Analysis & Synthesis page

Poverty page

Current   Cooperatives   Activist   Women   Global   Food   Resources

To many of those who are concerned about the fate of humanity and the earth, the issue that looms larger and larger is this: how can we create a society that is free from poverty--both material and spiritual--and how can we do this without destroying the earth we live on in the process?

Finding Material and Spiritual Solutions To Poverty

By Roar Bjonnes (PNA)
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services." Despite the growing globalization of economic and political affairs, for most of humanity today, these rights have become increasingly inaccessible.

Growing Inequality
Indeed, the combined accumulated wealth of the three richest individuals is greater than the combined gross national product (GNP) of the 48 poorest countries, or a quarter of the world's nations.

Despite promises of greater equality by many politicians and economists, there has instead been a tremendous increase in economic inequality over the last 30 years. According to the UN's Human Development Report (1998), in 1960, the income of the richest countries was 30 times greater than that of the world's poorest countries. By 1995 this income disparity had increased to 84 times. In over 70 countries, per capita income is lower today than it was 20 years ago. And according to World Bank sources in 1999, almost three billion people--half the world's population, live on less than two dollars a day. Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently admitted that their loan and development policies over the last decades have failed in helping the poor people of the South.

Poverty and Abundance
Despite the conventional belief that the world's economy has experienced soaring economic outputs during the past 30 years, the ranks of the world's poor has continued to increase dramatically. Some 1.5 billion people now meet Robert McNamara's 1978 definition of absolute poverty: " a condition of life so limited by malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, squalid surroundings, high infant mortality, and low life expectancy as to be beneath any reasonable definition of human decency."

The dismal reality of global poverty and hunger is even more disquieting when considering that goods and foods are more abundant than ever before. Yet the number of people without adequate shelter and enough purchasing capacity to buy decent food is growing. Clean drinking water is another growing problem. According to the Institute for Food and Development Policy, it is estimated that almost a third of all people in developing countries lack sufficient drinking water. A fifth of all children receive insufficient intake of calories and protein, and two billion people--a third of the human race--are suffering from anemia.

Although 30 million people die of hunger each year and 800 million suffer from malnutrition, the world's food supply is abundantly high. "In fact," writes Ignacio Ramonet in the French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique, "food products have never been so abundant." Indeed, according to the Institute for Food and Development Policy, there is enough food produced in the world today to supply each citizen with at least 2,700 calories per day. Millions of people, however, do not have the ability to purchase and consume enough food to avoid malnutrition and hunger.

Poverty and economic inequality are not just problems faced by poor nations. Amid the food bounty of the world's richest nation--the United States--millions of children's growth are stunted by malnutrition. With its unparalleled industrial and service economy, there are millions of unemployed and homeless people in the United States. Millions more work full time jobs while still remaining in poverty.

Economic inequality and material poverty are global problems facing people in both industrial and pre-industrial countries. Only in some countries, such as Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Canada and a few others, where economic rights are seen as integral parts of democracy, has abject poverty been eradicated.

Spiritual Poverty
Despite tremendous advances in technology, economic development, and an increase in global wealth, the economic disparity between rich and poor has grown dramatically over the past 30 years. Growing numbers of people, primarily in the Southern hemisphere, do not have adequate access to life's basic necessities--food, water, shelter, education, healthcare and employment. But economic poverty is not the only form of affliction that bankrupts human life. Amongst the affluent one-fifth of humanity--the car drivers, the Internet surfers, and the throwaway buyers--in short, all those with access to the fruits of the global economy--another form of poverty is on the rise: the poverty of affluence, the poverty of the spirit. In an ironic twist of fate--the more the global economy tries to feed the social, psychological and spiritual hungers of the affluent with an ever-increasing array of material goods, the more the poor people of the South are effected, the more the environment suffers.

Solutions for People, Earth and Spirit
Poverty has many causes. There are political, environmental, educational, cultural, and spiritual reasons for the current increase in poverty. Economic reform is therefore not a panacea. To eradicate poverty, we need a multidimensional set of remedies. Most importantly, economic growth is not an end in itself, it is simply the means by which civilization can advance and sustain the cultural and spiritual values of individuals and society.

To many of those who are concerned about the fate of humanity and the earth, the issue that looms larger and larger is this: how can we create a society that is free from poverty--both material and spiritual--and how can we do this without destroying the earth we live on in the process? In other words, since the dominant capitalist or neo-liberal economy has failed us so utterly in eradicating poverty, what can we replace it with?

The influential, UN sponsored Brundtland Report, issued in 1987, declared that the answer is "sustainable development." Now, a decade and a half later--as both material and spiritual poverty has increased dramatically--it has become evident that deeper solutions are needed. Because, as sustainable development has become increasingly part of the global discourse, it has also maintained the fatal flaws of corporate capitalism's development paradigm.

We need to move "beyond sustainable development" toward a spirit-centered vision of progress and economic prosperity. We need a development model that is life-centered rather than matter-centered; one that grows from local communities, that is cooperative rather than competitive, one that shares wealth equitably, maintains harmony with the earth, protects local markets, vitalizes local cultures, and makes spirituality the defining context of progress. In other words, to solve the problems of poverty, we need to develop a post-capitalist economy that can create prosperity without jeopardizing the environment. (END)

Copyright The Author 2003