Poverty

With the jaundiced and cynical eyes of a 58-year-old I see poverty not as a condition but as a state of mind.  When I see families who have lived on welfare for generations spending 10% of their welfare cheque to cash it at a Money Mart rather than set up a bank account I shake my head.  Poverty is about the distribution of wealth, educating the poor, and politics.  A “friend request” on the web site “My Space” from the Winnipeg band Why sparked this polemic as a result of their anti-poverty campaign.  Not sure that I appreciate their taste in music but I’m moved to comment at length about their cause.

 

The Government of Canada spends millions in foreign aid yearly; we should probably be spending more but unfortunately much of what we do allocate supports Canadian industry and Agriculture sending inappropriate food stuffs and technology to Third World Countries.  Our cash infusions tend to line the pockets of corrupt officials in these same countries.  Do you remember the disastrous earthquake of nearly a decade ago in Italy and the millions donated to rebuild housing for the homeless?  Until recently most of those people still lived in tents because all of that money disappeared before it reached them.  Unless the aid organizations proffering help follow the money and work in situ to ensure their help benefits those in need the likelihood is that those in need will never benefit from it.  The corollary that follows is that when this does happen those aid organizations are going to need military protection from those who see their assets diminished by this intervention.  Hence even Doctors without Borders and pacifist organizations such as Mennonite Relief are targeted by so-called terrorists. 

 

In many parts of the world it is not the lack of money that causes poverty but its concentration in the hands of a few.  Take Nigeria for example.  The oil resources there are being exploited in part by Canadian Companies but the riches they create; rather then benefit the ordinary citizen; have been a bane to their existence because they have been forced off their traditional lands by oil exploration.  The profits have been concentrated in the hands of a few who employ armies to protect their interests.  How do we effect change without being seen to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign nation? 

 

Even our most noble efforts tend to work against us.  We have introduced safe drinking water, nutrition, and basic medical care to most parts of the world; but in many countries the only means of ensuring support in senior years is to have large families so that enough offspring survive to provide eldercare.  Therefore, although we have reduced child mortality; we have contributed to an unprecedented population explosion as couples still insist on having large families to ensure their future support.  We have all read about the Chinese government’s legislated efforts to curb population explosion.  Even the most recent pope in Rome still insists that birth control is a sin—poverty and hunger aren’t?  Mankind is in danger of destroying the ecology of the planet that supports them by their very numbers. 

 

World Health and ecology are directly interlinked.  Although the use of DDT has been banned in Canada for decades it is still manufactured in vast quantities here for export to tropical nations fighting malaria and hence still a threat to our songbirds and environment.  Malaria still infects millions worldwide.  By digging wells to give drinking water to nomadic people we have contributed to the desertification of Africa by concentrating these people in one place.  In Africa a staggering proportion of the adult population suffers from HIV infection but religious and sexual practice still serve as catalyst to its spread.  The number of children who will become orphaned as a result of AIDs related death is frightening.  Global warming threatens the inundation of millions of square miles of low-lying countries by rising sea levels while First-World Countries argue their economies cannot sustain the measures necessary to fight it and Third-World Countries contend the curtailment of fossil-fuel use would cripple their growing economies.

 

In summary, if we don’t curtail population growth; malnutrition and disease will do it for us.  Future wars are going to be fought over drinking water, not wealth.  Even though modern communication has made of the world a global village and our humanitarian needs have made of us one people; tribal infighting and petty parochial ethnic groups threaten to tear us further and further asunder.  I repeat—poverty is about ideas, not wealth.