The face of hunger

Poverty and inequality have always been with mankind. Even if inequality, upto a point ? measured in terms of income, wealth or power ? is often rationalized by innate differences in abilities among different human beings, abject poverty for millions of people cannot be defended merely on the ground that the poor lack the effort to improve their conditions. This is all the more appalling when there is so much plenty in some parts of the world.

What is the situation today? Without going into the statistics, one can visualize the extent of inequality across nations by an image suggested by Jan Pen, an economist.

Think of the people of the world marching by in a parade. Each person?s height is proportional to the average income in his country. You are observing the parade from a gallery and the parade takes exactly an hour to pass by you. The marchers are proceeding at a steady pace so that after 15 minutes, one quarter of the people in the world will walk past you. People march by in order of their height, starting with the shortest.

For almost all the time, it would be a parade of the dwarfs. The first 6 minutes are primarily made of countries in sub-Saharan Africa, with the average height of about 1 foot. India starts in the 9th minute and takes up a full 11 minutes to pass by, with marchers 2 feet tall. After half an hour, China enters, with 3 feet tall marchers, and takes up 13 minutes. During the last 5 minutes of the parade, the height of the marchers escalates frighteningly as 20-footers from Japan enter in the 55th minute. The last three minutes are made up of 27-feet tall marchers from the United States of America. Finally, 36-foot marchers from Luxembourg pass by, taking up less than a second.

Despite a much higher rate of growth of global income over the centuries, the inequality between rich and poor countries has widened. In 1820, the richest part of the world had a per capita income that was 3 times that of the poorest part of the world. By 2000, this has increased to 19 times.

Of course, all this masks the huge inequality within a given country. In reality, all marchers from India are not of the same height. High growth is usually considered the solution to poverty. But the inequality within high growth economies (like China) is clearly going up. Many consider this to be a necessary evil in order to bring down the numbers below the poverty line. According to World Bank estimates, the percentage of people below the poverty line (defined as $1-a-day consumption at 1993 purchasing power parity exchange rate) in the world has come down from 33 per cent in 1981 to 18 per cent in 2001. In absolute numbers, this means that the number of ?poor? people has fallen from about 1.5 billion to 1.1 billion over the last 20 years. But if you take $2-a-day as the poverty line, then the number of ?poor? in the world has gone up from 2.4 billion to 2.7 billion. Further, most of the people who have been able to go over the $1-a-day hurdle are in Asia, particularly China and India ? two of the fastest growing countries. By contrast, the number of poor in Africa has roughly doubled in the same period.

What can be done about it? A committee of experts was appointed by the United Nations to suggest remedies. The committee, under Jeffrey Sachs, has just submitted its report. It recommends more aid from the developed countries to the African nations. This, despite the popular notion that aid has failed to bring about the needed changes. Sachs agrees that foreign aid has not achieved much. But he puts the blame on inadequate resources rather than on poor governance. In fact, he feels that governance can be substantially improved with infusion of more resources to build proper institutions and infrastructure. He uses the firefighter analogy. Suppose, you send a single man to fight a forest fire. He would inevitably fail. But you cannot conclude from this experiment alone that firefighters are ineffective. The proper conclusion is that you need more firefighters. So, to fight the raging fire (in the form of increasing poverty and increasing spread of diseases like AIDS and malaria), you need to send more resources to the region. Though many of the richest countries in the world promised to give 0.7 per cent in aid, the average for the richest 22 countries is only 0.25 per cent.

According to Sachs and his team, Africa suffers from many natural disadvantages like land-locked economies, small markets, low income leading to low savings, low tax revenue and little investment in infrastructure, infertile soil, dependence on one or two crops for exports, colonial legacy creating artificial state boundaries that has led to civil wars, the extraordinary burden of diseases and so on.

The report suggests focusing aid on simple cost-effective projects like providing mosquito nets to fight malaria (which would improve health and productivity), free medicines to AIDS victims, improving rural roads and warehouses so that farmers can bring crops to the market and get better prices, arranging for diesel generators to electrify villages and better primary and secondary schools. Even in education, resources can get more mileage if spent on free school uniforms and midday meals, which will attract the poor.

More computerization in administration and availability of information may reduce corruption among government officials. Some think more resources would lead to more corruption. Sachs however believes that good governance needs more resources. His team favours accountability and close monitoring of how aid money is spent. Aid would be stopped whenever there is evidence of corruption.

For experiment, Sachs suggests increasing aid to Ethiopia by five times the current level. Ethiopia is a country that has a lot of poor people, but it also has a reasonably pragmatic government. However, if the Ethiopian government, after receiving aid, decides to go back to war, all aid would be stopped. If this pilot project works in Ethiopia, it can be tried in other countries.

No one knows for sure whether these new initiatives would significantly reduce poverty in Africa. But the global community cannot afford to leave things as they are, without inviting grave consequences for mankind.

A stealth bomber costs more than $2 billion apiece. Think of how many millions of families can be brought above the poverty line with this money? About 70 per cent of the weapons of mass destruction are produced by the six permanent members of the security council, which is supposed to ensure peace in the world. These are the biggest ironies, never mind all the talk about reducing poverty and spreading justice and freedom to all the people in the world.