Poverty & Education

Finally, some steps in the right direction. USA Today published this today. It ties into my previous post and the work that Ms. Barrymore has undertaken. I do not fault her, she has given generously. What I want to know is what is the UN doing to help educate the people that they are feeding. What good does it do for anyone to make them dependent on something that is finite and not guaranteed? I say nothing, but make them poorer and hungrier.

World Food Program

Admirably, Drew Barrymore is lending her helping hand to starving children in Africa. I have mixed feelings over the issue. On the one hand – hurray – there are fewer starving children for the next year. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has been pressing the world on the concern over rising food costs. It has been in the news quite a bit of recent. Which means, if the trend continues, that starvation will be on the increase. This will especially be true in nations where it is already prevalent.

On the other hand, I wonder what, if anything, she has done to help starvation in her own country. I do not honestly know. Maybe she has, maybe she has not. But then it touches on another difficult thing in the west, especially the US. That is the ingratitude of many – including the poor. If they do not get exactly what they want or think that they deserve, they do not want it. Though this can never be a blanket statement for all people. It is difficult and there are no concrete answers. At least not to me.

Western poverty

Surprisingly enough, a major news source is covering western poverty. Hurray for the BBC for having the guts to point out a problem affecting the world as a whole, not just the developing world. Although this article states that the UK poverty line for a family of four is £16,492 (US$ 32,702), the official government statement is £13,520 (US$ 26821). That is quite a difference in income levels (£2,972 or US$5,894). Their source was the Report of the Rural Advocate 2007; the other, which I found, was from The Poverty Site. It is a service of the New Policy Institute, a charitable “progressive think tank”.

I find it interesting to note that the US poverty line for a family of four in 2008 is US$21,200 (£10,694). That is a major difference between two supposedly equal western nations.

Poverty is something we must of think of as it relates to our neighbors (or neighbours), not just those on a continent thousands of miles away.

Food Bribery

How horrid it is that the political leaders in countries like Zimbabwe, whose majority population is either undernourished or starving, are using food as bribery. Worse yet, they are withholding it from the opposition. Yet this whole situation goes unnoticed in most western media. At best, our government issues a verbal slap on the wrist exclaiming how undemocratic the elections have been. Yet the fact people are hungry and starving is completely ignored. It’s deplorable. I beg to question the legitimacy of democracy and a people’s pursuit there of, if their daily needs are not being met? I wager to guess that people would disregard democracy entirely just to eat today. The fact of is, it takes time for democracy to be implemented – years, even decades. Starving people will likely be dead before democracy is in place and food is evenly distributed. That, however, leads us to the fact that not even democracy can guarantee even food distribution. So they may still be starving regardless of the status of democracy in their country. Since this blog is not an all out political discourse, I will not even begin to engage the discussion of whether democracy is a legitimate form of rule for all people in all countries.