The challenge of poverty

Poverty is an ugly state for the majority of the world's people and nations including Pakistan. Why are we seeing this phenomenon? Should it be enough to blame poor people for their own poor status? What have they done? Have they been lazy, made poor decisions, and been solely responsible for their plight? What their governments have been doing? Have they followed policies that actually jeopardise meaningful development? Such causes of poverty and inequality are no doubt real. But deeper and more global causes of poverty are often less focused and seldom discussed.
Globalisation promised increasing interconnectedness for global decisions, policies, and practices. However most of the times these are typically influenced, driven, or formulated by the rich and powerful leaders of rich countries or other global actors such as multinational corporations, institutions, and influential people.
This external influence proves as a catalyst and resultantly, the governments of poor nations and their people are often powerless and in the global context, a few get wealthy while the majority struggle.
Poverty never comes unattended by more misery and troubles. The poorest people will also have less access to health, education and other services. Perils of hunger, spectre of malnutrition and demon of disease afflict the poorest in society. The poorest are also typically marginalized from society and have little say in public and political debates, making it even harder to escape poverty.
It is an open secret that, the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to benefit from economic or political policies. The world is spending on military, financial bailouts and other areas that benefit the wealthy, whereas amount spent to address the daily crisis of poverty and related problems are often staggering.
I present here some disturbing facts and figures, which should be an eye opener for policy makers.
-- Over 3 billion people live on less than $2.50 a day (that is almost 45% of the world population)
-- The GDP of the 41 poorest countries (600 million) is less than the wealth of the world's 7 richest people combined.
-- Nearly a billion people cannot read a book or sign their name.
-- Less than one per cent of the amount the world spends on military weapons is needed to put every child into school.
-- More than 1 billion children live in poverty
-- 650 million are without proper shelter
-- 400 million are without safe water
-- 280 million have no access to health services
-- 29000 children die daily because of poverty.
This situation mostly belongs to cutbacks in health, education and other vital services around the world, which are prescribed by the world institutions as conditions for loans and repayments. In addition to this, developing countries are compelled to open their economies to compete with each other and with more powerful and established industrialised nations. This puts these developing countries into disadvantageous position due to lack of sound industrial base. Poor countries are always ready to enter spiralling race to see who can provide lower standards, low wages and cheap labour. This results into increased poverty and inequality for most people.
Relative poverty is a direct result of inequality where as absolute poverty is also a concern. Today higher number of people lives in poverty than previously thought. The new poverty line has been defined as living on the equivalent of $1.25 a day which means more than 1.5 billion people live on or below that line.
There is a dire need for meaningful long-term alleviation of hunger to root out poverty. Pakistan has done right step towards right direction by starting Benazir Income support programme and credit goes to the present government that not only continued this programme but increased its allocation to Rs 102 billion. Through this programme the government provides Rs 1500 per month to more than 5 million beneficiaries in the country. This small looking contribution from the government has played a vital role in warding off pangs of hunger for the poorest of the society.
However there is a strong need that resources and energies are deployed to relieve hunger through technical measures such as improving agriculture and establishing strong industrial base.
It is interesting to note that at world level, through tax Havens, transfer pricing and many other policies both legal and illegal, rich countries avoid billions of dollars of tax. This money can help poor countries provide important social services for their populations.
Nobody can deny that corruption is both a major cause and a result of poverty around the world. It is manifested at all levels of society. This issue is inter-related. At a national level, it undermines people's effective participation, while at local level it makes the life of poor more painful. At international level corruption is difficult to measure specially the one which is structured into law such as unequal trade treaties, free trade agreements and so on. These things are not even taken as issues because they are part of the laws. Professor Robert Neild from Trinity College, Cambridge University in his book Public Corruption the dark side of social Evolution; has given detailed account of structural corruption. He is of the opinion that Firms from rich countries bribe rulers and officials from developing countries to gain export contracts. Of this there has been considerable evidence in scandals that have occurred in UK, France and Germany and one such evidence was given by French paper Le Monde in an outspoken editorial commenting on the French company ELF AQUITAINE: For too long French policy in Africa has been neither moral nor effective.
The UN General Assembly has adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the UN Sustainable Development Summit 25-27 September 2015 in New York. This is high time for developing countries to review their policies and chalk out plans to overcome hindrances to poverty alleviation programmes. There are unlimited opportunities in these SDGs, which if tapped properly can change the destiny however everyone needs to play their part: Governments, Civil society and people.