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VI Readings on Poverty, Hunger,
and Economic Development
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Approximately one-fifth of the world's population, over one billion people, earns
less than $1.00 a day. According to the 1998 UN World Development Report, the three
richest people in the world own assets that exceed the combined Gross Domestic Products of
the world's 48 poorest countries, and Forbes
Magazine reports that 358 billionaires had a combined net worth equal to the combined
income of the bottom 45 percent of the world's population. Each day, over a billion
people in the world lack basic food needs. And each day 35,000 children under the age of five
die of starvation or preventable infectious disease. Furthermore the problems of
growing inequality, poverty, and hunger are getting worse in spite of the huge surge of
global economic growth over the past 50 years. In this section will will address the
issues of the amount of food in the world, the role it plays in a capitalist economy, why
people are poor, and what measures can be taken to eliminate poverty and hunger.
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| A. Hunger and the
World Food Supply |
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We often hear about the world running out
of enough food to feed our growing population. For various reasons, however, that is
not likely. The overwhelming evidence is that people are not hungry because of a
lack of food; they are hungry because they don't have the money to pay for it. The
following readings address the issue of the world food supply.
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Reading 1. Some Basic Definitions
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/World_Hunger_Program/... |
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In the case of hunger, definitions
can make all the difference. For example, the term "malnutrition" often is
used synonymously with the term "hunger," or even "starvation."
But the terms carry very different meanings; starvation clearly implies social, political,
or economic failures on the part of local, state, or national governments to provide for
their citizens; "malnutrition" tends to imply a failure on the part of the
person to obtain a proper diet. Here are a few basic concepts necessary to
understand poverty and hunger. |
Reading 2. Six Myths About Hunger
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/World_Hunger_Program/... |
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This is a brief fact sheet from the World Hunger
Program at Brown University. It quickly exposes some commonly held, but faulty,
ideas about world hunger. |
Reading 3. Food Supply Gap
http://www.fao.org/NEWS/1998/981204-e.htm |
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This brief report and graphic from
the Food and Agricultural Organization of the
United Nations displays and discusses the availability of food from one part of the
world to another. It calculates the DES for each area, an estimate of the
average daily food energy available per person over a given period. Note that this
is not what is simply available in a given area or country; it is what people have the
ability to pay for. As they make clear, there is sufficient food for everyone (in
spite of the fact that growers ostensibly grow what they believe can be paid for, not what
is needed). As one UN official said, "If you look at the world as a whole, there is
enough food produced to feed each person, each day. But it isn't happening because
it's access to food that's the real problem." You can also get a good idea of
the unequal distribution of food resources (and the relationship to income) from the table
from the World Health
Report 1998 on the global
distribution of overweight and underweight people. |
Reading 4. Increase in the Number of
Undernourished People in the World
http://www.fao.org/NEWS/1998/981103-e.htm |
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This brief summary of the UN 1998
State of Food and Agriculture report provides you some basic information on the
present-day food situation, as well as some of the future prospects. You can also
read the brief press
release describing the main findings of the report. You can also browse the full
text of The State of Food and Agriculture 1997 for a more comprehensive
overview of the global food situation. |
| B. Food as a Commodity |
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To understand why people go hungry you
must stop thinking about food as something farmers grow for others to eat, and begin
thinking about it as something companies produce for other people to buy. Food is a
commodity. Furthermore, agricultural producers choose to grow, not only what people
will and can buy, but they grow things for which they will get the best price. This
has various implications. For example, much of the best agricultural land in the
world is used to grow commodities such as cotton, sisal, tea, tobacco, sugar cane, and
cocoa, items which are non-food products or are maginally nutritious, but for which there
is a large market. Millions of acres of potentially productive farmland is used to
pasture cattle, an extremely inefficient use of land, water and energy, but one for which
there is a market in wealthy countries. More than half the grain grown in the United
States (requiring half the water used in the U.S.) is fed to livestock, grain that would
feed far more people than would the livestock to which it is fed. Furthermore,
growers must be careful not to "overproduce"; that is they must not grow or
raise more food than people can pay for. In many countries agricultural
producers are discouraged from producing; furthermore, as food producing corporations grow
larger, they are able to control production to ensure they don't "overproduce."
