A poor view on life

The poor, we're taught to believe, will always be with us. A good many of the poor have jobs, but receive too little pay to lift their family up from poverty. One in six Americans lives in poverty, more than 46 million. Twenty-five million people are in need of full-time work; 49 million go without health insurance excluded from a health-care system that is twice as expensive, per capita, as those in other industrial nations, captured by the drug lobby and the insurance and private hospital industries.

Poverty is destructive. The poor are more likely to be sick, vulnerable from hunger, to lack prenatal and infant care and to contract diseases that go undiagnosed. But if being poor makes Americans sick, getting sick too often makes them poor. Serious illness is the leading cause of bankruptcy. Poverty destroys hope. A hungry child finds it hard to learn. A toothache drowns out a teacher's voice. As poverty rates increase, the number of dropouts rises. Poverty destroys neighborhoods. Foreclosed homes become drug dens. The desperate turn to crime. Exploiters - the payday lenders, the sub-prime peddlers - target the vulnerable. The poor are less likely to have access to transportation that might take them to a job. They are less likely to have access to affordable groceries. They are more likely to go to an under-funded school, from which the best teachers have fled. The working poor are more likely to be in debt, more likely to live paycheck to paycheck.

The Chairman of Merck was paid $17 million last year, a period during which his company laid off considerable employees. Bank of America's chairman was paid $10 million, and that’s being paid for in part by the laying off of 30,000 workers. The 400 richest Americans got 12% wealthier.

Lets change the world

adapted from here

Worth a Read

Poor Economics by Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee and Esther Duflo
http://pooreconomics.com/

What is striking is that even people who are that poor are just like the rest of us in almost every way. We have the same desires and weaknesses; the poor are no less rational than anyone else—quite the contrary. Precisely because they have so little, we often find them putting much careful thought into their choices: They have to be sophisticated economists just to survive. Yet our lives are as different as liquor and liquorice.

The average poverty line in the fifty countries where most of the poor live is 16 Indian rupees per person and per day. People who live on less than that are considered to be poor by the government of their own countries. At the current exchange rate, 16 rupees corresponds to 36 U.S. cents. But because prices are lower in most developing countries, if the poor actually bought the things they do at U.S. prices, they would need to spend more—99 cents. So to imagine the lives of the poor, you have to imagine having to live in Miami or Modesto with 99 cents per day for almost all your everyday needs (excluding housing). It is not easy—in India, for example, the equivalent amount would buy you fifteen smallish bananas, or about 3 pounds of low-quality rice. Can one live on that? And yet, around the world, in 2005, 865 million people (13 percent of the world’s population) did.

Living on 99 cents a day means you have limited access to information—newspapers, television, and books all cost money—and so you often just don’t know certain facts that the rest of the world takes as given, for example, that vaccines can stop your child from getting measles. It means living in a world whose institutions are not built for someone like you. Most of the poor do not have a salary, let alone a retirement plan that deducts automatically from it. It means making decisions about things that come with a lot of small print when you cannot even properly read the large print. What does someone who cannot read make of a health insurance product that doesn’t cover a lot of unpronounceable diseases? It means going to vote when your entire experience of the political system is a lot of promises, not delivered...And so on.

dignity and poverty

An interesting article by Justin Bayor.

Edward Azar’s theory of Protracted Social Conflict (PSC) understands that the critical factor in PSCs is “the prolonged and often violent struggle by groups for such basic needs as security, recognition and acceptance, fair access to political institutions and economic participation”. The theory identifies deprivation as the underlying source of PSC. Grievances resulting from need and deprivation are usually expressed collectively and failure to redress these grievances provide the manure for PSC. Grievances among people emerge as a result of the indignities that they experience in their everyday life whether rich or poor. But the idea of human dignity is not a recent phenomenon. It is as old as the history of humankind and exists in various forms in all cultures and religions. For example, the high value accorded to the human being can be seen in the South African philosophy of ‘ubuntu’ or the protection of foreigners in Islam. The ‘golden rule’ which states that one should treat others as one would like to treat oneself, exists in all major religions. The International Bill of Human Rights has embodied one underlying conception of human dignity. The preambles to both the 1966 International Covenants on Human Rights states that Human Rights ‘derive from the inherent dignity of the human person’. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They… should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood’.

