World Hunger and Poverty

Sheila Nix, the U.S. Executive Director of ONE, emailed me some information about the crisis in the horn of Africa.

Yesterday, the United Nations declared a famine in south Somalia. There are more than 11 million people in the Horn of Africa–more than the combined population of NYC and Huston–who desperately need food, clean water and basic sanitation.

ONE is a grassroots advocacy and campaigning organization that fights extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa.

The ENS did a great job reporting about the opening of the High-level Conference on World Food Security: the Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy.

In my opinion, the most noteworthy part is when Dr. Jacques Diouf, the director of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, pointed out the shameful contrast between what we waste and how relatively little it would take to eradicate world hunger. After pointing out the trillions spent yearly on militarism and the billions of dollars worth of food wasted, Dr. Diouf asked, “How can we explain to people of good sense and good faith that it was not possible to find US$30 billion a year to enable 862 million hungry people to enjoy the most fundamental of human rights: the right to food and thus the right to life?”

Resources that could go towards feeding the hungry and eradicating poverty are spent on expensive and needlessly destructive endeavors such as the occupation of Iraq and the war on drugs like marijuana. I could never describe how intensely that upsets me.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today, “The rapidly escalating crisis of food availability around the world has reached emergency proportions.”

Rising prices have already raised the costs of the WFP’s current operations from $500 million to $755 million.

I assume the inflation comes from the rising price of energy, which has risen from increased demand and decreased supply.

Food prices have doubled over the last three years, threatening the economic conditions of millions of people throughout the world.

The world has enough resources to end world hunger and poverty, but I believe those problems will continue to get worse if we do not fix the social and political problems that allow them to occur. Like I have said before, if we do not fix our social structure soon, I fear we will end up doomed.

In a recent article, Arthur C. Brooks, author of Gross National Happiness, pointed out an interesting fact about charity: Most studies have shown that the working poor tend to give away between four and five percent of their incomes, on average, while the rich give away between three and four percent. So-called “middle class” people gave the smallest percentage.

On one hand, I realize that, when a richer person gives a smaller percentage than a poorer person, the richer person may still have given more total dollars. On the other hand, after paying the cost-of-living, richer people have a higher percentage of their income leftover which they could put towards charity.

If I had to guess, I would speculate that poorer people give away more money to charity because they feel more solidarity with other people who suffer economically. Needing help themselves probably causes them to sympathize more with those in need.

Regardless, we all need to organize and work together much more, and do it with the goal of ending poverty and building a better world for all. As I have said before, I doubt charity alone can solve the problem of poverty and economic inequality. More than charity, I believe we need to work together in voluntarily cooperative and mutually beneficial ways, which will most often happen when we realize that poverty alleviation benefits us all.

To most people, it seems that the mainstream evangelical movement has mostly focused only on opposing abortion and gay marriage. But I happily read an article about a group of evangelicals trying to prioritize a broader range of issues including poverty. They also intend to address other social problems such as healthcare, global warming, and the war in Iraq.

One of the organizers, Jim Wallis, said, “A whole generation of young evangelicals believes that Jesus would probably care more about the 30,000 children who died again today – as they did yesterday and they will tomorrow – from preventable disease than he would about passing a gay-marriage amendment in Ohio.”

I agree! I am not a religious person, but I agree with many of the secular teachings of Jesus. I also believe that Jesus and other caring people would worry much more about issues such as poverty, healthcare, education and the enviornment than about gay marriage.

Regardless of how they feel about gay marriage, I do not understand how anyone could think of it as more important to stop gays from marrying than to alleviate poverty and fix the healthcare crisis. Poverty kills children; gay marriage does not.

I often stress the importance of using grassroots organizations to alleviate poverty on a local level. Local organizations understand the local community and can meet the local community’s specific needs.

Unfortunately, most communities have become too passive about poverty. Almost all people realize they would rather live in a world without poverty, but they do not make local poverty alleviation a priority in their personal lives. Many people’s views on poverty amount only to passive indignation.

We need more than passive indignation to end poverty. We need to actively work to end poverty.

For organizations to work on fighting poverty on a larger scale, I suggest a poverty tour. By this, I mean to suggest that an organization focus on one local community at a time. One at a time, the organization could go to single towns or neighborhoods, and stay for a certain period of time. During that time, the organization could research the local situation and help spark a customized, local movement to end poverty in the specific place.

If you know about any organizations already doing some sort of poverty tour, then post about them in my World Hunger and Poverty Forums. Otherwise, keep in touch if the idea interests you. In the future, I will try to help organize such a tour.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon has announced that he plans to co-host a UN meeting on poverty with the president of the (UN) General Assembly.

