Guyana the wider world by Dr Clive Thomas
Stabroek News
March 25, 2001

This week we leave the examination of global food security for the time being, to engage another issue that directly relates to it - globalisation and poverty. If, as we saw, in the New Millennium food security constitutes a global problem of huge proportions that of poverty is far greater. Realistically, food security might well be considered as only one of several sub-sets of the problem of global poverty. This should give some idea at the outset of the scope of the phenomenon we are about to consider.

Size of the problem

To put some order to the mass of material on this topic, the first task I will attempt is to offer some idea of the magnitude of the problem being addressed here. In the development literature two crude benchmarks of global poverty are used. One is whether a person lives on an income of less than US$1 a day. This is considered the amount of money required to ensure minimal physical survival. Below this amount, persons would be destitute, consume inadequate nutrition, and have no secure access to housing or basic services like water, sanitation, health, and education. More often than not they are also unemployed or survive in the desperately poor informal and "hustle" economy.

The other benchmark is US$2 per day. At this level, survival is marginally better. We will return to how and why these benchmarks are used. But accepting them as reasonable for present purposes, what do we find? Today out of a world population of 6 billion persons, as many as 2.8 billion live on less than US$2 per day and 1.2 billion on less than US$1 per day. This happens in the context of a cruel paradox, which is, that globalisation has already generated unprecedented wealth for some countries.

Inequality

This poverty is distributed very unevenly across the globe. Of the 1.2 billion persons who live on less than US$ 1 a day, 44 percent are found in South Asia, 24 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa, and 23 percent in East Asia. In the Middle East and North Africa, the figure is less than one percent (0.5). In Europe and Central Asia the figure is two percent, while in Latin America and the Caribbean the figure is 6.5 percent. Between 1987 and 1998 the total number of persons living on less than US$1 per day fell in East Asia and the Middle East/North Africa. However, it rose in Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. The largest increase was in Sub-Saharan Africa.

More details on the above can be found in the recent World Bank' s World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty. This Report has two distinguished predecessors with the same theme, namely the 1980 and 1990 Reports. For those interested in this subject, this document is worth looking at carefully, as it presents very useful data on global poverty. For example, it contains data which show that in the high-income countries less than one child in 100 dies before reaching the age of 5 years. In the poorest countries, the number is five times larger (5 per cent). Relatedly, in high-income countries, less than 5 percent of children under 5 are malnourished. But, in the poorest countries, this figure is ten times as large - 50 percent.

In most cases the causes of death of children are linked to malnutrition and/or poverty. Inescapably, this is because poverty means inadequate food, poor sanitation, exposure to diseases, little or no education, and lack of assets or credit-worthiness. Most poor people are also "voiceless" and "powerless" within the structures of authority, power, and wealth within their societies. They are also the most vulnerable in society when economic reverses occur, natural disaster strikes, or violence erupts.

The World Bank Report also indicates that the wealth generated by globalisation is very unevenly distributed. Indeed, it is getting worse at a rapid rate. The Report estimated an enormous gap in 1998 between the average income in the richest 20 countries and that in the poorest 20. The former was 37 times larger than the latter. Moreover, the gap had doubled in the past 40 years. This picture of growing inequality in the global distribution of incomes therefore patterns what we saw earlier of regional inequalities in the number of people living with less than US$1.

The best and worst of times

This stark feature of a global economy with growing poverty existing alongside a situation in which many countries have made major gains and advances is cause for great concern. Despite the increase in the absolute numbers of the poor in most regions, except for sub-Saharan Africa and the former socialist countries of Europe, the proportion of the population in poverty is declining. In addition, on average the world's population lives longer and enjoys better health than ever before.

Globally, adult literacy has risen from less than 50% to about 70% over the past two decades. In developing countries, infant death rates have also been cut by more than half in this period. And, we also saw when we examined global food security that, on average, global consumption of calories per day has risen. Indeed the truth is that over the last half of the 20th century, more people have "escaped" poverty than in the previous five centuries.

There is little comfort however from only seeing the glass as half full. It is also half-empty. These data cited here should not give rise to a false sense of security. Instead it should impress on us the complex character of the phenomenon we are addressing. Poverty and inequality in the distribution of the benefits and costs of globalisation are two opposite sides of the same coin. In the "best" of times therefore, we find that more people suffer from the "worst" of times, than at any other historical time.

Next week we take a closer look at how this poverty is measured, and we shall use Guyana as an example.