World Poverty: A Never-Ending Situation - Research Paper Example

Due World Poverty: A Never Ending Situation The widely known contemporary global poverty indicesare not only dramatic, but fall far much behind the conventional wisdom of justice. Whereas research and policy implications have a combined and directed synergy emphasizing global poverty reduction, inequality remains a much sticky affair. Quite on the contrary, data on nations’ poverty is often touted as a global challenge, while inequality is not. The coexistence of neoliberal policies with the international policy on poverty alleviation is a paradox that continues to defy reconciliation, yet the capitalistic perpetuated inequality widens domestically and internationally. Tackling endemic poverty, as it is currently, needs theorization in the light of the rather skewed state policies and practices. Despite being highly preventable, hunger deaths still bite with startling figures. As a matter of fact, the scale of intervention employed in alleviating poverty lacks in urgency and magnitude akin to those deployed in response to natural disasters (Gupta par 6). Apparently, equal distribution of wealth between the haves and the have-nots is seemingly unachievable; while there is enough food for everyone in the world, the cyclic dilemma of poverty seems to be a never ending situation with everyday burgeoning numbers of hunger deaths. While good-life is recognizably a fundamental right, at least in paper according to the United Nations statutes, the international domain remains descriptively anarchistic-Hobbesian of ‘mere survival’. The horrific spectacle of tens of millions stranded, effectively pushed to the periphery by the systemic character of capitalism with trails of the wealthy minority is a sour taste in spoken language, yet a reality even in the face of the tremendous capability of the modern era civilization. Approximately a third of the world’s population (1.4 billion people) lives under the cover of one-dollar incomes a day or even less (SO241 par 1). Frankly, the overall discrepancies in the distribution of wealth are well past the grotesque point. So large are the differences that no amount of justification— conceivably economic, moral or otherwise—can cure the curiosity that extends more to the negative. Assumptive interaction of knowledge and power informs a rather reasoning principle that the global poverty statistics, and by extension inequality, cannot be neatly separated from the trending world order. Global economic integration punctuated the global growth momentum over the past few decades. Coincidentally, global poverty, and inequality for that matter, has been a rather permanent feature with phenomenally high figures (Sandra 16). Intuitively, the explosion of wealth over these past decades has had tremendous effects on aggravating extreme poverty indices one way or another. As insinuated above, the status of a nation’s health forms the basis of most global poverty rakings, with life expectancy topping the list of such indicators. Notably, poverty and related conditions affect the average number of years that a citizen of a given nation can be expected to live (SO241 par 3). Accordingly, The Global Stratification of Life Expectancy, 2006 affirms the widely expected and acknowledged superiority of life expectancy in the wealthy and upper-middle-income nations compared to the lower-middle-income and poor nations (SO241 par 4). The sharp contrast however, is in the real numbers; with a life expectancy of between 20 and 24 years, poor nations are clearly on the verge of extinction. Other than the life expectancy, the contrast is replicated in child mortality and the provision of sanitation and clean water. Contrary to the popular notion, lack of or little food to feed too many people in poor nations being a primary contributor to the poverty numbers is a “scarcity fallacy.” By world standards, the poor nations are hardly “poor,” though they are far from the descriptive term “wealthy” by G7 standards (Narveson 5). As noted in SO241 General Sociology: “A good deal of thinking and sociological research suggests that world hunger has less to do with food shortages than it is with shortages of affordability and accessibility. Thus, the nexus lies in the social inequalities and distribution systems created by economic and political factors erecting barriers to food access….. Scarcity is largely a myth. If anything, there is food in plenty today than any other time in history” (SO241 par 9-11). Quite simply, the fundamental influence of inequality underlines to a greater extent the statistics of the world hunger. Efforts towards exterminating world hunger should be viewed to the extent of recognizing the importance and fixing inequality via attentive democratic governance that recognizes food as a “fundamental human right”, governance devoid of politics in food aid, and governance with the capacity to tame the challenges posed by the global economy” (SO241 par 15). Arguably, Alan Freeman concurs and notes in his piece that food crises result from the systemic failures of development strategies to adapt to the changing demographic and consumer patterns (1429). Instability in oil prices, deteriorating climatic conditions, market speculation and biofuels production are just but elemental evidence of such systemic failures. Illustratively, the principal requirement for economic progress necessary to eradicate poverty globally is pegged in part on the power to purchase capital and intermediate goods; a power to which no poor nation is exempted. Clearly, the poor nations stand disadvantaged given that the price of their progress remains fully dictated by the advanced countries via the “Purchasing Power Parity” (PPP); an erroneous comparative standard that has systematically reduced the prices of consumption goods in the Third World. Indeed, the distortion flaws in PPP that are consequently translated in the proper functioning of the market valuation no longer guarantees equal distribution of wealth in the whole world. As a standard of comparative measure, the PPP treatment of consumption costs in terms of production costs has not only failed to capture the reality but further aggravates the very imbalanced wealth inequity between the rich and the poor nations that have hitherto depended on agriculture (Freeman 1443-44). The consequential result has been the rural-urban widening divide between and within nation-states perpetuated particularly by political and economic isolation. As Thomas Lines would argue, the ‘geography’ of global poverty, is