Poverty should not just be understood according to its academic definition only. It should be understood in terms of what poor people themselves say. To the poor themselves, living in poverty means more than living without money, water, food, education, relatives, peace, social capital, democracy etc. In other words, living without human material and non material security involves a lot of more, which affects the dignity of the poor. For instance, the main concern of a group of homeless people in the US was the indignity of having to line up daily to receive a ration of five pieces of toilet paper. ‘That infuriated them, it took them beneath any level of dignity they might have’ and it was around that indignity, rather than the wider issue of their homelessness, that they were prepared to fight. Dignity in the human person requires personal autonomy, societal concern, respect and treatment by others in society as an equal. If dignity is attributable to all human beings and if dignity requires autonomy which in turn is a right, then human dignity is essential to human rights. Apart from the material lack and want of food, livelihoods, assets, money, housing and shelter often described by the poor, the poor often described poverty as the everyday indignities that they have to go through which include pain, discomfort, exhaustion, discrimination, exclusion, rejection, isolation, loneliness, voicelessness, stigmatisation, vulnerability, disrespect, worry, fear, anxiety, low self-confidence and esteem, powerlessness, helplessness, frustration, anger, humiliation, shame etc. These are the issues that really concern the poor. Human indignity is more important than the situation of the poverty itself. Simply put, a poor man would rather have an empty stomach than face the indignity of having food served on the ground for him or live without employment rather than face humiliation from being spat on by an employer.

Poverty is said to be a hindrance to human dignity because it constitutes a denial of the fundamental human rights of an individual. The OHCHR has declared that ‘poverty is the principal cause of human rights violations in the world. It prevents people from assuming not only their duties as individuals, but also their collective duties as citizens, parents, workers and electors’. Rights ‘are shaped through actual struggle informed by poor people’s own understandings of what they are entitled to’ according to the OHCHR

Consequently, it is around the issues of human indignity that people are prepared to utilise violence. The issues around the issues of human indignity vis-a-vis isolation, discrimination, rejection, powerlessness etc are what Edward Azar referred to as grievances. Poor people are more willing to fight for their grievances from poverty rather than for the issue of poverty itself. A hungry man is an angry man yet an angry man does not fight because he is hungry but because he is angry. The anger is a grievance from the hunger for which he is prepared to fight. However, not all hungry men become angry and this is because because their hunger is without a grievance.

Taken from here

THE PRICE OF RICE

The Indian government proposed a Food Security Act that will provide subsidised grains only to those who earn less than Rs 20 a day (if you live in a city and less than Rs 15 a day if you live in a village) - the BPL - below poverty line. The reason the poverty line matters so much is because it determines how many Indian can claim welfare, which, in turn, determines the fiscal burden the State will have to bear. The government says it can’t afford to feed everyone – hence the manipulations with the BPL. But for the poor, the BPL is not some statistical term: it is a lifeline. Rs 20 a day is somehow supposed to feed whole families. Ferrari dealerships and Louis Vuitton stores spring upto cater to the new urban rich but leave hundreds of millions of others struggling without access to adequate food and clean water.

Economists Pravin Jha and Nilachal Acharya have estimated that if rice/wheat were made available to 200 million households in India at Rs 3 a kilo, it would add Rs 84,399 crore to the Budget, just the price of two Commonwealth Games.

The World Bank global poverty line, at $1.25 a day or about $38 per month, is three times higher than India's urban level.

Himmat pedals his bicycle rickshaw through New Delhi's crowded streets, earning barely enough to feed his family. The 5,000 rupees ($110) he earns a month pays for a tiny room with a single light bulb and no running water for his family of four. After buying just enough food to keep his family from starving, there is nothing left for medicine, new clothes for his children or savings. Himmat is way above India's poverty line. "My existence doesn't matter to the government. They don't care if people like me live or die," he said.

