Absolute and Relative Poverty
Absolute and Relative Poverty
In between the years 1978 and 1980 politics from all over the world came together to see if they could help the world's poverty. A man called Willy Brandt the groups chairman wrote an introduction saying:
'Our report is based on what appears to be the simplest common interest. Mankind wants to survive and, one might even add, has the moral obligations to survive. This not only raises the traditional questions of peace and war, but also how to over come world hunger, mass misery and alarming differences between the living conditions of rich and poor ... we want to emphasize our belief that the two decades ahead of us maybe fateful to mankind'
(North-South: A Programme for Survival, 1980)
The best way to show how the world divides into rich and poor is the North-South line. In the North part of the equator (including Australia) are the rich, or developed countries; these countries include North America, Europe, Russia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. In the southern part of the equator indicates the poor, or Third World countries (also known as underdeveloped or developing countries). These countries are most of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Here are a few facts and figures about the differences in the two sectors:
North
* 25% of the world population,
* Earns 80% of the world's income,
* A person is averaged to live up to or more than 70 years,
* Most people are educated at a primary or secondary school,
* Over 90% of the worlds manufacturing industry,
* About 96% of the world's spending on research and development,
* It dominates most of the international economic system and institutions of trade, money and finance.
South
* 75% of the world's population,
* Earns 20% of the world's income,
* A person is averaged to live up to 50 years,
* 20% or more people suffer from hunger and malnutrition.
* 50% of the people don't have a chance of getting a formal education.
In the Third World countries most people live in 'Absolute Poverty'. Here is a quote of a definition of 'Absolute Poverty':
'A condition of life so characterized by malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, high mortality rate and low life expectancy as to be beneath any reasonable definition of human decency'
(Robert Macnamara)
Absolute poverty is a trap in which nearly a fifth of the world's population (around one billon people) are imprisoned. 90% of these people live in the countryside, in which they own small farms or are landless labourers. In the North many people are worrying about if they are eating healthy diets, but in the South 35,000 people are dieing of starvation every day. This counts up to a person dieing around every minute. The reasons for this absolute poverty are because the people who are trapped have lack of education, food, health care, employment, shelter, and safe water. These six things are the six basic human rights:
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Food - Food helps us to grow and develop, and without the right amount of food or the right kinds of food, people can suffer malnutrition, which can result to death. At least one eighth of the world's population doesn't have enough food to eat.
'When you have gathered your grapes once, do not go back over the vines a second time ... they are for the foreigners, orphans and widows.'
(Deuteronomy 24:21)
Water - Clean, safe drinking water is essential to life. It is vital for the ...
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Jemma Able Page 1 5/2/2007
Food - Food helps us to grow and develop, and without the right amount of food or the right kinds of food, people can suffer malnutrition, which can result to death. At least one eighth of the world's population doesn't have enough food to eat.
'When you have gathered your grapes once, do not go back over the vines a second time ... they are for the foreigners, orphans and widows.'
(Deuteronomy 24:21)
Water - Clean, safe drinking water is essential to life. It is vital for the control of diseases such as diarrhoea, typhoid and cholera. The World Health Organisation estimates that 80% of all sickness and disease can be attributed to inadequate water and sanitation. Such diseases cause estimate of 50 million deaths a year. Children in seven in the developing world die before its fifth birthday. Most of these deaths could have been prevented.
Housing - Housing provides us with protection and security. Today, as more and more people in the Third World Countries are drawn to cities in search of work and a better life, overcrowding becoming a major problem.
'Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for their health and well being, including housing.'
(UN Declaration of Human Rights)
Health - Health care is important to 'ensure a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or illness' (World Health Organisation). This requires adequate food, access to safe drinking water, sewage disposal, health, education and care. Yet 70% of the Third World population do not have access to organised health care and 90% of child deaths are linked with malnutrition, contagious diseases and unhygienic living conditions.
'Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give.'
(Mathew 10:8)
Work - Work can give us identity, security and the means to meet many of our other basic needs. Today, world unemployment stands at around 500 million/300 million of these are in the Third World.
'All of us should eat and drink, and enjoy what we have worked for. It is gods gift.'
(Ecclesiastes 3:13)
Education - We take education for granted, but in the poorest countries in the world only four adults in ten can read or write, and as less as one in four children go to secondary school.
'Every child shall be given an education, which will promote his general culture, and enable him on a bases of equal opportunity to develop his abilities, his individual judgment and his sense of moral and social responsibility and to become a useful member of sociality.'
(UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child)
The reason that the poverty has not been improved greatly is because most Southern Governments are unlikely to change their politics because their resources are too scarce.
The majority of people living in the developing countries survive under an income of £70 a year. 825 million adults are illiterate in the world, the mainstream are women living in the Third World countries. 800 million people have no access to health care, and 450 million people of those 800 are mentally or physically disabled.
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An example of Absolute poverty is in the Southwest of Africa, here a country that is in constant war between two groups both waiting to take over the country, called Angola. Many years before the war the country was wealthy, but because of the war many people have come from the country into the city because the enemy has destroyed the farms. The overcrowding of the city has lead to poverty and it could not be stopped because the Government that owns the country are selling all the food and money on weapons, etc, for the war.
