For the rich, any contingency that they themselves might sink into poverty is so remote that it need not enter their minds. They are also in the position of being bountiful; so that, curiously, while they may be genuinely concerned about the existence of the poor, poverty is also a source of self-esteem. Do not be shocked by this remark; without the philanthropy of wealth, the manner in which the world has dealt with, alleviated, poverty up till now could not have been maintained at all. But this over-spill of wealth is too sporadic, too personally dependent on what aspects of poverty, piece-meal, donors happen to favour, to be a solution.
I read recently that if an amount equal to the combined wealth of the ten richest individuals in the world could be made available annually, the problem of the world’s 1.3 billion living in extreme poverty could be solved by the end of the century. And it seems one of the listed twenty richest (Ted Turner of CNN) has heard the message or taken the hint; and his remark that his one-billion dollar donation made available over ten years represents a mere nine months of his income gives credence to the incredible claim that the wealth of ten individuals is so great that it could solve the problem of poverty. Well, one cannot expect these individuals to give up their worldly goods in toto for the world, any more than any of us, I suspect, are prepared to sacrifice our — we consider — reasonable privileges entirely for those who have none. What is asked is for those who possess and control great wealth to look at the political and economic structures in their countries which have made that wealth possible and yet have created conditions that make philanthropy necessary — political and economic regimes that have failed to establish the means, in adequate pay for work, in education and training, in environment, by which people may provide for themselves in self-respect and dignity. That is the thinking that will face the facts of redistribution of the world’s wealth.
The wealthy and powerful who control the consortiums and international companies, and the government agencies who plan with them, need to take responsible heed of the emphasis placed by the United Nations Development Programme on ‘putting people at the centre of development’; on the concept of development enterprises as not only or even primarily advancing the credit balance of a country and providing X number of jobs, but as the instigation of a series of social consequences that will affect the implicated community in many ways. What may put pay in the pockets of the income poor this year may be off-set, over their lifetime, by destroying their environment. Development becomes a dangerous form of social engineering if it discounts the long-term effects on social cohesion. Profit and loss, in the book-keeping of the eradication of poverty, will be a calculation of how many people’s daily lives can be entered, in the long term, on the credit column.
For the broad middle-class, which includes the skilled working-class in many countries, the possibility of descending to poverty is subliminally present. Their concept of poverty is tinged by fear, as well as by concern for those who suffer it: there but for the grace of God go I. Civil conflict, a change of government, inflation, a form of affirmative action whether on principle of colour, race, or simply replacement of older employees with the young — these contingencies threaten middle-class safety with its home ownership, its insurance policies and pension funds. All the things that poverty strips one of; all the safety-nets the poor do not have. . Poverty is regarded as a blow of fate that just might come. Alternatively, in defensive rationalisation, whose fault is poverty, aside from national aleatory conditions? Perhaps, since the middle-class by and large is industrious and ambitious — and has the possibility of advancement in terms of money and status, having a base to start from which the poor have not — the middle-class often feels that it is lack of will, initiative, and commitment to work as they themselves do, that keeps the poor in that state.
The basic image of poverty is the man begging in the street; the conclusion: surely there’s something else he could do? Unemployment is suspect as lack of ability; and well it may be in many developing countries where lack of skills makes people literally unemployable, unable to be active in sectors where employment would be available. But what has to be realized is how that lack comes about in the general disempowerment of poverty itself. To abolish the spectre of the man begging in the street, the woman huddled on her park-bench home, the children staring from a refugee camp, is first to make the effort to understand what factors create this disempowerment.
How do victims themselves perceive their poverty?
They live it; they know it best, beyond all outside concepts.
What, apart from the survival needs of food and shelter, do they feel they are most deprived of? Researchers moving among them have learned much that is often ignored, such as the perception of women that, as those who with their children suffer most, attention to their advancement should take more than a marginal ‘special interest’ place in transformation of the lives of the disadvantaged in general. Recent advice to the Hong Kong meeting of the World Bank and the IMF was that some fifteen thousand bankers, finance ministers, and representatives of development business attending ‘might do well to re-dedicate themselves to slowing population growth through more attention to reproductive health, education for girls and employment for women’.
Consultation with how communities in poverty see themselves in relation to the ordinary fullness of life other communities take for granted is now recognized by research as integral to harnessing the negatives of social resentment and passivity into vital partnership for change. It is the fortunate world outside dollar-a-day subsistence that needs to begin to see the impoverished as our necessary partners in world survival, partners to be listened to in respect of the components of what a decent life is. It is the privileged world that needs to come to the realization that a ‘decent life’ cannot be truly lived by any of us while one-quarter of the developing world’s population exists in poverty.
If economic poverty began when some had surplus production and some did not, and nothing much has changed in principle, the second cause of poverty as a phenomenon of human history is war, and nothing much has changed there, either. Wars, social conflict, whether at international, national, or inter-ethnic level, still produce hunger and homelessness, the prime characteristics of poverty, and now, it seems, on a rolling action scale, spreading as a deadly pandemic from one territory to another. The eradication of poverty implies a hand-in-hand relation with agencies of the non-violent resolution of conflict. The peace-keeping, peace-promoting work of the United Nations and other formations, fraught with difficulty, danger, and frustration, and controversial as it is, must be seen as a vital component of the decade’s aim. The Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, has put the truth succinctly: ‘Without peace development is not possible; without development peace is not possible.’
The violence of nature — flood, drought, and earthquake — is another factor that has caused poverty since ancient times, and that is something which is not within human capability to prevent, as wars are. But the violence perpetrated by humankind on nature is increasingly one of the causes of poverty. The destruction of indigenous forests, the pollution of oceans, the leaching out of the land by indiscriminate use of chemicals; these take away from communities their livelihood. The leakage of nuclear waste makes water unpotable and, as the people of South-East Asia have so recently experienced, the hellish miasma from burned-out trees makes the very air unbreathable. The problem of poverty cannot be solved while the earth and its oceans that feed us are abused by ruthless government planning and blinkered human greed.