The country currently spends just 2 percent of its GDP — about 29 billion — in social protection, and half of that goes to the Public Distribution System, which provides the poor with subsidized food. Even with the low poverty line, the system — riddled with corruption and mismanagement — caters to over 440 million people, more than the entire population of the United States. The World Bank poverty line would add about 60 million more people to that category.

US Poverty

Last year, only 51% of personal income was derived from working salaries, the lowest since 1929, according to an analysis by USA Today. The problem stems from the lingering effects of the recession and the high number of unemployed. Wages declined even more during the beginning of 2011, slipping to another historic low of 50.5% in February for personal income. The newspaper also found Americans in 2010 relied more on government assistance than at any other time in the nation's history. A record 18.3% of total personal income was a payment from the government last year for Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, unemployment benefits and other programs. To demonstrate just how high the rate is, government aid averaged about 12.5% annually from 1980 to 2000.

A recent report by the University of Buffalo School of Social Work says single workers in the U.S. need more than $30,000 a year for economic security. Single-parents with two children need nearly twice the income ($57,756) to cover basic expenses and save for emergencies and retirement, while dual-income households with two children require $67,920. The 2010 national poverty level is $10,830 for a single-person family and $18,310 for a family of three.

http://www.presstv.ir/usdetail/177335.html

Lennon was a rebel - Bono is a wonker

From the Washington Post

There is a fundamental difference between Lennon's activism and Bono's, and it underscores the sad evolution of celebrity activism in recent years.

Lennon was a rebel. Bono is not.

Lennon's protests against the war in Vietnam so threatened the U.S. government that he was hounded by the FBI, police and immigration authorities. He was a moral crusader who challenged leaders whom he thought were doing wrong. Bono, by contrast, has become a sort of celebrity policy expert, supporting specific technical solutions to global poverty. He does not challenge power but rather embraces it; he is more likely to appear in photo ops with international political leaders - or to travel through Africa with a Treasury secretary - than he is to call them out in a meaningful way.

Lennon merged his activism and his music: In 1969, "Give Peace a Chance" became the anthem of the movement after half a million people sung along at a huge demonstration at the Washington Monument. "Imagine" and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" expanded his antiwar repertoire.

Lennon paid a price for his activities. We now know from subsequent Freedom of Information Act releases that the FBI monitored and harassed him. In 1971, President Richard Nixon set in motion a four-year effort to deport him.

Bono had regular photo-ops and lunches with President George W. Bush, giving Bush much-needed publicity . For example, the singer appeared onstage with Bush at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington in 2002 . Bono even toured Africa with Bush's first Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, fully aware that the administration was capitalizing on his celebrity.
"My job is to be used. I am here to be used," Bono told The Washington Post. "It's just, at what price?"

On Bono's signature issue of poverty, for instance, why not call out a few of the oppressive regimes that keep their people impoverished - as well as the leaders, in the United States and elsewhere, who have supported them with economic and military aid? (Bono has acknowledged that "tinpot dictators" were a problem for aid efforts in the past but has not confronted today's despots and their enablers in rich nations.)

Bono calls global poverty a moral wrong but he does not identify the wrongdoers. He buys into technocratic illusions about the issue without paying attention to who has power and who lacks it, who oppresses and who is oppressed. He runs with the crowd that believes ending poverty is a matter of technical expertise. The technocratic approach puts him in the position of a wonk, not a dissident; an expert, not a crusader.Bono is not the only well-intentioned celebrity wonk of our age - the impulse is ubiquitous. Angelina Jolie, for instance, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (seriously) in addition to serving as a U.N. goodwill ambassador. Ben Affleck has become an expert on the war in Congo. George Clooney has Sudan covered, while Leonardo DiCaprio hobnobs with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders at a summit to protect tigers. The celebrity desire to gain political power and social approval breeds intellectual conformity, precisely the opposite of what we need to achieve real changes.

True dissidents - celebrity or not - play a vital role in democracy. Politicians, intellectuals and the public can fall prey to group-think need dissidents to shake them out of it. True dissidents claim no expertise; they offer no 10-point plans to fix a problem. They are most effective when they simply assert that the status quo is morally wrong. Of course, they need to be noticed to have an impact, hence the historical role of dissidents such as Lennon who can use their celebrity to be heard. We need more high-profile dissidents to challenge mainstream power. This makes it all the sadder that Bono and many other celebrities only reinforce this power in their capacity as faux experts. Where have all the celebrity dissidents gone?

