Poverty reality

Why are so many people poor in our society? Why are so few rich? Is it possible that only a small minority deserve wealth, while millions are lazy? Over the past three decades, economic output per person in the U.S. has increased more than 60 percent, to an estimated $54,678 in 2014. It's hard to imagine how anyone can survive at 50 percent of the poverty level.  As of 2013, using the measure of income employed by economists Hilary Hoynes of the University of California at Berkeley and Marianne Bitler of UC Irvine that corresponded to $9,384 a year for a family of three. Nonetheless, more than 7 million people were living below it.

A large proportion of people in developing countries remain desperately poor. Globally, the poverty line is defined as a daily income of $1.25— a line that many criticise as shockingly low. However, what is truly shocking is that nearly 1billion people — including more than 80% of the populations of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Liberia, and Burundi — live below it. In India 63 million people are faced with poverty every year due to "catastrophic" expenditure over healthcare which neutralises the gains of rising income and various government schemes aimed to reduce poverty, according to its Health Ministry. It is because there is no financial protection for the vast majority of healthcare needs. Healthcare costs are more impoverishing than ever before and almost all hospitalisation even in public hospitals leads to catastrophic health expenditures, it says. About 27% of 377 million people living in urban India, or 104 million people, have been identified as poor, according to preliminary figures of the Socio-Economic and Caste Census. About 15 per cent of 17 million people living in Delhi have been identified as poor.

You can work very, very hard and be poor. You can work hard and lose your home. You can be responsible and still not have enough food. On the other hand, rich people can cultivate all the vices that we attribute to poor people — drug abuse, laziness, chronic irresponsibility, a desire to leech off others — and get away with it, because they have the income to live that way, and because their powerful families have the legal resources to protect their reputation.

 Graham Riches, retired professor emeritus and former director of the School of Social Work at the University of British Columbia, one of the world’s foremost experts on hunger and the right to food, with Tiina Silvasti, professor of Social and Public Policy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, he has just published: ‘First World Hunger Revisited: Food Charity or the Right to Food?’ which examines the issue of food charity in 12 food-secure nations: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, the U.K. and the U.S. “Why do we need food banks when we have employment insurance, pensions, social assistance?” Riches asked. “The problem with charitable relief is that the longer term problems of food insecurity aren’t being addressed,” said Riches. “People cannot afford to put food on the table.

“Food banks give the impression that the problem is being addressed,” he said, “but food poverty is still growing. It’s not a problem of food supply. It’s a problem of lack of income.”

Under international law, the government of Canada has an obligation to provide for its citizens, he said. It has ratified the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which includes the rights to food and an adequate standard of living. Instead of living up to their legal obligations, he said, governments “exploit the religious context of giving, a moral imperative to feed the hungry. “Hunger is today seen as a matter for charity,” he said. “It allows governments to look the other way.” It also absolves wealthy food corporations, he said, noting the irony in Walmart, which is in the grocery business, making donations to food banks, which are then used by its low-paid employees. Such a system, he said, creates “a secondary food market with secondary consumers. People are forced into public begging.”

Giving people “the scraps off the table,” he said, “is profoundly unethical…It comes back to the right to food,” said Riches. “It is something we must fundamentally address. Do we have a collective right to water? To air? It’s not just something we can leave to the happenstance of charity… It’s a question of human dignity.”