Bono in his recent talk inspired headlines claiming extreme poverty will be zero by about 2030 based upon World Bank numbers that those living on less than $1.25 each per day roughly halved from 1990 to 2010 to about 21%. Bono suggests that it is just a matter of keeping up the good work to maintain the trend. Globally, and again assuming accurate and meaningful data, it is true that there has been a half-billion-plus decline in the number of extremely poor people. But it’s clear that those people have remained very poor indeed. As the World Bank acknowledges: “There has been less long-run progress in getting over the $2 per day hurdle.” The number of people in this category remains, after three decades, around 2.5 billion. Move the threshold upwards and you very quickly embrace the majority of the world’s people – 80%, for example, living on less than $10 a day.
Even the slight upward movement at the bottom may not tell us very much about how people live, since recent decades have seen massive population displacements from rural areas into urban slums, where you might be be a lot hungrier on the notional $2 a day than you were on half that money in the countryside.
The main findings from the World Bank’s show it was in Bono-free east Asia that dominates these improved figures. In sub-Saharan Africa in 1981 had 10.5% of the world’s extremely poor, in 2008 that number was 30%. In east Asia and the Pacific the number of extremely poor fell by almost three-quarters between 1981 and 2008. Latin America and the Caribbean the number fell by more than 40% just between 2002 and 2008.
In sub-Saharan Africa, where Bono’s agenda has been concentrated, the absolute numbers below every poverty threshold have skyrocked since 1981, with the number of extremely poor rising from 205 million to 386 million in 2008; at the below-two-dollar-a-day threshold the sub-Saharan numbers have almost doubled in the same period, to 562.3 million. This is in the context of a large population rise, of course. Bono from the now toothless Celtic Tiger Irish Republic cherrypickss some sub-Saharan countries called the “Lions” to bolster his claims yet the UN Conference on Trade and Development declared that their “the current pattern of growth is neither inclusive nor sustainable” – that the growth is, in short, unequally shared and largely driven by the extraction of quickly depleting natural resources.
Despite the self-congratulatory pats on the backs Bono gives to his backers in governments, multi-nationals and charity foundations, the world has a distribution problem, not a production problem. Bono come with “good news” that distracts from the struggle towards a world where the genuine eradication of poverty is possible and not just a presentation of skewed facts and figures.
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Even the slight upward movement at the bottom may not tell us very much about how people live, since recent decades have seen massive population displacements from rural areas into urban slums, where you might be be a lot hungrier on the notional $2 a day than you were on half that money in the countryside.
The main findings from the World Bank’s show it was in Bono-free east Asia that dominates these improved figures. In sub-Saharan Africa in 1981 had 10.5% of the world’s extremely poor, in 2008 that number was 30%. In east Asia and the Pacific the number of extremely poor fell by almost three-quarters between 1981 and 2008. Latin America and the Caribbean the number fell by more than 40% just between 2002 and 2008.
In sub-Saharan Africa, where Bono’s agenda has been concentrated, the absolute numbers below every poverty threshold have skyrocked since 1981, with the number of extremely poor rising from 205 million to 386 million in 2008; at the below-two-dollar-a-day threshold the sub-Saharan numbers have almost doubled in the same period, to 562.3 million. This is in the context of a large population rise, of course. Bono from the now toothless Celtic Tiger Irish Republic cherrypickss some sub-Saharan countries called the “Lions” to bolster his claims yet the UN Conference on Trade and Development declared that their “the current pattern of growth is neither inclusive nor sustainable” – that the growth is, in short, unequally shared and largely driven by the extraction of quickly depleting natural resources.
Despite the self-congratulatory pats on the backs Bono gives to his backers in governments, multi-nationals and charity foundations, the world has a distribution problem, not a production problem. Bono come with “good news” that distracts from the struggle towards a world where the genuine eradication of poverty is possible and not just a presentation of skewed facts and figures.
Based on this
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