William Easterly, professor of economics at New York University and co-director of NYU's Development Research Institute. Author of "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good."

...to each according to their needs

"Ask people what they need and give it to them: it's the only way "
From The Independent's charity appeal

grey poverty

The fact that 3.7 million older adults do not have sufficient cash income to meet their basic expenses too often escapes attention of the media. AARP’s Public Policy Institute produced an interesting report on the older American population.

Nearly one in ten adults age 65 and above live in a family with income below the official U.S. poverty line, or federal poverty level (FPL).Today, nearly 3.7 million older adults (9.7 percent of adults age 65 and older) live marginally above the poverty threshold (between 100 percent and 125 percent of the federal poverty line), and 2.6 million have incomes between 125 percent and 150 percent of the federal poverty line. Overall, 36.2 percent of older adults, or 13.7 million adults age 65 and older, have low income—defined as 200 percent of the FPL.

In 2008, an adult age 65 and older living alone was counted as poor if his or her annual cash income before taxes was below $10,326. An elderly couple with income below $13,014 was counted as poor. Nearly one in six older adults was poor or near poor, with income below 125 percent of the FPL, and about a third had low income—below 200 percent of the FPL. The official U.S. poverty measure has been in use for more than four decades, but increasingly, it fails to accurately describe who is and who is not poor, and it does an especially inadequate job of measuring the extent of poverty among older adults. Nearly twice as many adults age 65 and above are poor when newer measurement approaches are used.The official poverty measure describes the number and percentage of people who have pre-tax cash family income inadequate to meet their most basic needs for shelter, food, and clothing. Constructed more than four decades ago—and adjusted only for price inflation since then—the poverty measure is widely regarded as out-of-date. Recent efforts to measure the income needed to pay for ordinary expenses find that the income needed for a decent standard of living is significantly higher than the federal poverty level (FPL).

59 percent of poor older adults depend on Social Security for all or nearly all (90 percent or more) of their family income.Details describe the fact that twenty percent of older adults who are black or Hispanic are poor, and poverty hits older people with limited education and those who are not married especially hard. Most poor adults age 65 and older are not married—either widowed (43 percent), divorced or separated (19 percent), or never married (8 percent). Older women of color are especially likely to live in poverty. Nearly a quarter of older women who are black or Hispanic are poor, and more than a third are poor or near poor (with income below 125 percent of the FPL).

In 2008, 22.1 percent of low income elderly households (with incomes below 130 percent of the poverty line) were “food insecure” (they had limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods). This is a substantial increase from 2006, when 17.6 percent of the very low-income elderly had low or very low food security.Moreover, in 2008, roughly 10 percent of low-income elderly households had very low food security: They not only had limited or uncertain availability of food, but they ate less than they felt they should, cut the size of meals, or skipped meals in three or more months during the year.

Poor older adults tend to be in worse health than adults who are not poor. They tend to have more chronic and disabling health conditions. Poor health and disability, on top of very limited income and inadequate insurance protection, mean that health care costs are a burden for many poor older adults.

Housing takes an even bigger bite out of the incomes of poor older adults. Housing costs absorb more than 30 percent of income for 80 percent of poor older households.

As the previous post explains the worst poverty is usually suffered by those who for some reason such as old age or racial descriminatin but we all suffer poverty , some perhaps worse than others but the cure is to tackle the root cause , to recognise to solve one person's poverty is to deal with everybody's ragardless of individual degree .

Black American Poverty

We read that the wealth gap between whites and African Americans has expanded dramatically. A new study by Brandeis University in Massachusetts Institute on Assets and Social Policy reveals that income equality does not always lead to wealth equality when it comes to race. The wealth gap between black and white families and individuals being tracked in the study more than quadrupled over the course of a generation, and that the middle-income white families in the study accumulated a higher net worth than high-income African-Americans.