The problem, of course, is that people who don't have enough money to buy food (and
more than one billion people earn less than $1.00 a day), simply don't count in the food
equation. In other words, if you don't have the money to buy food, no one is going
to grow it for you. Put yet another way, you would not expect The Gap to manufacture
clothes, Adidas to manufacture sneakers, or IBM to provide computers for those people
earning $1.00 a day or less; likewise, you would not expect ADM ("Supermarket to the
World") to produce food for them. Aid programs or governments may take up some
of the slack by purchasing food from producers, and distributing it; but, as we discuss in
Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism,
this may do more harm than good. What this means is that ending hunger requires doing away
with poverty, or, at the very least, ensuring that people have enough money or the means
to acquire it, to buy, and hence create a market demand for food.
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Exercise 1. Food Outlook
http://www.fao.org/giews/english/fo/fotoc.htm
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Each month Food Outlook produces a
newsletter that reports on the international food situation. It might report, for
example, that grain production in certain countries is down because of flooding or
hurricanes (as in Honduras after Hurricane Mitch), or that rice production is up, or that
prices on one commodity or another have declined. However, you have to remember that
when there are reports of production declines, the decline is relative to how much of a
given crop was planted, and the decision of how much to plant is a market decision; that
is, the amount planted depends on what the grower believes the market demand for the
product will be. In other words, what and how much is planted does not depend on
people's need for food; it depends on what they are able and willing to pay for it.
Browse the latest issue of Food Outlook. Read the Highlight section, browse
through the rest. From your browsing through the report, what do you think
determines what farmers (largely agribusiness) grow? What determines how much of a
given commodity they plant? If they can get a larger return on one commodity over
another which will they grow? |
Reading 5. Public
Action to Remedy Hunger
http://www.thp.org/reports/sen/sen890.htm |
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Nobel Prize winning economist,
Amartya Sen is one of the foremost spokespersons on global hunger and poverty. His book,
written with Jean Dreze, Hunger and
Public Action, is one of the most comprehensive studies of hunger yet written. In this
address, Sen summarizes the major points of the book. There are, he says, two types of
hunger: famine and endemic depravation-- the daily lack of sufficient food. Famine, while
receiving the most attention, is less prevalent that the largely hidden endemic hunger
from which some one billion people suffer. While the problem of hunger is widespread, Sen
warns about being pessimistic. People are hungry, says Sen, because they lose their
entitlement to food--they lack either the land to grow food, the money to buy it, or
access to state programs of food or wage distribution. With the will, he says, no one
needs to go hungry. Among the most important features necessary to prevent hunger, he
says, is a democratic (and thereby accountable) government and a free press that
publicizes the threat of hunger. |
Exercise 2. A Profile of the Irish
Famine
http://vassun.vassar.edu/~sttaylor/FAMINE/ |
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One of the most famous instances of
famine was the one that struck Ireland in 1846 after a fungus wiped out the potato crop;
it is estimated that one to one and a half million people died in a two year period.
We discuss the famine and its affect on population in Global problems and the Culture of Capitalism; but one of the often
ignored features of the famine is that while thousands starved to death, shiploads of
food, often protected from starving Irish by armed guards, sailed down the Shannon River
bound for English ports and people who could pay for it. This comprehensive site on
the Irish Famine contains contemporary accounts of it, and many links to additional
sites. Browse through some of the contemporary accounts and judge to what extent the
severity of the famine was accurately reported by the English press. |
| C. Why are People Poor? |
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If, as most researchers claim, people are
hungry because they lack the money to buy food, then eliminating hunger requires
eliminating poverty, or, at the very least, ensuring that people, particularly women and
children, receive food entitlements. But that requires understanding the reasons for
global poverty. The following readings address that issue.
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| Reading 6. What
do we know about the poor? http://www.globalaid.co.uk/technology/healthcare/gla2/page67.htm |
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This brief report from Global Aid provides some answers to
the questions of how many poor there are, where do they live, and what are their economic
circumstances. |
Reading 7. The Persistence of Poverty
in the Age of Globalization
http://www.fonaristide.org/carolina.html |
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In this address to students at the
University of North Carolina, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the ex-president of Haiti, notes
that Haiti, after a slave revolt that began in 1791 made it the first independent Black
country in the Western Hemisphere, was the first "debtor nation." Forced
to pay huge sums to France as the price for independence, Haiti soon became impoverished,
and remains today the poorest nation in the world. It also illustrates what has
happened and, perhaps, what will happen to the new class of debtor nations, and to their
citizens who face a life of poverty. |
Reading 8. Global Capitalism Breeds
Inequality
http://www.workers.org/ww/1998/dg1105.html |
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This presentation by Donna Goodman at a public forum
in New Paltz, NY, represents a socialist's perspective on global poverty and hunger.