partly a “geography” of market isolation manifested in a lack of capital and the vagaries of insecure/seasonal labor demand (Boulton 1053). According to the above arguments, the current state of poverty in poor nations and the lower level of per capita incomes are largely due to previous theft or some other sort of specific, uncompensated injustices committed by the rich nations. In a research study titled World Poverty and Human Rights, Thomas Pogge castigates the rich world by holding them to account for the awful treatment of the “poor”: “….. It is, rather, that the poor of the earth have been prevented, by various operational mechanics of the “global economic order,” from reaping the gains from the trade transactions with those rich people. But even worse than the blockages is the outright robbery by the governments of those poor people. In artificial African nations, whose borders were largely drawn by assorted Europeans who knew nothing and cared little about the people whose lives they so severely affected, the phenomenon of nominal dictatorship pretty much severs the link to prosperity” (Narveson 8). Sadly enough, the rich are also party to the economic rip-offs by the “poor” governments via the supposedly government-to-government Foreign Aids that land to the host nations with strings attached. Narveson shares a case of continued supply of foreign aid to the North Korean government that serves the interests of the Army or Party loyalists in full glare of starving millions; a clear indication that the rich are not rich minded enough to shoulder a lasting support for complete poverty eradication (9). Quite frankly, the twentieth century has witnessed many more hunger deaths than those from violent conflict. Yet conflict management ranks above poverty eradication in priority of the current world order. The simple but quick assumption to the foregoing is that exclusion has been the basis for violence in states of exception. The Jewish holocaust in Nazi Germany, for instance, was made possible due to the legally binding exclusion from the German state and the subsequent reduction to “bare life” (Gupta par 8). In view of the low life expectancy of the poor viz-a-viz the international poverty principles, the wait for the translation of poverty eradication efforts into actual achievement is rather indefinite; by the time intergovernmental action takes a serious take-off, very few would be living in the poor nations. While rich governments engage in the “bare life” subsistence policies toward the eradication of severe global poverty, they spend billions on other humanitarian initiatives that serves their interest the most abroad even at the expense of exploitation simply to maintain power hierarchy (Colin and Samyuktha 23-14). The assumption is that addressing global poverty will rebalance global inequality with the consequential effect of reducing room for dominant political and economic maneuvering. Suggestively, global inequality is part of the wider strategy of power balancing act, and that global poverty is part of the price paid for preserving global inequality. Unknown to the rich global actors is that the deformities in the international conditions are fundamental recipes for instability. The world remains precariously sensitive to the ever widening socioeconomic inequality, especially in developed countries, with certain prospect of diminishing levels on a global scale (Samuelson “Defining Poverty Up”). The policies in place are conceivably incoherent. Noteworthy, the neoliberal policies aggravates the very inequalities that poverty reduction measures seek to alleviate. The structural reform efforts by the International financial institutions pegged on ‘conditional convergence’ are just but misfired strategies held hostage by the trappings of the liberalization policies. Hence, the objective expectation of halving global poverty by 2015 is not only a mere dream but unachievable target without credible policy shifts (Chandy and Gertz 22). With the skewed distribution of wealth between the developed and the developing world, equity is seemingly elusive given the statistical trends in poverty levels globally. However, a reduction of world poverty meets the mutual interest of every nation (Chandy and Gertz 2). It not only confers political legitimacy to the institutions of governance but also offers immense contribution to the world’s stability through reduced risks of conflicts. Besides, it is doable. The high-income nations are out of the doldrums of serious military threats. As such, the feasibility of complete wipe-out of hunger the world over has never been greater with modern civilization. According to Laurence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz, the period between 2005 and 2010 witnessed a significant reduction in extreme poverty numbers by a whopping 400 million down from approximately 1.3 billion (3). Comparative rational analysis of the figures with the conventional arguments rooted deeply in economic principles reveals falsified anti-poverty strategies of the latter. The sole plausible option remaining is of a political nature. Precisely, the challenge is to create a just society in which equitable food access is assured for every human race. Food scarcity matters. However, the social conditions and institutional dynamics must change course to power policy shifts capable of making a difference. Work Cited Boulton, Andrew. Thomas Lines. Making Poverty: A History (London: Zed Books, 2008, Pp. 166+x). Journal of International Development 22.7 (2010): 1052-053. Print. Chandy, Laurence and Geoffrey, Gertz. Poverty in Numbers: The Changing State of Global Poverty from 2005 to 2015. Brookings, n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2012. Colin, Chartres and Samyuktha, Varma. Water, Food and Poverty. Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press Delivers, 2011. Print. Freeman, Alan. The Poverty of Statistics and the Statistics of Poverty. Third World Quarterly 30.8 (2009): 1427-448. Print. Gupta, Akhil. National Poverty, Global Poverty, and Neoliberalism. Academia.edu., n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2012. Narveson, Jan. Welfare and Wealth, Poverty and Justice in Today’s World. The Journal of Ethics 8.4 (2004): 1-12. Print. Samuelson, Robert J. Defining Poverty Up. Newsweek 7 June 2010: n. pag. Print. Sandra, Alters. World Poverty. Detroit, MI: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010. Print. "SO241 General Sociology." The Impact of Global Poverty. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2012. . Read More