The escalating gap, according to the study researchers, was largely caused the fact that white families have historically had more wealth to pass down. Although many black families have moved up to better-paying jobs, they begin with fewer assets, such as inheritance, on which to build wealth. They are also more likely to have gone into debt to pay for university loans.

"About one in every four white families inherit money, and their average inheritance is $10,000" said Thomas Shapiro, director of the IASP and author of "The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality." "That provides a huge head start. Less than 8 percent of African-American families inherit wealth, and when they do, the average inheritance is $900. Even when African Americans do everything right - get an education and work hard at well-paying jobs - they cannot achieve the wealth of their white peers in the workforce, and that translates into very different life chances”

White families typically have assets worth $100,000 (£69,000), up from $22,000 in the mid-1980s. African-American families' assets stand at just $5,000, up from around $2,000. A quarter of black families have no assets at all.Only one in 10 African-Americans owns any shares. A third do not have a pension plan, and among those who do the value is on average a fifth of plans held by whites.In 1984, high-income black Americans had more assets than middle-income whites. That is no longer true. "African-Americans' wealth essentially flatlined."

The report attributes part of the cause to the "powerful role of persistent discrimination in housing, credit and labour markets. African-Americans and Hispanics were at least twice as likely to receive high-cost home mortgages as whites with similar incomes. African-Americans, before the 1960s, first by law and then by custom, were not really allowed to own businesses. They had very little access to credit. There was a very low artificial ceiling on the wealth that could be accumulated. Hence there was very little, if anything, that could be passed along to help their children get to college, to help their children buy their first homes, or as an inheritance when they die" said Shapiro. "In African-American families there is a much larger extended network of kin as well as other obligations. From other work we've done we know that there's more call on the resources of relatively well-off African-American families; that they lend money that's not given back; they help cousins go to school. They help brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, with all kinds of legal and family problems".

Class is determined, not by the size of income or colour of skin but by their ownership or non-ownership of the means of production and distribution. Today, the richest 1% of the US population owns close to 40% of its wealth. The top 25% of US households own 87%.

The fact that these are examples of the lower strata of working class existence should not obscure the fact that poverty, in some measure, is a problem for the entire class. The worst poverty is usually suffered by those who for some reason - unemployment, old age, sickness are unable to get a job and a decent wage. Or as this report explains , an unwelcomed legacy of discrimination and racism from the past. History will affect peoples chances in life. Chronic poverty can be passed on from generation to generation

the failure of the trickle down strategy

The Trotskyist website WSWS has posted an interesting article on the failure of New Labour reformism .

For the last three decades the Institute of Fiscal Studies has produced a report on the UK Gini coefficient ( The Gini coefficient can range from 0 to 1 and provides an objective measure of income inequality, which allows every country to be ranked against others and against its own past performance. A coefficient of 0 would mean income is shared equally between all individuals, whilst a coefficient of 1 would mean one person within the population has all the income and everyone else none. So a higher Gini coefficient figure indicates a higher level of inequality ).

The figure has increased from 0.25 when Thatcher came to power to now 0.36, beyond the normal bounds of inequality seen in developed countries.

The report also notes that the number of those in relative poverty, which is defined as those with an income less than 60 percent of the median, has risen over the last three years.

“Poverty for working-age adults without dependent children is now at its highest level since the start of our comparable time series in 1961,” according to the IFS report.

The IFS report concludes, “Over the past three years, average living standards have continued to stagnate, though poverty and income inequality both rose. We expect that the current recession will again lead to a change in the course of poverty inequality and average living standards. Unfortunately, the only thing we can be near-certain of is that average living standards will fall, but we cannot be sure how this pain will be shared.” - i think we can guess who .

The contrast between rich and poor is even starker when the mean or arithmetical average is considered. The mean earnings figure for 2007-08 was £487 a week. It is calculated that 65 percent of the population earn less than this sum. A small proportion of the population, 1.2 million, has earnings above £1,500 a week. The incomes of Members of Parliament range up to £1,100 a week, putting them above 91 percent of the population. Only nine percent of households in the UK have a higher income. If their expenses are included in the calculation they have a higher income than 96 percent of the UK population. If they have a working partner, their household income is in the very top income bracket.