The meeting will take place on September 25th, during the general debate of the UN General Assembly which runs from September 23 to October 3.

September seems like far off, but hopefully it will give them time to plan the meeting and make it more effective.

The United Nations adopted eight goals “Millennium Development Goals” in 2000. One goal included halving the amount of people in extreme poverty and halving the number of people who suffer from world hunger by 2015. At the current rate, the world will not achieve the goals.

The world has enough resources to provide food, clothing, clean water, healthcare, and education for everyone in the world. I hope the people of the world start making it a priority to end poverty. We can do it. I hope we do.

I just read a good article by Dean Calbreath in which he points out the failures in the national poverty line. Basically, he shows that elderly people have a higher cost of living than what the poverty line says.

For example, according to calculations from UCLA research, elderly people from San Diego generally need to spend thousands of dollars more than the poverty line to not live in real poverty, even when they have paid off their mortgage. Renters and people still paying their mortgage have even more to pay!

The United States government has set the poverty line for a married couple at only $13,690. If a married couple makes that much in a year, the government does not consider the couple poor.

In the article, Dead Calbreath also explains the problem of using an old poverty line. The government bases the poverty line on the costs of food, but people need to pay more non-food expenses nowadays than they did when the government created the poverty line formula.

I doubt we could ever make a nation-wide, one-size-fits-all poverty line. Poverty requires a more qualitative method of measurement, rather than a simple quantitative poverty.

Regardless, I think we simply need to at least measure the costs of food, clothes, shelter, and healthcare. Generally speaking, a person needs to make that much in income after paying job-related expenses such as education and transportation.

What would you estimate as the true cost of living in the United States? Please post your estimations in this thread at the World Hunger and Poverty Forums. We need to put our heads together to figure these problems out.

Apparently as a result of rising food prices, the UN says that world hunger is rising, namely in countries such as Mexico, Yemen, and Indonesia.

UN figures show that food prices have rose last year by 40 percent due to increasing oil prices and rising demand from developing countries.

I read in the newspaper that the size of the middle class will increase rapidly over the next decade as people in developing countries escape poverty. Ironically, that will cause increased demand and increased prices. It will also magnify problems such as pollution.

If global oil production has not peaked, I bet it will soon. That combined with increased demand will make oil prices sky-rocket, which will increase the prices of most other commodities.

We cannot afford to not address these growing global problems.

Of course, I think we must remember: the world has more than enough food for everyone. We simply have a social problem. We do not distribute food and other resources fairly, but instead choose to let people starve. Such an unfair, brutal, and problematic social system cannot deal with worsening global problems such as limited energy resources, human-caused global warming, and war.

If we do not fix our social system soon, I fear we will doom our society. A problematic society that chooses to let so many people starve will not survive.

A biannual poverty report from Israel’s National Insurance Institute says that 45 thousand Israelis slipped below the poverty line in 2007, including 30 thousand children. Also in 2007, the percentage of children living in poverty in Israel rose to 35.8 percent. The report also points out that poverty has risen among both Jews and Arabs.

Like so often happens in the United States, the average income in Israel has risen while poverty has increased. This happens because richest people make more money than the working class loses.

Regardless, I see war as the main problem. The people in Israel and the other nations of the world have to stop allowing their governments to waste so much money and resources on war. The United States needs to stop providing military funding for other nations.

We need to put the money and resources towards creating peace and alleviating poverty. This includes international initiatives for education and economic development. That means get children and uneducated people in school and ensure that educated adults can find jobs or start their own businesses.

We cannot afford the devastation, nationalism and corruption that war causes–let alone the financial costs of literally trillions of dollars per year.

We need to stop the vicious cycle of poverty and violence. And we cannot stop it by putting money into violence instead of into alleviating poverty. More war and more poverty will beget more nationalism, more war and more poverty, which in turn will beget hopelessness, anger, and terrorism. We, the people of the world, can stop that vicious cycle by ending poverty with the resources that we currently let our governments use for war.

I have often mentioned the inherent link between war and poverty. When I think of poverty in Israel, Gaza, and the Middle East in general, it always reminds me of the relationship.

Earlier in this post, I mentioned that poverty has risen among both Jews and Arabs. Poverty and militarism will cause nationalism that will likely continue to lead to those peoples fighting each other. But we can stop the violent, nationalist conflicts by coming together to alleviate poverty for all and build a better world for all–which we can only do by funding global poverty alleviation instead of nationalistic wars.

What do you think? You can post comments on this post and on the relationship between war and poverty in this thread at the World Hunger and Poverty Forums.