The terrible realities of poverty

For many months now the media spotlight has every now and then paused on the drought disaster on the Horn of Africa, where hundreds of thousands of Somalis (among other nationalities) are battling to survive a severe food shortage.

But they are not the only people starving and I thought it appropriate for us to consider some startling facts that I have mentioned before in this column and which I feel are worth repeating over and over again in these very trying times.

In the time it has taken you to read this sentence so far, one child somewhere in the world has died from hunger. As you ponder the injustice and inhumanity of this tragedy another two children have died agonisingly from empty stomachs.

In the time it takes to do the weekly shopping and wonder whether to spend R100 plus on a leg of lamb for the family or just choose a cheaper chicken, some 1200 children will have died without ever having known what lamb or chicken tastes like.

And in the time it takes to finish a lavish meal in a restaurant, even if you pass on the dessert, another 2000 children will have died not knowing a thing about pudding other than that those a little older than themselves would literally kill for it.

Every six seconds of every day, a child dies of hunger. In the time it takes to eat a chocolate bar, to argue over petty problems with those we love, to decide on whether to sell shares or buy a new motor car, children, no different from our own except for being much, much thinner, are dying horrible, painful deaths.

According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation, half the world’s population is obese. This does not for a minute suggest that half the world’s population has too much to eat. Obesity, according to the UN, is more often than not a consequence of malnutrition.

So why do we keep hearing about food surpluses and gluts? Sure, we also hear about food shortages.

The problem, according to the UN, is that the bulk of the world’s resources are continually being funnelled to a tiny minority of its inhabitants. It is something that has been happening for eons but which has now grown to cataclysmic proportions.

Equally, the gap between rich and poor has been widening alarmingly. The difference in earnings between the average company chief executive and one of its workers has risen from six times to somewhere in the region of 150 times within a decade.

In an effort to assuage the demands of shareholders in free market economies the world over, boards of directors are having to pay more and more for executive skills with some CEOs earning more money a minute than most workers earn in a lifetime.

A former CEO of the New York Stock Exchange earned more than R1 billion a year in salary and bonuses—surely an act of remuneration madness?

What’s to be done? Well the only answer, I believe, came from Pope Benedict. He suggested quite simply and emphatically that wealth needed to be shared. Not as an act of charity but as an act of responsibility.

The trouble is that those top 4% of the world’s population who own 96% of the world’s resources are basically motivated and somewhat obsessed by the accumulation of material wealth, so there is very little chance that anyone, including the pope, will have much success in persuading them to part with what they see as their hard-earned income.

Human nature is such that even if one takes into account that there are many millions of wealthy people around today who actively support charities, there is also an atmosphere of insecurity—so much so that a lot of wealthy people who have far too much money, are very reluctant to give away any surpluses simply because in the rather brutal ebb and flow of modern economies, jobs, positions and status hangs on a thread. Riches gained over a lifetime can disappear in an instant.

From a practical point of view it is far too optimistic to expect individuals to solve the problem of poverty and the death of so many children. Another 3000 of whom have died, incidentally, since you started reading this column.

Perhaps the most practical way of solving this problem is to appeal not to corporate conscience but rather to corporate strategy.

Corporations the world over need to be reminded that with the way things are going now, the more the gap between rich and poor increases, the more likely it is that there will be fewer and fewer people who can actually afford to buy the zillions of consumer products being manufactured.

And that the only way global market economies can be sustained would be by increasing the active consumer pool through eliminating poverty.