poverty

let them eat cake

antarchi's picture
Submitted by antarchi on July 1, 2007 - 03:57.
in

How much of the world do we eat?

pieces of cake

(Click on the diagram for a slightly better image)

A bit crude since it uses GDP figures, and mostly from 2003/2004. Populations scaled down by a lot: each person on the diagram represents 110,038,757* people in real life. Oceania excluded.

Figures taken from GeoHive

Roughly as follows:

China: $ 7,505,600,000,000
Asia (without China): $ 13,998,897,000,000
Africa: $ 2,092,300,800,000
Northern America: $ 12,776,478,300,000
Latin America and the Caribbean: $ 4,299,879,000,000
Europe: $ 14,244,444,000,000
Oceania: $ 737,226,300,000
World Total: $ 55,654,825,400,000

* Chosen so that the number of people on the picture was 60. Total world popn. is approx 6.6 billion

Pete

antarchi's picture
Submitted by antarchi on June 20, 2007 - 02:39.
in

I had been wondering whether, if those in severe poverty were on our doorstep - slept outside no. 11, went through the dustbins at the end of our tidy drives for the scraps we throw away - whether then the Great British Public, those blessed britains, would sit up. I had been thinking that the problem is that they are out of sight, if we want them to be - and mostly we do want it. We don't have to be confronted by the moral burden of someone - thousands, millions - suffering, starving while we buy ourselves a new CD, ipod, mobile phone, computer, car, holiday ...

But then there's Pete. Pete sits outside Sainsbury's every day, that's his patch. He's clean, come off drugs, has a 1 year old daughter, sells the Big Issue, even has the prospect of a roof over his head. Today he was crying outside Sainsbury's. Sitting on the pavement with his head in his hands, hiding his tears, while people pushed past him in shining new clothes and with bulging shopping bags. He hadn't sold anything today and if he doesn't have the money for the shelter, he gets pushed down the list for housing - his chances fade.

A tiny fraction of those bulging shopping bags would get him in there.

capital flight

antarchi's picture
Submitted by antarchi on June 22, 2008 - 13:42.
in

Intimately linked to the debt crisis is the enormous burden that capital flight from Africa has imposed on this poorest continent. Recent work by Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce of the University of Massachusetts reaches the conclusion that Africa’s wealthy have, during the period from 1970 to 2004, exported a total of $420 billion, nearly double the total debt burden of Sub-Saharan Africa in 2004, which in 2004 was $227 billion. Most of this money was not acquired legally. With the interest this capital could have accumulated over the 35 year period, the authors estimate the total loss to Africa at $607 billion.

not thinking the human costs

antarchi's picture
Submitted by antarchi on June 7, 2008 - 16:16.
in

The social consequences of structural adjustment [imposed by the WTO] cum agricultural dumping were predictable. According to Oxfam, the number of Africans living on less than a dollar a day more than doubled to 313 million people between 1981 and 2001 – or 46% of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty, as well as severely weakening the continent’s agricultural base and consolidating import dependency, was hard to deny. As the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa admitted, “We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming.”

worst low pay rate in Europe

antarchi's picture
Submitted by antarchi on May 5, 2008 - 11:12.
in
Low pay is not just a problem of an extreme underclass or of migrants; it is endemic across the country. One in seven of all working households are poor; one fifth of all workers, 5.3 million people, are paid less than £6.67 an hour (two thirds of the median), the worst low-pay rate of any in Europe. It works out at less than a £12,000 salary. In some regions, the proportion of low-paid is well over 25%, while in some constituencies (in Wales, Birmingham, the West Midlands, even the rural West Country) it is comfortably over 40%.

we're getting greedier

antarchi's picture
Submitted by antarchi on February 23, 2008 - 02:46.
in

According to the 1999 Human Development Report, in 1820 the fifth of the world's population living in the world's richest countries collectively received three times the combined income of the fifth of the world's population living in the poorest countries. A century later this raio had increased to 11 to 1. By 1960 it was 30 to 1; by 1990, 60 to 1; and by 1997, 74 to 1.

— Peter Singer

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