by VIJAY PRASHAD
PHOTO/Lecercle/Flickr
To end global poverty, we have to end global capitalism.
In December, the United Nations sounded the alarm. Releasing its report on the World Social Situation of 2013, entitled “Inequality Matters,” the UN warned that inequality was deepening, and that no country was immune from the contagion. In the Global South, the hemorrhaging of incomes among working people has been about as dramatic as in the Global North. If there is one social process that the planet shares, it is global inequality.
How does the UN explain this rise in inequality? What the data suggests, the UN reports, is that “inequality has increased mainly because the wealthiest individuals have become wealthier, both in developed and developing countries.” The top 1% has siphoned off the social wealth for its private gain, and the bottom 99% — which produced the social wealth – has to live off its crumbs. What’s clear is that capitalism is incapable of ending poverty or substantially reducing inequality.
Word comes from China and India that they have dramatically reduced poverty. Take the case of India. Based on official data on poverty, things appear better now than before. But the data is based on a reassessment of the indicators.
The government created a new measure – one is poor if one consumes less than twenty-four pounds of grain per month. The UN World Food Program asked quite simply if it was reasonable to assume that the person who had twenty-five pounds of grain per month was not poor.
Let us remain at the level of calorie consumption. In 2009, almost three quarters of the Indian population consumed less than 2,100 calories per day. This percentage is up from 64 percent in 2005 and 58 per cent in 1984. So caloric intake in India has declined for very many more people during its relatively high growth rates.
A study released earlier this year indicates that 680 million Indians live in absolute deprivation. There are thus more people living in extreme poverty in India than in sub-Saharan Africa. This is all despite the comparatively high growth rates and the rhetoric of India Shining. So high growth rates are not necessarily going to end inequality.
A standard way to measure poverty is to calculate what percentage of a country’s population lives on less than $2 per day, factoring in purchasing power parity. In three African countries – Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Liberia – more than 90 percent of the population gets by on under $2 per day.
Jacobin for more
(via 3 Quarks Daily)