We Can End Poverty But Do We WANT To?

"UNITED NATIONS - Global poverty can be cut in half by 2015 and eliminated by 2025 if the world’s richest countries including the United States, Japan and Germany more than double aid to the poorest countries, hundreds of development experts concluded in a report Monday.At stake is life or death for tens of millions of impoverished people, it said.

The report spells out the investments needed to meet the U.N. goals adopted by world leaders at the Millennium Summit in 2000 to tackle poverty, hunger and disease and promote education and development, mainly in African and Asian countries.

“What we’re proposing is a strategy of investment to help empower the lives of very poor people that lack the tools and sometimes even the basic means to stay alive, much less be productive members of a fast-paced world economy,” said Professor Jeffrey Sachs, head of the U.N. anti-poverty effort and lead author of the report.

The investments range from schools, clinics, safe water and sanitation to fertilizer, roads, electricity and transport to get goods to market.

‘Tremendous imbalance’
“The system is not working right now — let’s be clear,” he said. “There’s a tremendous imbalance of focus on the issues of war and peace, and less on the dying and suffering of the poor who have no voice.”

According to the report, 1 billion people live on a dollar a day or less, many of them going to bed hungry every night; life expectancy in the poorest countries is half that of people in high-income countries. And every month, for example, 150,000 African children die of malaria because they don’t have bed nets to keep out mosquitoes, a tragedy Sachs called the “silent tsunami.”

In 1970, the world’s nations agreed to provide 0.7 percent of their gross national income for development assistance, and that figure was reaffirmed by the U.N. conference on financing development in Monterey, Mexico, in 2002.

So far, only five countries have met or surpassed the target: Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Six others have made commitments to reach the target by 2015: Belgium, Finland, France, Ireland, Spain and Britain.

Nations including U.S. far from target
But 11 of the 22 richest donors according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are far from the target and have not set timetables to reach it — including the United States, Japan and Germany.

If all 22 rich countries come up with the money, more than 500 million people can escape poverty and tens of millions can avoid certain death in the next decade, the report said.

If the countries kept up the 0.7 percent level of aid-giving for another decade, it said, “by 2025 extreme poverty can be substantially eliminated” for the remaining 500 million people surviving on a dollar a day.

“Our generation for the first time in human history really could see to it that extreme poverty on the planet is ended, not just by half but ended by the year 2025,” Sachs said.

“We are not asking for one new promise from any country in the world, only the follow-through on what has already been committed,” he stressed.

But trying to get the United States and the other rich nations to double or triple the amount of development assistance they give is expected to be an uphill struggle — and the target of a major lobbying effort."

Source: MSNBC News


The world been like this for quite a while. It's not that we can't feed all the hungry mouths, it's that we choose not to. The conflict theory explains how the bourgeoisie are constantly suppressing the proletariats and because of this, there will never be equality. It's true that by assisting weaker nations, we would be making them stronger. I suppose many of the strongest nations feel that their position would be threatened by this.

Thus, we shall live in comfort at the expense of others. This is very sad as we are dealing with people's lives and not just our own egos or whatever it may be. I'm sure the top nations addressed have reasons to justify their actions...or lack of actions for that matter; but are these reasons good enough?

I suppose it all comes down to whether we really want to put and end to poverty or not. If we do want to, we can. If we don't want to, let's not even pretend that we want to.