Poverty Shifts to the U.S. Suburbs

Peg Tyre and Matthew Philips report on the growing problem of suburban poverty:

Once prized as a leafy haven from the social ills of urban life, the suburbs are now grappling with a new outbreak of an old problem: poverty. Currently, 38 million Americans live below the poverty line, which the federal government defines as an annual income of $20,000 or less for a family of four. But for the first time in history, more of America’s poor are living in the suburbs than the cities—1.2 million more, according to a 2005 survey. “The suburbs have reached a tipping point,” says Brookings Institution analyst Alan Berube, who compiled the data. For example, five years ago, a Hunger Network food pantry in Bedford Heights, a struggling suburb of Cleveland, served 50 families a month. Now more than 700 families depend on it for food.

Suburban poverty can also be invisible. Poor people who live in the city tend to be concentrated in subsidized housing or in neighborhoods where the rent is low, which in turn attract retail businesses that target customers with low incomes. Poor suburbanites often live in the same ZIP codes as their affluent neighbors, shop at the same stores and send their children to the same public school. And if people don’t see themselves as poor, they often don’t seek the help they need.

Read entire Newsweek article.

Sadly, the official numbers underrate the problem. For example, take a single-parent making $21,000 a year and trying to support three kids with the substandard public school systems of lower-middle-class America; the government considers them above the poverty line.

Additionally, the majority of supposedly well-off working-class families live in debt.

Anyway, suburban poverty shows once again that this massive social problems – poverty, hunger, and homelessness – affect all of us. We all need to organize and work together to put an end to these social ills.

What do you think?

Celebrity Chefs Raise Awareness of Starvation

It seems a dozen renowned celebrity chefs accepted a challenge to make cuisine out of CSB, a cheap bland substance usually given to the world’s poorest people by humanitarians.

CSB stands for corn soya blend, the same vitamin-enriched food-ration substance that humanitarian aid workers truck through mine fields in Afghanistan and air drop from C-130s into Sudan. It is generally distributed in 25-pound canvas bags and made into mush or porridge under the dire conditions of war, famine and natural disaster. On its own, it has virtually no flavor, but it does provide crucial daily nutrition with little more than a few drops of water and even the most rustic mortar and pestle[…]

The idea to use those who literally cater to the rich to bring attention to the world’s poorest people was born of a struggle to find the common ground among those whose job it is to feed people—whether they are gourmet chefs or humanitarian aid workers, says the project’s creator, Jonathan Dumont of the World Food Program in Rome. “Despite the fundamental common goal of feeding people, the bottom line is that one type eats for pleasure and art and the other eats to survive,” he says. At first Dumont worried that it would be hard to find top-notch chefs willing to participate. But, instead, he says, “the overwhelming enthusiasm of the chefs who have already contributed, or have agreed to contribute to the project, made me realize that this is actually a way of unifying the poorest people on the planet with the richest.”

Read entire Newsweek article by Barbie Nadeau.

This event has much potential to raise awareness about the important issues of hunger and poverty. I even imagine that the chefs will tell this memorable story long afterwards. Although the quirky challenge seems fun, it also highlights the saddening gap between rich and poor.

What do you think?

Overpopulation & Poverty

The Independent recently released an article that says birth rates must be curbed to win war on global poverty:

The earth’s population will approach an unsustainable total of 10.5 billion unless contraception is put back at the top of the agenda for international efforts to alleviate global poverty. A report by MPs released today challenges world leaders to put the contraceptive pill and the condom at the centre of their efforts to alleviate global poverty, tackle starvation and even help to avert global warming.

Read entire Independent News article.

Unfair distribution causes the world hunger and poverty problem, not overpopulation. We know this, because the world currently has more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet. However, population growth puts that reality at risk. Continued population growth may hinder the world’s ability to reach the goals of ending poverty and hunger.

Unfortunately, growth seems highest among the poorest groups and in poorest and most desolate places. This happens for many reasons. For one, many poor people lack education and/or access to birth control. Also, many poor people see childbirth as an asset, because they can use the extra pair of hands to put to work on farms and such. In places with high infant and child mortality rates, parents need to give birth to more children as to make up for the ones that will likely die.

What do you think?

International Hunger Workshop in India

Rafiqul Islam Azad reports on an international workshop about hunger:

Speakers at an international workshop in Chennai, India [last Monday] stressed the need for formulating an strategy at aggregate level to ensure food security across the globe.

The four-day workshop on “Food Insecurity: A Great Threat to Human Security”, organised jointly by International Student Young Pugwash (ISYP) and MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) was inaugurated by ISYP President Prof MS Swaminathan.

Over one hundred experts, researchers, academicians, agriculturists, lawyers, journalists, government officials and representatives from donor agencies and NGOs are taking part in the workshop.

Read entire article by Rafiqul Islam Azad.

It makes me glad to hear the workshop, even though I could not attend. Nonetheless, I hope we do more than just talk about the problem. I hope we also carry out a plan to end world hunger.

What do you think?

