Friday, May 23, 2014

Statistics to shame

 The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism found that out of 52 mainstream media outlets analyzed, coverage of poverty issues amounted to less than 1% of available news space from 2007 to 2012, a period that covered the historic recession. The report also concluded that media organizations chose not to cover poverty because "it was potentially uncomfortable to advertisers seeking to reach a wealthy consumer audience."

Poverty is the main cause of hunger because the poor lack the resources to grow or purchase the food they need. Even though there is enough food produced worldwide to provide everyone with an adequate diet, nearly 854 million people, or 1 in 7, still go hungry. Around 1 in 8 people in the world, about 842 million people, were estimated to be suffering from chronic hunger between 2011-13. 

About 22,000 children die each day due to conditions of poverty. More than 6.9 million children died under the age of five in 2011 — that's about 800 every hour — most of whom could have survived threats and thrived with access to simple, affordable interventions. A child born in the world's poorest nations has a 1 in 6 chance of dying before their fifth birthday. In high-income countries, the odds are about 1 in 165.  

For more than 1 billion people across the globe, $1.25 is the daily budget for food, medicine and shelter.  more than 1.2 billion people living in extreme poverty. In 2010, the average income of the extremely poor in the developing world was 87 cents per capita per day, up from 74 cents in 1981. The median income for people in the developing world is $3 or less a day. That's less than the cost of a frappuccino at Starbucks.  The global “middle class" income bottoms out at about $10 a day. One report warns of poverty's "revolving door," alluding to the fact that climbing out of extreme poverty and staying there can be very difficult.

 The top five poorest countries in the world are India (with 33% of the world's poor), China (13%), Nigeria (7%), Bangladesh (6%) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (5%). Adding another five countries — Indonesia, Pakistan, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Kenya — would include almost 80% of the world's extreme poor. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for more than one-third of the world's extreme poor. Combining results from 27 Sub-Saharan African countries, 54% of residents are living in extreme poverty — the highest proportion among global regions worldwide. India has a greater share of the world's poor than it did 30 years ago. Then, India was home to about one-fifth of the world's poorest people. Today, close to one-third of the world's extreme poor are concentrated in India. About 75% of the world's poor people live in rural areas, depending on agriculture for their livelihood.

There are 16.4 million children living in poverty in the United States. That's about 21%, compared to less than 10% in the U.K. and in France. In 2010, one out of every six Americans were enrolled in at least one government anti-poverty program. One in four children in America participated in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, in 2011. One in three American women — about 42 million — either live in poverty or on the brink of it. And, 1 of every 6 elderly people in America live in poverty. More than 7.5 million women fell into the "extreme poverty category" in 2010. Taking food stamps, housing subsidies and refundable tax credits into account, the number of American households in extreme poverty is 613,000, which is about 1.6% of non-elderly households with children.

Approximately 1.2 billion people — nearly as many as the entire population of India — still live without access to electricity. About 2.8 billion people still rely on wood, crop waste, dung and other biomass to cook and to heat their homes. Almost 612.8 million people, nearly twice the population of the United States, lack clean fuel for cooking and heating in China. 

The richest 85 people in the world control as much wealth as the poorest half of the world. The world's 100 richest people earned enough money in 2012 to end extreme world poverty four times over, according to a report by Oxfam. Rich people who live in neighborhoods with other wealthy people usually give a smaller share of their income to charity than rich people who live in economically diverse communities, according to this study of tax records in the United States. 

From here 

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