The increase of population has had a bad effect on the country. All of the refuges have flooded the streets, cooking, sleeping, and bring up children on them. Some of them were able to escape the streets and went to empty buildings; one of these buildings was called 'Lagoon Tower'.
Lagoon Tower was a building made buy the Portuguese, who fled before the war started. They were building Lagoon Tower and never completed it. There are 20 floors in the building, which has no clean water supply, no electricity, no wall on the outside of the building, and has no sewage system. Their is a life shaft going down the centre of the building were people dispose their waste, this waste all collects at the bottom. This waste flows slowly into the water surrounding the building, where the people collect their drinking water. The women collect the water in large containers and have to carry it up the stairs of the building to their room.
The people who live in the tower try to make a living, for example an older sister of a family containing her younger brother and sister makes bread, which she sells, at the market. However this is still not able to provide enough money to support them. Many people are trying to flee from the country but when they arrive at the other country they send them back.
Many people are suffering from absolute poverty, but many people in the developed countries also have problems with poverty, this is called relative poverty. Relative poverty is like absolute poverty but the people who suffer from it have has more than two of the basic human rights. To cover this subject I will be using the United Kingdom as an example.
According to the Low Income Families (LIF) statistics from the 1992 in the UK 13,680,000 people, 24% of the UK's population were living in poverty. Of these 8% of them were living below the poverty line. Some suggest that the huge figures in poverty are due to over generous poverty lines. The evidence suggests that the level of income measured by both poverty lines is unquestionable meagre in a regulated society. Study, which has looked at the cost of a modest-but-adequate lifestyle suggests that the 13-14 millions people who are living in poverty according to either definition are forgoing many of the things which are taken for granted.
Poverty is measured by stretching back to the last century. Here we draw on two different measures of poverty, Low Income Families (LIF) and Households Below Average Income (HBAI). LIF shows the number of living on or below the income support level. HBAI shows the number of individuals living on or below 50% of the average income. Both measures look at income after housing costs are deducted.
Family Type
Income support measure
(After housing costs)
HBAI measure
(After housing costs)
Single Person
£42.45 (1)
£61.00
Couple
£66.60 (2)
£110.00
Lone parent with 1 children under 11
£71.05 (3)
£79.00 (4)
Couple with 2 children under 11
£105.00
£139.00
Notes: 1 = single person aged 25 or over.
2 = Couple aged 25 or over
3 = lone parent aged 18 or over.
4 = Children aged 3.
5 = Children aged 3 and 6
In 1992/3 there were 4.3 million children - one in three children - living in poverty according to the HBAI statistics. This compares to the 1.4 million children living in poverty in 1979. The HBAI figures say that if a child is brought up in a house with on full-time work they have more of a chance that they will live in poverty. For children living in an environment of which there is a full-time worker their chances lower.
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Figures have changed since 1979 (according to HBAI) because the number of lone parents couples with children and single people living in poverty has increased while the number of poor pensioners has fallen. In 1992/3 couples with children accounted for the largest group in poverty with 37%, which was followed by lone parents with 17% of those in poverty. The risk in poverty is highest among the unemployed, or with families, which only have access to part time work, and lone parent families. Women in poverty out number men by about 1.2 million: The LIF statistics show that in 1992 roughly 5.4 million women were living in poverty compared to the 4.2 million of men. This is because of unemployment; low pay, women's unpaid work (including child care responsibilities), poor distribution of resources within households and insufficient support via the social security system.
The causes to poverty in the UK is largely determined by three factors access to the:
* Labour market - this is because of levels of unemployment, which have remained high in the UK. There are over twice as many unemployed in 1996 than there were in 1979. The unemployment unit estimates that unemployment is currently well over 3 million people. Social class, race and sex determine the likely hood of unemployment. Disabled people are more likely to experience exclusion from the labour market. The 1993/4 Family Resources Survey found that 64% of households with a sick or disabled person received no income from employment. Poverty is also caused by low wages. In 1994, 37% of full-time workers and 77% of part-time workers were living on low pay, according to the Council of Europe's threshold (£221.50 a week or £5.88 an hour).
* Extra costs - children bring extra costs for families. Between 1979 and 1992/3, the risk of poverty tripled among couples with children. Disabled people also face additional costs resulting from spending on items such as transport, heating, laundry, wear and tear on furniture and clothing, special diets, caring services and prescriptions. Cuts in benefits for disabled people have also led to an increase of poverty.
The overall failure is from the policies, which deal with both of the above.
The impact of poverty is serious because it is not simple about doing without things; it is also about being denied the expectation of decent health, education, shelter, a social life, and a sense of self-esteem which the rest of society takes for granted. In 1994/5 Family Expenditure Survey showed that lone parents in the poorest fifth of the population spend £4.78 a week on leisure services compared to £31.20 in all house holds. The NCH Action for Children's poverty and Nutrition Survey found in1991 that 1 in 5 parents and 1 in 10 children had gone without food in the previous month because they had no money to buy it. The growth in homelessness over the 1980's and the 1990's has been dramatic. In 1994 there were 122,660 homeless households compared to 55,530 in 1979. According to the 1991 Census 2,674 people were sleeping rough, all though many rough sleepers are not easily visible.
Overall poverty is the biggest killer that I have come across. Some of the facts here are really upsetting, and you never know what will happen in the future.
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