End Poverty in 30 Years? Ending Extreme

¶ … End Poverty in 30 Years? Ending extreme poverty seems as if it should be relatively easy. There is a tremendous amount of wealth in the world, and, even with the growing world population, redistributing only a small portion of the world's total wealth would result in the eradication of extreme poverty. However, history has repeatedly shown that people, regardless of religious affiliation or social orientation are not willing to simply allow for resource redistribution.

Communist ideals have remained just that, ideals, as people have routinely used power positions to ensure wealth concentration, which has meant that prior attempts to forcefully redistribute wealth have been unsuccessful. Furthermore, while some people with wealth would be willing to give up some portion of their wealth in order to eradicate poverty, the reality is that charities are notoriously inefficient at asset relocation. Charities are fantastic for solving short-term problems, but poverty is a life-long problem, which cannot be solved with stop-gap asset reallocation measures.

Therefore, it is important to recognize that the solution to poverty will be more involved than simply making adjustments regarding wealth ownership. In fact, a true end to global extreme poverty seems as if it will probably require changes in several different dimensions: ending hunger, increasing access to education, improving women's rights, improving health for women and children, and combating HIV / AIDS. If these changes could occur, then it would be possible to end extreme poverty within 30 years.

However, as the following investigation of these individual issues reveals, not only is it unlikely that these changes will occur in the next 30 years, but also unlikely that they will occur at any time in the forseeable future. One of the first challenges to ending extreme poverty is providing enough food to end hunger. Hunger is a debilitating effect of poverty, and, while it may be hard to comprehend in a nation of abundance, people still die of starvation at alarming rates around the globe.

In addition to being an effect of poverty, hunger is also a cause of poverty. Hungry people are not able to compete at the same level as appropriately fed people. They do not have the same energy as other people. They are prone to health problems. Moreover, these health problems transcend generations; hungry people are less likely to have healthy children.

Because there is actually more than enough food to feed the world's current population, it would seem that providing sufficient food for people to avoid hunger would be relatively easy. However, one of the problems with this solution is that the areas most likely to be impacted by famine are the same areas most likely to be experiencing large-scale conflict.

While those conflicts may be based in scarce resources, the reality is that, even if resources suddenly become sufficient, it will take at least a generation for current animosities between groups of people to cease to exist. Until those animosities cease to exist, groups are going to continue to interfere with the distribution of food to those experiencing hunger. The second challenge is increasing education, because without having a minimum level of education, people will be unable to sustain themselves above the poverty level.

However, educational access is a very political and social issue. Women are routinely denied access to education because educated women are less likely to marry young and are likely to give birth to fewer children than poorly educated women. Moreover, in theocracies and other totalitarian governments, education challenges the status quo. Furthermore, and this is a critical point, educated people would probably be unwilling to do the menial labor that helps support the Western middle-class lifestyle. There is a global disincentive to provide education for the world's poor.

Another stumbling block to eradicating extreme poverty is the issue of women's rights. Women and children are disproportionately impacted by poverty, and this is because women are devalued in comparison to men. Even though several organizations and nations have tried to eradicate sexist practices, in the world's two largest emerging countries, India and China, women are so devalued that sex-based abortions and allowing female children to die are common practices.

While scarcity might seem to increase the value of women, it will probably only serve to further the idea of women as possessions. Moreover, because wives will be scarce, any pre-existing disputes between groups of people will probably be exacerbated as unattached young men are more likely to be militaristic than attached young men. One side effect of the devaluation of women is that women and children have poor health care. Women routinely die in childbirth, and, globally, children continue to die of relatively benign childhood diseases.

Further complicating the issue is that when women die, children are oftentimes left to fend for themselves, making it virtually impossible for that child to escape a life of poverty. There have been tremendous advances in maternal and child health, and, in areas that want these improvements, they are relatively easy to enact. However, a significant component of maternal health is access to reliable birth control, and religious agendas may inhibit those efforts.

Given that reliable birth control has been available for 50 years, but is still routinely denied to women in many third world nations, it seems unlikely that this scenario will change within the next 30 years. An example of how religious agendas has impacted global healthcare is the worldwide HIV / AIDS pandemic. Condom usage is proven to very dramatically reduce the spread of HIV. However, because condoms are also a form of birth control, information about condom usage and how.