World Hunger and Poverty

Someone sent me a notification about a report about biotech crops by the ISAAA (The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications). According to the report, biotech crops have experienced remarkable growth over the last dozen years. The report also points out some socioeconomic benefits of biotech crops, namely the ability of poor or struggling farmers to increase their income by growing more crops for less costs.

From what I know, scientists use biotechnology with agriculture to genetically engineer crops to increase the yield of the crops.

Some people believe that biotechnology can help reduce world hunger by producing more food to feed the hungry. However, for the most part, I do not believe that because the world already has enough food to feed anyone.

Nonetheless, the ISAAA report points out that poor farmers can increase their production and reduce their costs with biotech crops. That does make sense. The farmers that use biotech crops can make more money with them, and that will help alleviate poverty when poor farmers use the technology to increase their income.

I always feel skeptical of newly powerful technology because I do not think humankind has achieved the required social responsibility to make it safe to posses the power of technology. Large amounts of individuals will each choose to adopt a new technology that helps each of them personally in the short term, but the combined use of the technology could have devastating effects on society as a whole. For example, consider the pollution and deaths caused by automobiles, or the threat of the technology of nuclear bombs.

Technology can help greatly when used wisely with the proper social responsibility, but it can cause devastation and self-destruction when not combined with wisdom and social responsibility.

Wisdom and social responsibility come about most of all from knowledge and a well-informed public. For that reason, I appreciate that the ISAAA provides information and reports about crop biotechnology. In fact, their website has a knowledge center, in which they say, “we believe that a transparent, science-based debate is essential for maximizing the potential benefits of crop biotechnology…”

I agree.

What do you think? How do you feel about crop biotechnology? Post your answers to that and your comments on this post in this thread at the World Hunger and Poverty Forums. We welcome all viewpoints.

Homelessness causes a lot of problems. For one, it greatly contributes to the poverty cycle because children who grow up homeless will not learn the skills or have the opportunities that they need to avoid poverty as adults. Of course, most people want to avoid homelessness, which means they may need to waste a lot of money on expensive housing.

Affordable housing can help a lot. It helps some people avoid homelessness, and it helps others have more money to spend on other needs.

Nonetheless, I have noticed a major flaw in the way that most affordable housing works: location. Most affordable housing and subsidized housing is located in poor neighborhoods.

It may seem to make sense to put housing for poor people near poor people. However, these people would have a better chance of escaping poverty if they moved away from poverty. Most importantly, poor children will have more of a chance of escaping the poverty trap if they grow up in a more affluent neighborhood.

Affluent neighborhoods have less crime, better schools, better role models, and other factors that incredibly reduce a child’s chance of ending up in poverty.

I would recommend that poverty-fighting organizations that work in the housing sector try to find ways to put as affordable of housing as possible in as affluent of neighborhoods as possible. Then get poor families into that housing, making sure the adults get sufficient employment and the children get quality schooling.

What do you think? Do you agree that putting affordable housing in more affluent neighborhoods would help more? Post your answers to that question and other comments in this thread at the World Hunger and Poverty Forums. We welcome all viewpoints.

Squidoo provides helpful information about various topics with pages created by users. One interesting page on Squidoo is the one for Collins College: http://www.squidoo.com/Collins-College

Collins College offers education in creative fields such as game design and film production. The good thing about creative fields is that people who have a career in them usually like it a lot. People can find something that they love and then create in it. People enjoy expressing themselves artistically as well as being productive. That can help them start a good career which will pay them enough to take care of themselves and their families.

I see education as the most important tool we have in ending poverty and creating a better world for all. Education empowers people and it can enable them to overcome the oppression of poverty. Additionally, a more educated society will run itself more wisely.

When talking about homeless people, many people do not realize that most homeless people are not bums. Most homeless people have jobs or are actively seeking employment. They are generally families made up of a single mother and her children.

However, there are bums. And the problem with them is very different than with other poor people. Homeless bums are generally men who have given up. Some of them are guys whose wives left them and who are hopeless and sick of paying alimony. Some of these homeless bums are people who have acquired a mental disease such as schizophrenia. However, they are almost all mentally ill. Depression counts as a mental illness.

We need to find ways to get mental treatment for these bums. For most, treatment will allow them to go back to living a somewhat normal life, thus making them productive members of society. For a few, they may need to spend a prolonged period of time in an insane asylum. However, for their sake and for the sake of everyone else, we need to get these bums off the streets and into treatment.

It is utterly foolish to let insane people roam the streets as bums. And I doubt that any bums are sane in that almost no sane person would choose to live as a bum. And a person is only a bum if they choose to be one.

I think we all realize that society will be a safer and happier place if bums are not left on the streets.

Would you rather have bums forced into treatment or left as vagrants on the streets? Post your answers to that question and your comments on this post in this thread at the World Hunger and Poverty Forums. All viewpoints are welcome.

An important part of helping people avoid or escape poverty is short-term education. People may not have enough money to go to school for a long time, and they need the education to make more money. It’s a catch 22.

http://www.sbcleveland.com/ is the website of a private college in Cleveland that offers short-term training programs. Sanford-Brown College also has 15 total campuses in 9 states.

Not everyone has the time or money to go to school. But it can be a very powerful tool in achieving financial stability.

I think those of us who work for poverty alleviation would benefit from trying harder to define poverty.

Common misconceptions about poverty hinder the social movement to eradicate poverty. I think we can often trace the misconceptions to a misunderstanding of what the word poverty means in the socioeconomic context.

I think finding a accurate and complete definition of poverty requires a group of people. So I hope you help us try to define poverty in the World Hunger and Poverty Forums.

Let me try to offer my own definition of poverty. I define poverty as a lack of access to a basic standard of living which includes basic “needs” such as food, clothes, shelter and healthcare.

Additionally, I want to point out that a person needs to make enough money to pay not only their current living expenses, but also past and future expenses. On average, people probably can only work about half their life–generally from their mid-20s to retirement. So we cannot measure a person’s yearly salary against the cost-of-living for a year to measure poverty. In a year, a person needs to earn about double a year’s worth of living expenses.

Also, we need to make subtractions from a person’s salary to come up with a “net salary” which we can use to judge their true economic standing. We need to subtract unemployment insurance, education costs, transportation, and any other job-related expenses. In other words, a person must accept certain costs in order to do a job and earn an income, so we must subtract the costs from the income to find the person’s net salary. And we must use the net salary to find out if the person can truly afford the cost-of-living.

The United States government admits that nearly 40 million of its citizens live in poverty. But I think we would find an even higher number if we used a more accurate measure of poverty based on a more accurate definition of poverty.

How can we fix a problem without understanding it correctly?