“Ten years ago the government committed to eradicating child poverty but these figures show progress has stalled,” Hilary Fisher, director of End Child Poverty said. “In the previous two years, child poverty actually rose. Progress has been made on child poverty, but the UK is way off track on its targets. Budget 2009 invested less than a pint of milk per week per child in family incomes and did nothing to narrow the gap.”

A Joseph Rowntree Foundation Report concluded that the measures brought in by the Labour government to address inequality were stalling.The report issued in February stated that “child poverty remains amongst the highest in Europe,” despite the fact that the government had focused on this area. Health inequalities also continued to widen.

“The UK’s experience in the 1980s and 1990s showed that the strategy of hoping that growth in living standards at the top would ‘trickle down’ to those at the bottom did not work."

Black US Poverty

The National Urban League released its annual "State of Black America" report. Blacks were twice as likely to be unemployed, three times more likely to live in poverty and more than six times as likely to be imprisoned compared with whites, the study said. Blacks also lost their homes due to foreclosure at a greater rate than other ethnic groups.
25 percent of black Americans still in poverty.

According to Survey of Consumer Finances from the Federal Reserve, the “wealth gap” between white Americans and Black Americans has gotten worse in recent years. The latest available data (from 2007) shows that for every dollar in wealth held by a white household, the typical Black household has just 10 cents. Hispanics have now moved ahead of Blacks. They now have 12 cents in wealth for every dollar of white wealth.

Wealth accumulation tends to be inter-generational. Indeed, most experts agree that the single biggest predictor of how much wealth you will accumulate is the net worth of your parents and how much of it they were able to pass on to you. However, this economic truism does not explain why Hispanics have started to accumulate more wealth than Blacks.

Overall, however; the years of the Bush administration were not good for most Americans. The Federal Reserve report shows that the net worth of the average American family is less today than it was in 2001.

Slumdogs return to the slums

According to CNN
On Sunday night, Azharuddin Ismail and Rubina Ali were in Hollywood, California, getting celebrity treatment as eight Oscars were awarded to the movie they starred in, "Slumdog Millionaire."
On Thursday night, the two children were sleeping at home in Mumbai, India. Azharuddin sleeps under a plastic sheet in a shantytown beside a railway track, where the smell of urine and cow dung lingers in the air. Rubina sleeps with her parents and siblings in a tiny shack beside an open drain.

slumdogs and millionaires

According to here
Out of India's population, 76% live below the poverty limit of $2 a day, compared to 73% in Sub-Saharan Africa. That is 800 million people living in abject poverty - in one country.

One third of all the world's ultra poor are Indians. 40% of all malnourished children are Indian.

but then there is this
Four of the top eight billionaires in the world are from India. Topping the ranks is steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, whose worth Forbes puts at $45 billion. Next up are the Ambani brothers, Mukesh and Anil, with $43 billion and $42 billion repsectively, largely from petrochemicals. Rounding out the list is KP Singh, the real-estate magnate, at $30 billion. All four of the Indian billionaires inherited substantial fortunes, suggesting that in India, wealth is still determined more by your parents than by your career or your ideas.

Food for Thought

According to the Lancet nutrition series (January 2008), 178 million children under 5 suffer from nutritional deficiencies - 55 million acute and 19.3 million severely acute (wasting).

Unlike many diseases, malnutrition has a cure - a balanced diet, regular consumption of fortified foods, supplements when local foods don't have the nutrients needed, and animal-based products like milk, fish, eggs and cheese.

One solution is to increase spending on nutrition. According to the Lancet nutrition series, $300 million a year is spent on nutrition while $6 billion is spent on HIV/AIDS.

"Nutrition can only be sustainable if people ultimately pay for it," said Dr. Alfred Sommer, dean emeritus of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

What he means is for people to pay in pounds and pence , dollars and cents . No matter how well meaning those experts and NGOs are , they are bound by the confines of the capitalist system and the most obvious solution of actually providing such nutition freely is simply beyond their ken .

doom and gloom for the new year

"...the growth in hunger is not occurring, as in the past, because of shortage of food – but because people cannot afford to buy it even when it is plentiful. The main reason has been that high food prices have priced the poor out of the market..."
A new FAO report shows that this year's grain crop is set to grow by 5.4 per cent to 2,241 million tons, following a 6 per cent rise last year – ahead of population growth.

