What is poverty?
Poverty is about not having enough money to meet basic needs including food, clothing and shelter. However, poverty is more, much more than just not having enough money.
The World Bank Organization describes poverty in this way:
“Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not having access to school and not knowing how to read. Poverty is not having a job, is fear for the future, living one day at a time.
Poverty has many faces, changing from place to place and across time, and has been described in many ways. Most often, poverty is a situation people want to escape. So poverty is a call to action -- for the poor and the wealthy alike -- a call to change the world so that many more may have enough to eat, adequate shelter, access to education and health, protection from violence, and a voice in what happens in their communities.”
In addition to a lack of money, poverty is about not being able to participate in recreational activities; not being able to send children on a day trip with their schoolmates or to a birthday party; not being able to pay for medications for an illness. These are all costs of being poor. Those people who are barely able to pay for food and shelter simply can’t consider these other expenses. When people are excluded within a society, when they are not well educated and when they have a higher incidence of illness, there are negative consequences for society. We all pay the price for poverty. The increased cost on the health system, the justice system and other systems that provide supports to those living in poverty has an impact on our economy.
While much progress has been made in measuring and analyzing poverty, the World Bank Organization is doing more work to identify indicators for the other dimensions of poverty. This work includes identifying social indicators to track education, health, access to services, vulnerability, and social exclusion.
There is no one cause of poverty, and the results of it are different in every case. Poverty varies considerably depending on the situation. Feeling poor in Canada is different from living in poverty in Russia or Zimbabwe. The differences between rich and poor within the borders of a country can also be great.
Despite the many definitions, one thing is certain; poverty is a complex societal issue. No matter how poverty is defined, it can be agreed that it is an issue that requires everyone’s attention. It is important that all members of our society work together to provide the opportunities for all our members to reach their full potential. It helps all of us to help one another .
From http://www2.gnb.ca/content/gnb/en/departments/esic/overview/content/what_is_poverty.html
Poverty
Poverty is general scarcity or dearth, or the state of one who lacks a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution refers to the deprivation of basic human needs, which commonly includes food, water, sanitation, clothing, shelter, health care and education. Relative poverty is defined contextually as economic inequality in the location or society in which people live.
After the industrial revolution, mass production in factories made production goods increasingly less expensive and more accessible. Of more importance is the modernization of agriculture, such as fertilizers, to provide enough yield to feed the population. Responding to basic needs can be restricted by constraints on government's ability to deliver services, such as corruption, tax avoidance, debt and loan conditionalities and by the brain drain of health care and educational professionals. Strategies of increasing income to make basic needs more affordable typically include welfare, economic freedoms, and providing financial services.
Poverty reduction is a major goal and issue for many international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank. The World Bank estimated 1.29 billion people were living in absolute poverty in 2008. Of these, about 400 million people in absolute poverty lived in India and 173 million people in China. In terms of percentage of regional populations, sub-Saharan Africa at 47% had the highest incidence rate of absolute poverty in 2008. Between 1990 and 2010, about 663 million people moved above the absolute poverty level. Still, extreme poverty is a global challenge; it is observed in all parts of the world, including developed economies.UNICEF estimates half the worlds children (or 1.1 billion) live in poverty.
From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty
EconomicPoverty and Socio-Economic Issues
As per the United Nations, “poverty is fundamentally a denial of choices and opportunities, and a violation of human dignity. It means lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society. It means not having enough to feed and clothe a family, not having a school or clinic to go to, not having the land on which to grow one’s food or a job to earn one’s living, not having access to credit. It means insecurity, powerlessness and exclusion of individuals, households and communities. It means susceptibility to violence, and it often implies living on marginal or fragile environments, without access to clean water or sanitation”. (UN Statement, June 1998 –signed by the heads of all UN agencies)
Poverty is a socio-economic issue. Socio-economic issues are factors that have negative influence on an individuals' economic activity including: lack of education, cultural and religious discrimination, overpopulation, unemployment and corruption. Poverty is also a variable that determines one's socio-economic status - meaning, an individual's or group's position within a hierarchical social structure which depends on a combination of variables, including occupation, education, income, wealth, and place of residence.
In Canada right now:
One in ten children is poor.
Canada's child poverty rate of 15 percent is three times as high as the rates of Sweden, Norway or Finland.
Every month, 770,000 people in Canada use food banks. Forty percent of those relying on food banks are children.
http://www.kprschools.ca/students/equity%20and%20Diversity/PovertyandSocio-EconomicIssues.html#.VD-LVBYhCSo
Poverty
Economic freedom is one of the strongest tools available to fight poverty and is responsible for the greatest advances in reducing poverty over the last century. The economic growth created by increased economic freedom reduces poverty by giving more opportunities to workers and helping them avoid the poverty trap. With economic growth, absolute poverty levels are reduced, as is inequality, as relative poverty levels tend to decline as well.
http://www.economicfreedom.org/issues/poverty/
Harmful economic systems as a cause of hunger and poverty
Lane Vanderslice
The standard economic model of how economies work is that people produce and exchange goods. Governments exist to provide “government goods”— things that people cannot provide for themselves, such as national defense. Thus the standard economic view is that activities are essentially productive. While this view has made for a thriving profession of economics, it is not a correct view of reality. The principal difficulty is that there is economic activity that is unproductive and harmful (from the point of view of those being harmed), and that this is a key feature of the economic organization of societies. What follows is a brief analytical description of these societies and how it affects people's welfare and development.
Many societies are run on this basic set of principles. Take and maintain control of the government. Use powers of the government to obtain income. Key elements of this process are described in five sections:
Introduction
Obtaining income
Keeping people oppressed/preventing revolution
Avoiding overthrow
Restricting entry
A sixth section discusses the impact of harmful economic systems on poor and hungry people and on development. A seventh section Reducing harm gives a too brief discussion of what people are doing to improve matters.
Introduction
1. Production vs. harm basic statement. The basic idea and activity in productive societies is helping to produce goods—things that are useful to someone—food, light bulbs, cars—and then exchanging the income received for goods that are desirable to you.
The fundamental economic mechanism exists in “harmful” economic societies as well. But these goods (or the resources that produce them) can be reallocated through force, as well as law backed by force. Simply put you can produce goods, or take them away from others, which is why we describe these societies as harmful. The highest stratum—the ruling class—obtains goods through means which may be described as unproductive or extractive.
2. Conquest and conflict historical overview. Armed conflict, the fight by groups for control of the government or territory (frequently possessing natural resources), has been throughout history the principal way in which harmful economic societies have been established. Its importance continues today. The results of conflict have been the domination of the winning side over the losing and the establishment of a pattern of income and resource allocation favoring the winners.
Examples would be the Hittite empire (Wikipedia 2013), the Assyrian empire (Wikipedia 2013), the Roman empire (Wikipedia 2013), the Norman conquest of England (Wikipedia 2013), the conquest of the territory that became the United States by various European powers and then the government of the United States, the British empire (Wikipedia 2013) and the Japanese Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere (Wikipedia 2013).
Control over labor power is also an important way of using power to obtain income, with serfdom (Wikipedia 2013), slavery (Wikipedia 2013), and debt bondage (Wik