Homelessness Mounting Among Kids

Catherine Komp recently wrote an article about homeless kids. She says:

Described as America’s “dirty little secret” by social-service providers, an estimated one million young people experience homelessness each year. Many are unaccompanied teenagers, sleeping in parks, abandoned buildings or “couch surfing” at friends’ houses. Others are younger children, often in the care of a single parent, who double-up in relatives’ homes or in crowded shelters. The even-less fortunate live in cars, tents and under freeway overpasses.

Children and families are the fastest growing segments of the homeless population, according to advocates, who say this serious social problem driven by poverty and a scarcity of affordable housing is not widely recognized by the public.

Groups that work with this population say some end up on the streets to escape physical, emotional or sexual abuse. Others might be asked to leave home by an impoverished family to reduce the strain on younger children.

Once on the street, young people of all sexual orientations face challenges beyond finding enough to eat and a place to sleep. NPHY’s director of community relations, Larry Lovelett, said they contend with police, thieves and sexual predators.

Read entire New Standard article by Catherine Komp.

How can we continue to let these rates rise?! Unfortunately, the majority of homeless people, especially younger homeless people and homeless families, suffer silently and hidden from public view.

Nonetheless, we know they suffer. We see the staggering rates of homelessness. Let us put an end to his preventable problem.

These young people have as much potential as anyone else. If our society merely gave them the environment to use the potential, rather than leave them stranded in homelessness, these children could grow into productive and healthy members of society.

Reducing homelessness and helping these children achieve their potential benefits all of us.

To solve the problem, we need to enact more than temporary fixes. We can permanently fix the problem by providing education and perhaps job-placement services in addition to food, clothes, and shelter. The homeless person immediately needs food, clothing, and shelter to survive in the short-term. However, food, clothes, and shelter won’t solve the problem alone, because they don’t enable the homeless person to permanently escape homeless and poverty. The homeless person also needs education and/or job-placement services to give the homeless person the ability to support him or herself and permanently escape homeless and poverty.

In my opinion, society can most effectively provide the aforementioned services through private and non-governmental methods, namely with student loans and business loans – assuming we include food, clothing, and shelter with tuition costs.

What do you think?

Hunger Threatens National Security

Julianne Malveaux recently wrote an elegent article connecting national security with hunger. I include an excerpt:

The war in Iraq, President Bush has said, is “of enormous importance to American security.” There’s another kind of security our president might want to focus on – food security at home.

To be sure, he mentioned hunger and poverty in passing during the State of the Union address, but only in the foreign policy context. Yet, 11 percent of all Americans are “food insecure,” which means they are hungry or living on the edge of hunger. That’s 12 million households – 35 million people, including 13 million children – who are too poor to eat balanced meals, or who skipped meals because there was not enough money for food.

Food insecurity in the United States is often recurrent but not chronic. In other words, the food insecure eat most days, but possibly not every day. They sometimes supplement their household food supply with charitable donations from food banks or community food programs. Some, but not all, of those who experience food insecurity are homeless.

Internationally, too, we could do more to fight hunger. Bush raised the issue obliquely in his State of the Union address, mentioning the Millennium Challenge Account and the “strength and generosity” of the American people. He might note that both domestically and internationally the fight to eradicate hunger has a direct bearing on our national security. Hungry people do desperate things, often for small sums of money.

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. talked about his “audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies.” Even though our nation celebrates King’s birthday, we lack his audacity and his focus on eliminating poverty and food insecurity both in this country and in the world.

Read entire Progressive Media Project article by Julianne Malveaux.

Hunger kills far more people than terrorism. Nonetheless, Julianne Malveaux seems to make the point – a point with which I agree – that the continued prevalence of world hunger and poverty causes and facilitates terrorism, because the anger, pain, and desperation of poor people to excuse or, even worse, promote violence and terrorism.

More significantly, I point out now that hunger and terrorism both mainly result from the same problem – the unfair and non-meritocratic inequality of the socioeconomic structures of the world. In other words, terrorism and hunger both exist in our society because our society lacks equal opportunity and thus unfairly deprives hard-working, (potentially) intelligent, and (potentially) strong people the ability to peacefully help themselves. In addition to leading to hunger, that deprivation leads to anger and desperation among the public, which in turn causes people to condone or even support terrorism.

I adamantly want innocent people defended from any form of offensive violence, coercion, or harm. Accordingly, I adamantly want terrorists stopped by any means necessary, including defensive force.

At least in the long-term, we can more effectively stop terrorism by attacking the causes of it, rather than continuously trying to kill and capture individual terrorists.

The worst terrorism and violence comes from governments and organizations. Large groups of angry and desperate people elect, empower and support such governments and organizations. As a result, when we hunt down single terrorists, terrorist organizations or terrorist governments, new terrorists just take the place of the old ones.

We can neither reduce nor eliminate terrorism without the type of diplomacy, activism, and cooperation that reduces the amount of anger and desperation in the public. Let’s work to simultaneously eliminate hunger, poverty, and terrorism.

What do you think?