So writes The Independent

One billion people will go hungry around the globe next year for the first time in human history.
Some 963 million people are now undernourished worldwide, according to the most recent survey of the crisis by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), and the UN body expects the situation to worsen with the recession. "The number will rise steadily next year," an FAO spokesman told the IoS last week. "We are looking at a billion people. That is clear." The FAO fears the tally will go on increasing for years to come.
Rich countries have failed to provide promised money to boost agriculture in the Third World; the financial crisis is starving developing countries of credit and driving their people into greater poverty, and food aid to the starving is expected to begin drying up next month. This directly contradicts an undertaking by the world's leaders at a special summit in September 2000 to "reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger" from 1990 levels by 2015, as part of an ambitious set of Millennium Development Goals.

Over the 12 months until last summer, wheat and maize prices more than doubled and rice prices more than tripled. This was due partly to the growth in biofuels which, the FAO reports, has taken over 100 million tons of cereals out of food supplies over the past year to fuel cars instead. One fill of a 4x4's tank uses enough grain to feed one poor person for a year.

And they claim capitalism and the market is an efficient method for providing for the world !!!

man kills 2 day old baby

Kolkata , Ratan Santra , a balloon seller , choked his two day year old daughter to death in West Bengal and surrendered to the police .

"I hardly earn Rs30 [ 40 pence ] a day and have a mother , wife and two more daughters to feed . So I killed her to save her . as well as ourselves , from poverty and hunger "

America the Poor

Early each morning these days, the manager of Mendota Food Center on Derrick Avenue in this small community west of Fresno, boxes his aging produce, which he would normally throw away, and leaves it at the back of his store.

Within an hour, the boxes are all gone.

"It shows there's hunger in Mendota, and people will take anything," said Mayor Robert Silva, who manages the grocery store. Some other grocery stores are doing likewise.

The economic downturn, state-enforced water rationing, poor rains, and unemployment have all come to a head here. Now, hunger is sweeping through the community. Town officials are bracing for longer lines at food distribution centers, starting next month, when Mendota's single largest employer, the 42-year-old Spreckles Sugar Company, is set to shut its door.

Promises , promises , always promises

Peru's economy has grown at a rate of 9% and exports have tripled in the last five years . Shopping malls and new high-rise blocks of flat are springing up as part of a construction boom and the rising middle class is quickly developing an appetite for shopping.

"Peru at this moment is the brightest star in the firmament of humanity," President Garcia declares at the summit. "No-one doubts that."

Yet much of the growth has emerged from the country's largely urban coast, a world apart from the impoverished rural highlands where poverty has become an increasingly big problem in recent years.
For them, promises made by world leaders at the summit - to reduce poverty, to reduce the impact of rising food prices, and to tackle climate change - offer little hope.

"Nothing has really changed for the poor, especially in the provinces, except that the food prices have gone up," says Noemi Dioses, a 34-year-old single mother who works as a carer in Lima. "He's not governing for us," she says, accusing President Garcia of "governing for the big businessmen and the foreign investors... All the lovely fruit and vegetables that are grown here get exported," she says. "We're not enjoying the fruits of this boom."

1st World Wealth , 3rd World Lifestyle

Here in Kerala , South India , i read in the Times
"Soaring food prices have led to a growing number of middle-class New Yorkers joining an unusual organisation that “dumpster dives” in rubbish bins for food.
The trash tours form part of a growing movement called “Freegans”, which is rapidly increasing in popularity as New Yorkers find it harder and harder to make ends meet.
Freegans – a name derived from the words “free” and “vegan” – sift through garbage cans and bin bags in the evenings looking to find edible food and discarded items such as shelving or kitchen appliances that can be reused. ..

