3. Relief efforts that attempt to overcome poverty are doomed to failure unless they address the causes of poverty. Some external factors causing the poverty of entire nations are international debt, unfair trade practices, externally imposed privatization programs, resource wars financed by dominant global interests, the power of multinational corporations to avoid taxes and regulations, intellectual property regimes enforced by international institutions, and inherited patterns of trade and marketing that enable former colonial powers to reap most of the profits of commerce.
4. Factors within nations that cause poverty and extreme inequality include centuries of concentration of land ownership that ignore traditional norms of reciprocity, the dominance of national economies by monoculture and the export of a few raw materials, corporate and state-owned monopolies, limited availability of credit to small-scale businesses, the breakdown of laws and practices that have sustained the commons, and traditions that ignore the productivity of women.