Introduction - The 'old' evils of poverty, hunger and inequality

The portrayal of evil by western leaders and media ignores the true evils that devastate people globally – the triad of poverty, hunger and broader inequality. In this first blog for Politico, Justin Frewen gives a brief insight into the scale of global poverty.

Writing in the aftermath of World War II, the philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that “[t]he problem of evil [would] be the fundamental question of post-war intellectual life in Europe”. For a considerable period Arendt’s prediction failed to become a reality. Although the horror of the Nazi regime left an indelible scar on the European psyche, the usage of evil as a concept declined. It has only been in the past couple of decades with internationally condemned outrages such as the Rwandan genocide, Srebenica and 9/11 that evil has re-emerged at the forefront of international debate.

George Bush and Tony Blair believed in evils (and “evil-doers”) that represented a threat to the existence and survival not only of their respective nations but of humanity as a whole. In his Noble Peace Prize address, Barack Obama returned to this theme when he declared in his efforts to justify his actions in Afghanistan and elsewhere: “For make no mistake:  Evil does exist in the world.” However real or fictional these alleged threats to civilisation are, other evils continue to blight the lives of billions, of people today. Arguably, the three most malevolent of these are poverty, hunger and inequality. 

Debates abound as to how poverty might best be measured; the fact that 2.6 billion live under US$2 a day gives some indication as to global poverty. Such deprivation devastates the quality of life of those trapped in poverty. Indeed, it greatly diminishes the chance of living at all: according to the UN Millennium Project 2005 report, the life expectancy of those living in households suffering from extreme poverty is only 40 years or half the 80 years people in the ‘developed’.

For children, particularly, the situation is grim, as over 100 out of every 1,000 die before their first birthday with some 10.6 million children dying before the age of five.  

In spite of the much lauded technological developments and the possibilities they purportedly provide for people everywhere to “plug and play” in the new “Flat World” economy, as claimed by writers such as the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, the world was confronted with a worldwide pandemic of hunger at the start of the new millennium. Up to 790 million people lacked the most basic food security with some 284 million of these in South Asia, 242 million in Southeast Asia, 180 million in sub-Saharan Africa, 53 million in Latin America and 33 million in the Near East and North Africa. Given the increase in wealth and economic developments of the previous century, the deaths of 20,000 people a day from the ‘effects of hunger’ must surely rank amongst the greatest outrages of our current era.

Even more shameful is the fact that the hundreds of millions wasting away from hunger-related deficiencies live in a ‘world of plenty’ where agriculture produces enough food to provide everyone with over 2,700 calories per day, well in excess of the average requirement of 2,200 to 2,400.

Allied to these modern plagues of hunger and poverty are the staggering levels of inequality that result in highly reduced life spans and opportunities for those who live in the most deprived areas of our planet.

According to the 2005 UNDP HDR, in 53 of the 73 countries for which there are accessible data, containing over 80 percent of the world’s population, there was an increase in inequality with only 9 countries, responsible for some 4% of the globe’s total population, seeing these disparities contract. Furthermore, this situation held true for both high and low-growth countries as well as across all regions.

The widening gap in inequality is not only limited to the international stage but closely mirrored within states themselves. In the US, for example, 2003 saw the upper 20% of households earn 49.7% of all income before adjustments for household size and 39.6% of income after. According to the Gini index (which measures equality on a 0 to 1 scale with 0 representing perfect equality and 1 perfect inequality), inequality has risen considerably both between individuals and households. Whereas in 1967 the US Gini coefficient was 31.4 by 2006 it had risen to 47, though it did decline slightly to 46.3 by 2007.

In effect, today’s disparities in wealth and income are unprecedented in human history. They have become almost grotesque in their magnitude and the manner in which they condemn so many worldwide to live in squalor without any feasible possibility of enjoying the fruits of humanity’s economic, cultural and social achievements.

Sadly, it is highly unlikely that the evils of poverty, hunger and inequality are likely to disappear anytime in the near future. Despite international aid initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) which aims at tackling the problems of poverty and ‘underdevelopment’ globally, the outlook is bleak. While progress has been made on certain fronts, for instance towards universal primary school enrolment, others such as the targeted reduction in child mortality have proved far more elusive. Furthermore, the current economic crisis has had a disproportionate impact on those already most impoverished. According to the World Bank’s 2009 Global Monitoring Report, the current international recession is reversing progress made in reducing the number of chronically hungry people, as their number soared from 850 million in 2007 to 960 million in 2008, with a continued rise to over 1 billion expected in 2009.

The urgent need to tackle the evils of poverty, hunger and inequality both in the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds are obvious. However, political priority of highlighting “evil-doers” and not the underlying causes diverts the attention, efforts and resources required to successfully tackle poverty, hunger and inequality. Indeed, in the last decade the US has consistently flouted its promises on Overseas Development Aid, spending more on the “wars on terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan, the total cost of which approaches $1 trillion.

The sustainability research organisation, Worldwatch pointed out in their 2005 State of the World report, it is these ‘old evils’ of poverty, hunger and inequality that are in many cases the root causes of the evil referred to by politicians such as Bush and Blair. To truly make the world a safer and more humane place, poverty, hunger and inequality are the real evils that should be eliminated.

(In the following pieces, I will examine in more detail the evils of poverty, hunger and inequality the major global program for tackling these evils, the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and conclude with a piece discussing our moral responsibility to tackle these ‘evils’ and how we might go about this).