It points also to the fact that these problems are not limited to the poor countries of
the world, but to the rich ones as well. |
Reading 9. Global Poverty
in the Late 20th Century
http://www.heise.de/tp/english/special/eco/6099/1.html |
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In this paper, economist Michel
Chossudovsky proposes that increased poverty is a consequence of the global integration of
the capitalist economy that we examined in the readings on The Capitalist. He also explains
how the "globalization of poverty" is affecting the former Soviet Union, as well
as other Western countries. |
| D. How Can We
Eliminate Hunger and Poverty? |
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There is widespread agreement across the
political spectrum that poverty and hunger can and must be alleviated; The World Bank has
even set the elimination of poverty as its major goal. The problem is how do we do
it? In theory, it's easy; just increase taxes on the wealthy and redistribute the
income. But since the wealthy control most global institutions, that's not too
likely to happen. Once we eliminate that option, proposals to eliminate poverty
range from accelerating economic growth in poor countries (although that doesn't do much
for the poor in rich countries), to overhauling our way of living, to helping the poor
create their own economic opportunities. The following selections each address these
ideas.
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| Reading 10. Economic Growth and Human
Development http://www.wri.org/wr-98-99/econgrow.htm |
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This report from the World Resources Institute
describes the growing inequality of wealth in the world, and examines its implication.
The report concludes that "In the longer term, reducing income
inequality and ensuring adequate human development for all is likely to depend on greater
commitment to the implementation of policies for broader-based economic growth and poverty
reduction through increased investment in public education and health." |
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What kind of growth http://www.religion-online.org/cgi-bin/relsearchd.dll?action=showitem&id=203 |
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Theologian John B. Cobb questions
the assumption made by most economists that the growth in a countries GNP or GDP is
synonymous with "progress," and improvements in "standard of living."
He suggests that "economic policies designed to increase gross national
product repeatedly work against human community." Cobb suggests that we must pay more
attention to local communities, and that local communities must, if quality of life is to
be improved, detach themselves to some extent from the global market. Most of his essay
address life in the United States, but it applies globally. |
Exercise 3. Social Indicators of
Development
http://www.ciesin.org/lw-kmn/guides/sid.html(Information is available also from the World Development Indicators at:
http://www.worldbank.org/data/countrydata/countrydata.html) |
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As an alternative to measuring
"progress" by the GNP or GDP (the quantity of goods and services produced)
social scientists developed the Social Indicators of Development, that attempts to include
various quality of life indicators in the measure of progress and standard of living.
This site contains the World Bank's most detailed data collection for assessing
human welfare to provide a picture of the social effects of economic development. Data are
presented for over 170 economies, omitting only those for which data are inadequate.
Find out how different countries stand in relation to each other. After reading the
text, go to the search interface. |
Reading 12: World
Development Report 1998: Consumption for Human Development-Overview
http://www.undp.org/hdro/e98over.htm |
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The 1998 World Development Report
from the United Nations concentrates on global consumption of goods both as a measure of
well-being, and as a problem in future economic growth. It first documents the
glaring inequalities in consumption patterns among countries (20% of the richest countries
account for 86% of consumption), as well as the staggering growth in goods produced and
consumed. While some people note with alarm that the global population has doubled
since 1950, few mention the fact that, in the same period of time, consumption rates have
increased six times. The problem is how can we possibly improve the lives of poorest
people in the world through economic growth, when that growth has actually increased
poverty and inequality and, in addition, threatens to overwhelm the environment? The
Overview closes with seven recommendations of how to do it. |
Exercise 4. The Microcredit Movement
http://www.pbs.org/toourcredit/home.htm |
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This is the PBS Web site that
accompanied their two-part documentary on microcredit. Microcredit represents an
attempt to target particularly vulnerable portions of the population--largely women--and,
through a small loan program, assist them to start small businesses. In Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism we
discuss the best known of these programs, The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Browse the site beginning with
the brief summary,
and then review some of the facts about the Grameen Bank, About Global Poverty
and Microcredit. |
Reading 13. What Can I Do About Hunger?
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/World_Hunger_Program/... |
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Global hunger, as Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze note,
often generates cynicism ("not a lot can be done about it"), or complacency
("don't blame me... I'm not answerable"). But, of course, we can do
something, and we are, as members of the richest country in the world devouring the
resources of the poorest countries, responsible. The World
Hunger Program at Brown University, suggests a number of things that we can do
individually and collectively. |
Additional Resources on Hunger, Poverty and Economic Development
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