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The issues of poverty and inequality underpin the polarized debate in
justification of or opposition to the current development approach. Both the measurement of these issues and the
methods by which they can be resolved are subject to contentious debate between
the business community, economists and humanitarians. Although the
international community pledged itself to resolving these issues when signing
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, still not nearly enough
action is being taken to remedy an urgent and dire situation.
Measuring Poverty and Inequality
According to the World Bank's annual figures, almost half of
the world lives on less than $2 a day, including almost a half of all
children. Of these people, 969 million
live on less than $1 a day - the official marker of extreme poverty. Although this figure has now fallen beneath
one billion, the statistical measurement of poverty remains controversial. At the very least, dollar-a-day measures fail
to reflect the harsh reality of living in the burgeoning slums of developing
countries. According to a critical mass
of opinion, the quality of life for billions of poor people is continuing to
deteriorate, making the promised widely-shared prosperity of globalism
increasingly irrelevant for the majority world.
The global inequality debate is no less contentious. Although the fact of both wealth and income
inequality is acknowledged as widening by innumerable studies, the structural
causes of inequality are disputed. Despite
the International Monetary Fund's recent argument that foreign investment and
technology (and not trade) are associated with the increase in inequality in
developing countries, a wider consensus agrees that the policies of market
liberalization are a key contributory factor.
Meanwhile, the gap between rich and poor in both developed and
developing countries continues to grow inexorably, with the number of
billionaires soaring to record heights. Overall,
the three richest people in the world control more wealth than all 600 million
people living in the world's poorest countries.
The Failure of the International Community
For those at the bottom of the development ladder,
inequality means the difference between those who benefit from a basic standard
of living, versus those who lack even the essential resources needed to
survive. In a world with a huge surplus
of food, around 25,000 people continue to die from hunger each day, with one in
seven people going to bed hungry. This
gross neglect by the international community is reflected in statistics for
undernourishment which recorded a sharp increase in developing countries after
2001.
Parallel to the globalization of market forces which, over
the last 30 years, have evidently failed to supply the urgent demands of those
who have little or no income, a globalised system of welfare is sorely needed
if the international community is ever to achieve their long standing goals on
poverty eradication. Many NGOs argue that, at the present rate of action, several of the Millennium Development Goals will
take another 100 years to be met at current trends, and even if Goal 1 to half
extreme poverty is achieved, 900 million people will still live on less than $1
a day in 2015. It is worth noting that
such promises from the richest nations are nothing new: if the original 1970
pledge to provide 0.7 percent of national income in aid had been kept, world
leaders would have already celebrated the complete eradication of extreme
poverty. Instead, we would now be six
years into a programme to eradicate $2 a day poverty.
A Global Safety Net
A cooperative, international approach is crucially required,
one which can go far beyond existing pledges of more aid, debt cancelation and
fairer trade. By ensuring that those resources which are essential to life are
rapidly mobilized to where they are most urgently needed, governments are not
only fulfilling their moral obligations, but attending to their technical duty
of creating a global economy in which all citizens can actively participate and
contribute.
Evidence shows that all the basic necessities of life -
including clean water, adequate housing, energy, food and healthcare - could
feasibly be supplied to all world citizens within an immediate time-frame. The greatest barrier to achieving this
monumental reordering of world priorities is the inequitable structures of the
global economic system and a lack of political will, thus ensuring that 20
percent of the population in the richest nations continues to consume over 80
percent of the world's resources.
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