7.1 Inequality and Poverty
7.1
Inequality and Poverty
If the misery of the poor
be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin
- Charles Darwin [see reference 5]
The Bruntland report’s
definition of sustainability “meeting the needs of the present without compromising
the needs of the future” [see reference 6] implies intergenerational equality, and this
concept of equality can therefore be applied to society in the present
generation. Using equality as a measure
of sustainability therefore, it can be observed through the following figures
that socially we are far from achieving a sustainable system.
The figure below shows a
world map and highlights the percentage of people living on less than 1.25
dollars per day.
Figure
7.1.1 Percentage of population living under 1.25 USD per day in 2009
Wikipedia [see reference 7]
Figure 7.1.1 sourced from Wikipedia
(Author: Tony0106) under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike 3.0 Unported license
The figure of 1.25 dollar
is used by the UN as an economic line under which people are described as
living in poverty. The map shows a huge
divide over the world, with most of Africa living in poverty and most of the
"developed North" having poverty levels of under 2%.
Limited access to money
usually implies people living in poverty do not have access to basic water and
sanitation facilities, low nutrition levels, lack of access to education and a
very poor quality of life. The amount of
people living without these basic facilities for life is alarming compared with
the luxuries and excesses enjoyed by the majority of the populations in more
economically developed countries.
Another way of looking at
the divide is comparing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (how wealthy a nations is)
and their average life expectancy, which is a rough measure of the health of a
nation. This is displayed in the figure
below and again the spread is remarkable.
Figure
7.1.2 GDP per capita vs. life expectancy for all the countries in the world
Gapminder [see reference 8]
figure 7.1.2 sourced from Gapminder under a
Creative commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License
http://www.gapminder.org/downloads/gapminder-world-map/
It can be seen that an
increase in wealth is generally followed by an increase in health, but the
primary observation from the figure is the wide distribution throughout the
nations of the world. With this level of
inequality currently society is a long way off from being called
"sustainable".
GDP is a measure of how
much money a nation spends, but is not necessarily a measure of the countries
wealth, as it will include money spent on hospitals, policing, pollution
control and weapons. An increase in car
crashes, violent crime, cleaning up an oil spill or going to war will all
increase a countries GDP, but does not represent a better quality of life.
|
Exercise
Go
to http://www.gapminder.org/world
and view the graph "health and wealth of nations" which shows how
these figures for
|
The next figure tackles a
similar concept but instead of GDP looks at the ecological footprint, and instead
of life expectancy looks at the Human Development Index (HDI). The ecological footprint is a concept
introduced in the first chapter of this module,
and is measure of resource consumption in terms of land use measured in
hectares per person required for that lifestyle. It is a way of picturing whether a
consumption rate is sustainable in terms of number of planets needed if
everybody on the earth had the same level of consumption. Marked on the graph is the red line for 1
planet, or 2.1 hectares per person.
The Human Development
Index was devised by the UNDP in an attempt to a find a better quantifier of
quality of life; it takes into account life expectancy, literacy, education and
standards of living.
Figure
7.1.3 Comparison between human welfare and ecological footprint
Travelplanner via Wikimedia Commons [see reference 9]
figure 7.1.3 sourced from
Travelplanner (Author: mckayro) via Wikimedia Commons under a Creative commons
Share Alike 3.0 Unported License
It can be seen that a
relatively high measure of human welfare can be obtained with a comparatively
small ecological footprint (e.g Cuba).
After this point consuming more resources does not improve your quality
of life by a large amount. Another
important observation to take from this graph, apart from the spread between
the countries, is the number of countries currently consuming more than the Earth's
carrying capacity, and the degree to which this limit has been surpassed in the
case of the most resource hungry nations (e.g. USA).
The inequalities are
linked; poor nations are often poor because they have been exploited by the
richer nations; and international trade rules exist to perpetuate this system:
by making money in one part of the world you are taking money from
another. A game of consolidation of
power through capitalism is in progress where generally the rich get richer and
the poor get poorer.
Now read the following
extract from a blog post by Richard Skellington which highlights the
disparities between the rich and poor:
In times like these the
words of 2006 Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus ring true:
‘poverty has been created
by the economic and social system that we have designed for the world. It is
the institutions that we have built and feel so proud of, which created poverty
for them. Two months ago the World Bank warned that the world’s poor were far
greater in numbers than they first estimated. The Bank shifted the poverty line
from a dollar a day to a dollar twenty five cents. It is amazing what adding a
‘quarter’ does to the projections: a mere 25 cents plunges a further 500
million people in the developing world into poverty. Thus it was that the World
Bank’s new estimate of its poor rose in August from 985 million people to 1.4
billion people. This new estimate does not take into account the recent
increases in food and fuel prices.
In early October, when
Dick Fuld the chief executive of Lehman Brothers - the investment bank whose
collapse did so much to trigger the crisis in world financial systems - was
quizzed by Congressional leaders, he did not spare a thought for those billion
people living in the world today on around a dollar a day. No. He talked about his
compensation package. Defending accusations of a $500 million dollar pay off he
contested its size: "The $500m number is not accurate, although it is
still a large number," he told an angry Congress hearing. Wait a minute,
500 million dollars! That is one dollar for every human being in the developing
world who have now been added to the poverty index.
Given the increase in
world population, the rate of world poverty has fallen substantially from 50%
to 25% over the past 25 years. But the number of people in poverty has
increased. In Africa, between 1981 and 2005, the number of people in poverty
rose from 200 million to 380 million, with the average poor person living on
around 70 cents a day.
Unlike other regions of
the world, the rate of African poverty has remained the same, around 50% of the
continent’s population remained in poverty in 2005, compared to 1981. In Asia,
however, the rate of poverty has fallen since 1981, from 60% to 40%. Asia is
home to 595 million people living in poverty; 455 million of its poor live in
India.
In China, poverty has
fallen dramatically, from 835 million in 1981 to 207 million people in 2005.
Its rate of poverty fell massively from 85%to 15%. The World Bank estimate that
China alone almost accounted for all the reduction in world poverty since 1981.
World poverty, excluding
China, dropped from 4 out of 10 people to 3 out of 10 people during the same
period. According to the World Bank the world is still on track to halve the
1990 poverty rate by 2015. But at the current rate of progress, about a billion
people will still live below $1.25 a day in 2015, and some areas, such as Sub
Saharan Africa, will be acutely affected. [The World Bank's 8 new poverty line
of $1.25 per day in 2005 is equivalent to its $1 per day poverty line
introduced in 1981 after adjustment for inflation.]
Elsewhere, especially in
those middle income countries where the World Bank uses a poverty line of $2 a
day the poverty rate has indeed fallen. Latin America, the Middle East and
North Africa have improved but not enough to bring down their total number of
poor. The $2 a day poverty rate has increased in Eastern Europe and Central
Asia though these areas showed some small signs of progress since the late
1990s.
We live in a world in
which ten children die every minute from malnutrition, where 10.7 million
children never live to see their fifth birthday, and where 4 out of 10 human
beings have no access to basic sanitation. These are all avoidable statistics.
Meeting the United
Nations’ 9 millennium goal to halve the proportion of people in the world
without access to clean water would cost $4 billion dollars a year for the next
decade. Four billion dollars is roughly what Europe’s population spends each
month on bottled water.
Richard Skellington [see reference 10]
The above figures and blog
extract serve to illustrate the point that sustainability is as much about
humanity as it is the environment; a cornerstone of the sustainability triangle
is "social", and the central ethic of the social paradigm is
equity. From the figures presented it
can be seen that a large proportion of the wealth is held by a small proportion
of the population, and in comparison a large amount of the world's population
survive on very little.