Describe the causes of poverty in the developing world.

GCSE Religious Studies (Philosophy & Ethics)

Joanna Lowe Page 5/10/2007

GCSE Religious Studies: Coursework

Religion, Wealth and Poverty

Part A

Describe the causes of poverty in the developing world

Poverty is an issue subject to controversy due to the fact that it is rife in many of the developing countries of the world today. A definition of the world poverty is that it is a condition of having little or no wealth, indigence, destitution and relative lack of money or material possessions. In the world today, there are two main types of poverty that occur – these are absolute and relative poverty.

Absolute poverty occurs where people have insufficient incomes to gain subsistence standards of nutrition, lack of access to a basic health care system and education. It is usually calculated by estimating whether a household has a sufficient income, including its own production to acquire enough food for a healthy diet to live a healthy life. The precise “poverty line” is unavoidably discretionary because people differ in how much food they need and the distribution of food between the home can also be varied.

The other version of poverty is relative poverty, which occurs where people fall considerably below average ethics of the society in which they live. Unfortunately, an income-based measure of poverty doesn’t manage to capture the fundamental dimensions of a human’s welfare, for example, families with no access to health or education services may also be poor even if they manage to make ends meet when it comes to food.

Poverty has many causes, many of them very basic and some experts have suggested that the world has too many people, too few jobs and not enough food. These basic grounds happen to be very complex and are difficult to obliterate. It is recognised that both the causes and the effects of poverty combine, for example, the factors that cause people to be poor also triggers other factors which keeps them poor.

There are four main causes of poverty in the world, these being wars, natural disasters, debt and cash crops. In many undeveloped countries, there have ...

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There are four main causes of poverty in the world, these being wars, natural disasters, debt and cash crops. In many undeveloped countries, there have been sufferings of great wars and in areas such as Africa, European empires caused many civil wars in the early nineteenth century. Due to this, various African races were united into one country although half of their race was in a separate country. When these countries managed to gain independence, they were still only established as counterfeit countries and one race was usually mistreated by the reigning race of that time, unsurprisingly, leading to many outbreaks of civil war. Lesser economically developed countries can also suffer from wars between countries, for example, Ethiopia and Somalia, as well as certain wars induced by degradation, corruption and political oppositions, for example, Mozambique, Angola and Guatemala. Due to factors such as civil wars, political exile and natural disasters, many inhabitants of developing countries become refugees.

Many lesser-developed countries frequently suffer from natural disasters due to their situated areas in the world. The most common natural disasters that occur repeatedly are floods, earthquakes and droughts. Unfortunately for these countries, due to where they are situated, they are more badly hit by these natural disasters than anywhere else in the world. Due to the fact that the countries are still developing when compared to developed countries, an earthquake or a flood would have a much greater impact due to their lack of education about what to do in an emergency and lack of preparation for such disasters occurring. The impact of a disaster such as an earthquake or a flood would not only destroy the homes of the inhabitants of the country, but would demolish any farmland that these people would greatly depend upon as well as killing many people. Due to the hot climates that many lesser-developed countries suffer from, farmland can also be affected, as if there is no rain then their crops will not grow, causing further insufficiency.

Debt is another major issue that lesser-developed countries have to contend with, another asset to the provocation of poverty. To even begin to develop, the majority of lesser-developed countries have to take out loans from the banks of the already established countries of the world. Unfortunately, for those in debt, they have to take out loans at high interest rates and those countries that are even lesser developed than others may end up paying more interest than the amount of the loan they took out in the first place. An appalling example of this cycle was in the seventies, when the country of Chile took out a loan of 3.9 billion US dollars. Due to their inability to pay this money back instantaneously, by 1982, Chile had paid over 12.8 billion US dollars in interest but had still not managed to pay back their original loan.

To help aid this immense debt problem that many lesser-developed countries are suffering from there is the issue of cash crops, which are crops grown to be sold rather than consumed. Such examples of cash crops are the crops grown of cotton, coffee, tea and tobacco, largely grown in the developing world. Haplessly, many people are now starving due to the fact their land is being used to grow crops that are being sold on rather than for food to feed themselves on.

Although these four factors are the most widespread in the world today, there are many other issues concerning the growth in poverty that contributes greatly to this maturing problem. Problems such as lack of education, lack of clean water, the spreading of disease and the fact that there is a lower life expectancy in these lesser-developed countries leading to larger high-birth rates.

To add to these difficulties, there is also the poverty cycle which dominates the majority of the lives of those who live in the developing world. It all begins when a family is already suffering from minor poverty, then they have a baby. This baby becomes malnourished, leading to a lesser resistance to disease and then increasing the infant mortality rate so the parents then have more children. The issue of having more children causes a further strain on the lack of food, they resort to drinking unclean water, disease becomes rife and therefore these children are less able to go out to work due to their suffering from disease which could lead to their death. The poverty cycle is that of a vicious one as it is impossible to break.

In conclusion, the main causes of poverty in the developing world today are the frequency of natural disasters and their devastating effects, debt, civil wars, cash crops and the poverty cycle. Due to entities such as the poverty cycle, the poor become increasingly poorer whilst the rich gain affluence, and so the gap between the two widens constantly.