report by Minority Rights Group International.
A new measure of global poverty suggests that 1.7 billion people live in 'multidimensional poverty', far more than the World Bank's conservative estimates, while others suggest that the number of those in relative poverty could possibly be 4 billion and rising. Does this mean that global poverty reduction is a political myth?
Poverty is usually defined by the ‘$1-a-day’ line developed by the
World Bank. But does this definition tell the whole story? We need a broader approach, based on human rights, which
takes into account actual living standards, argues a report by the New Economics Foundation.
Rich people’s disproportionate contribution to the current ecological crisis is explained not by their wealth alone, but by their wealth relative to the rest of the population. A world without inequality is not just desirable: it’s an urgent necessity, argues Bob Hughes.
Over the last half-century, America’s highest earners have seen their tax outlays drop by as much as two-thirds. An ‘Economic Tax Recovery Plan’ could raise $450 billion in revenue by ending unfair benefits for the rich, says a report by Wealth for the Common Good.
Although the Millennium Development Goals offer hope for a certain number of those living in poverty, growing global inequality condemns many to continued marginalisation. The setting of abstract targets is no panacea for the planet’s poor and hungry, writes Justin Frewen.
