No poverty next week
By Dara MacNeil
By Saturday 8 November poverty and world hunger will be a thing
of the past. They will have ceased to exist. That, at least,
appears to be the plan of the United Nations, given that they
have designated 7 November as International Day for the
Eradication of Poverty.
Gestures such as this look good on paper. In PR terms they help
convince a sceptical public that august bodies such as the UN are
not only concerned about these serious, fundamental problems, but
are also intent on taking meaningful action.
In reality, however, the gesture is meaningless. Above all it is
an attempt to camouflage the lack of will at an international
level to redress such serious problems. The scandal of poverty in
a world of plenty continues, not because it cannot be solved, but
because the will to solve it simply does not exist. Thus, this
time next year, the United Nations and other concerned bodies
will no doubt be expressing ``renewed concern'', while trotting out
the same, scandalous statistics.
Indeed, of statistics there are plenty. Collecting and compiling
information has ever been a strong point of bodies like the UN.
Acting on that information has always proved slightly more
troublesome. Thus, they inform us that this year more than 100
million people are without proper shelter and live their lives on
the street. Fully one third of the world's population exists in a
state of serious financial insecurity. The same number of people
are also denied access to sufficient food, clean water and
medical care. Indeed, an estimated one billion people go hungry
every year.
In the world's poorest countries the life expectancy of the
average person does not extend beyond the age of 40, while every
year more than 17 million people - three and a half times the
population of this island - die from diseases which are both
preventable and easily-curable. Ending this scandal once and for
all would actually be relatively simple. Thus, those reliable
statisticians have calculated, it would require no more than
devoting 1% of the world's total income for the next ten years to
the cause of poverty eradication. That, however, is not going to
happen. Certainly not while the wealth of the world's richest
continues to grow.
Today, the combined net wealth of the world's ten richest
individuals is estimated to be in excess of $130 billion, one and
a half times the combined income of the world's poorest nations.
The UN itself estimates that the 358 richest people in the world
enjoy more wealth than the combined income of countries which
contain 45% of the world's population. And 89 developing
countries are poorer today than they were 10 years ago.
Last year, the international community staged another PR
exercise, similar to that which occurs on 7 November. On that
occasion they gathered in Rome to participate in the World Food
Summit. After days of debate they finally unveiled a masterplan.
Over the next twenty years, they declared, they would attempt to
reduce by half the number of people who go hungry every year.
Thus, by 2016 no less than 500 million people will be starving.
That is supposed to some sort of achievement. The supposed
masterplan was rightly derided by the heads of many of the
world's poorer countries. Cuban president Fidel Castro expressed
that sense of anger when he declared that: ``Capitalism,
neo-liberalism, the laws of a wild marketplace.....kill people.
Hunger, the inseparable companion of the poor, is the offspring
of the unequal distribution of wealth and the injustices in this
world. The rich do not know hunger.'' It's as simple as that.
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