..."Harvard University estimated last year that Middle America was suffering its worst financial hardship since the 1950s as families were forced to struggle with rising food and fuel costs, tightening credit conditions, sliding residential property prices and soaring healthcare premiums. "

The Price of a Garden Makeover

Stone imports to Britain which have increased 10-fold over the past decade. Escalating consumer demand is thought to be driven by the proliferation of gardening makeover programmes.

Nepal is among the world's poorest and least-developed countries with almost one-third of its population living below the poverty line. According to the United Nations' development index, the nation ranks 138th out of 177 countries. Life expectancy in this landlocked nation is 59.8 years for males and 59.5 for females. Nearly half of the population - 44% - are children, and in Nepalese culture child labour is the norm. Indeed, many children feel a level of responsibility in helping their families financially and are proud to earn an income. Child labour is fundamental to the economy. In Nepal, an estimated three million children aged between five and 14 years old are employed. The children work in quarries, brick kilns, factories, laundries, coal mines and restaurants, to name just a few of the 80 or so areas of industry that break the law. Despite the ratification of 18 international conventions by the Nepalese government to help protect the rights of the child - including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, numerous International Labour Organisation directives and a Children's Act enacted in 1992 - the violations continue.

About 32,000 children work in Nepal's stone quarries, some as young as five years old. Dawn to dusk can be a typical working day and according to the charity Concern-Nepal, nearly 70% of children work 10-hour days or more. Most are paid by the quantity of gravel crushed into a doko (basket). The figure varies but the children earn on average about 25p per day, about one quarter of an adult wage.

Concern-Nepal's Kathmandu office the charity's director Bijaya Sainju explains that children's duties include excavating stone, loading trucks for transport and crushing boulders into gravel. "They inhale dust with every breath and repetitive hammering is jarring to bones and muscles. Bonded labour is common so some children don't even get paid as they are employed to pay off family debts," he says. Related medical problems including serious respiratory complaints, backache, visual defects and joint and muscle pain.
Most are not even afforded minimal protective gear and there is a high risk of accidents that can cause permanent injuries or even death. Sainju says that children have been swept away quarrying beside rivers while others have died falling from cliffs.
Out of 600 quarry children interviewed by Concern-Nepal, 94% had witnessed workplace accidents. More than half had injured their hands with hammers, while 18% had hurt themselves falling while carrying loads of stones. First aid treatment, says Sainju, is non-existent, likewise the provision of medical insurance. Not one single child interviewee had received medical attention from a doctor, nor do most seek hospital treatment when injuries occur because of the high costs involved. For Dalit children, the "lowest of the low" in Nepal's caste system and people referred to as the "Untouchables", life is even harder as they suffer harassment from both employers and fellow workers. Many are also sexually abused. "Some 34% of quarry children are Dalits and because of the social stigma many will not report abuse in fear of retribution," Sainju explains.

Shortly before Christmas one of the UK's leading stone importers warned that children as young as five are routinely being used to quarry stone for the booming British patio and landscaping market. Marshalls PLC, which has a factory in Falkirk and is one of Britain's biggest building materials companies, said that large sections of the gardening and construction industry were turning a blind eye to the use of child labour in quarries in order to maximise profits. "We want the industry to face facts and we want consumers to start asking questions. If you want to re-do the patio, then stop and ask yourself where that stone is coming from," said Marshalls' director Chris Harrop. Similar types of labour abuse were uncovered during an audit by Marshalls. According to Marshalls, only about one-third of the 200,000 tons of patio stone coming into the UK from India each year was sourced ethically, with the rest often being produced in atrocious conditions. "We were appalled by the child labour problem in Rajasthan. You could see people on site without hard hats, no boots. Suppliers didn't keep employment records.There were no first aid facilities. It was an utter mess," says Rory Kendrick, the director in charge of Marshalls' stone importing operation.

India's quarry industry employs up to 100,000 children and supplies almost three-quarters of the imported stone used in British patios and garden features. Indian sandstone from Rajasthan is among the most popular, since it most closely matches the yellow York stone that was traditionally mined in England's Pennines, but has now been all but exhausted through demand.
As in Nepal, international treaties and domestic laws prohibit child labour but are rarely enforced.

Report from the Sunday Herald