|
MONTERREY,
Mexico -- There has been much talk at the International
Conference on Financing for Development about
the need to reduce global poverty-as if poverty
and
lack of development were the same thing. They
are not. Development has to do with industrialization,
modernization, integration into global commerce.
Poverty is the inability to afford the basic
needs
for oneself and one's family.
As
a reporter who has spent much of the past decade
visiting countries both rich and poor, I can tell
you that people are poor for a great many different
reasons, and "underdevelopment" is not
really one of them. Some of the most important reasons
for poverty around the world are:
Robbery. People in many places are poor because
somebody else has stolen what wealth they had.
Until a generation or two ago, in many places
those doing the stealing were colonialists
who came to expropriate a country's natural
wealth for the benefit of some great power
across the sea. The colonialists were succeeded
by locals who seized power in the emerging
governments and stole not only the wealth of
their own countries but also money provided
by other countries and international agencies
to help with development. They siphoned the
money into secret offshore bank accounts and
left their countrymen saddled with debts they
can never repay.
Discrimination.
Wherever one goes, the poorest people are
almost invariably representatives
of some minority group-a racial, ethnic, religious,
linguistic or tribal minority-that is despised
or disdained by the majority and disadvantaged
economically and every other way. They are
the victims of apartheid or "Jim Crow" laws.
In many different ways they are denied access
to the formal economy of their country and
live in the fringe or "informal" economy,
where there are no mechanisms that might lift
them out of poverty.
Callous indifference. UN sources estimate
that roughly one billion people go to bed hungry
every night. Larger numbers lack access to
safe drinking water and basic sanitation. If
you do not know who these people are, you can
be certain that their neighbors do. Their government
representatives and other leaders do as well.
But those neighbors, those leaders, are content
to allow this disgraceful status quo to persist.
Fertility. Many families are impoverished
simply because they have too many mouths to
feed. With each succeeding generation, the
little plot of land that provided the family's
food must be divided and subdivided, and the
poverty only gets worse. This happens even
though nobody wants to watch children starve.
It happens because women have no career choices
other than wife and mother, because they are
not empowered to limit the number of children
they bring into the world and are limited in
their ability to help raise the family's standard
of living.
Language. Many people are poor because they
are effectively barred from participating in
society, from jobs and from commerce, by their
lack of language skills. That is, they speak
a language different from that spoken by the
larger society in which they live. This is
a complicated issue because their language
is central to their identity, their culture,
the patrimony they hope to pass on to their
children. They fear losing it, losing their
cultural uniqueness through assimilation in
the larger society. But to preserve it they
must pay a terrible price.
There are many other causes of poverty-illness,
illiteracy, lack of marketable skills. And
there is one other cause of poverty for which
the international community bears special responsibility:
international development cooperation. Over
the past half century or so in which rich countries
have been sending foreign aid to poor countries,
that money has been used for just about everything
except reducing poverty. Let us hope that that
is about to change.
| 
