Global Wealth In Poverty
The majority of the world's population are in the poorer countries or in countries classified as poor. Should there be a voting on a one-man one vote basis to form a world government ( God forbids ), it would be definitely clear that the poorer people of the world will triumph. The riches accumulated in the world should be made to recycle through trade in order that there is global peace.
Interdependency
In historical perspectives, interdependency between nations is rational, relevant and the only way - for empires and civilizations in Asia, Africa and Europe have collapsed without the leaders of those societies ever predicting that their future citizens would be participants in today's FAO forums.
Balanced Nutrition
Poverty in the Malaysian context, has reached a stage whereby we should differentiate between having to eat to live without really filling the stomach or getting the satisfaction, or eating for satisfaction without taste nor balanced nutrition, or eating for balance nutrition with taste and satisfaction. This is probably what is meant when one talks about 'starvation', 'hunger' and 'malnutrition'.
Water Cycle
The poor in our country, who are mainly in the rural areas, can be looked at as a class of people living on higher slope of an arid mountain, depending for livelihood on rain water that falls on the slope. This rainfall seeps into the slope and flows down the rivers to the plains meandering through canals and streams, surpluses of which go to the sea. By the process of evaporation, the water, all along the way, evaporates to form clouds in the sky. The clouds are then pushed by the wind to break down as rain whether above the sea, on the plains or on the slopes itself.
That mountain is political power as the majority of voters are in the rural areas and among the lesser haves, and generally involved in agriculture.
Aridity Is Poverty
The rainfall is money, coming out of government expenditure, whether in the form of direct spending or subsidies or other forms of aid.
Through trade and business transaction, the money is drained down to the plains, which is symbolic of the cities and surpluses go to the seas as accumulated funds.
Evaporation, like taxation, which generates a lot of heat, causes vapour to rise upward and accumulate to form clouds, which is the treasury.
It is the political wind that blows the clouds and thereby determines the distribution of rain or government expenditure.
On a global basis, things are about similar.
Plight of the Poor
It is rather unfortunate that most discussions on poverty today are made by people who have hardly been poor. While we welcome the wealthy, more educated and prosperous individuals for their concern in the plight of the poor, we should remind ourselves, now and then, of the existence of the differences between the real experience of poverty and the intellectual exercise in poverty.
Feeling
Poverty, as is love, pain, hatred and satisfaction, needs to be experienced to understand the seriousness of it. It is beyond literary capability to write about pain and evoking the same feeling as cutting your fingers with a knife. It is also impossible to read anything on love and have the same feeling as falling in love itself.
Problems of the Poor Differs
No amount of discussion on poverty is real as to suffer poverty itself. If I remember right, it was the Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy who wrote in Anna Karenina “…that the problems of the rich are all the same while that of the poor differs”.
We should therefore always ask ourselves whether we are offering the poor what they really want. For those having to eat to live, it is not difficult to plan programmes for them as their requirements are basic and very obvious but the level of poverty all over the world differs.
Therefore, there is no single simple solution to the problems of poverty.
There is Not Enough Food in the World Today
Let us look at Dr. Eduoard Saouma’s statement which reads:
“FAO cannot solve all the food and agriculture problems in the world”.
On the other hand, Mr. Jean Mayer said:
“There is enough food in the world today to feed adequately every person on earth if the food were equitably distributed (this, however, would condemn peasants in poor countries to eternal poverty)”.
The sentence ‘this, however, would condemn peasants in poor countries to eternal poverty,’ which is within brackets, is even more important than the whole paragraph, as this sentence rationalises the reluctance of nations to sufficiently help the hungry.
Swollen Wings
I remember reading somewhere about a few philosophers, in Denmark, on realising that birds from north fly south to the Mediterranean in late autumn to avoid the bitter winter, provided tents as shelter and food for the birds to eat. After a few years, the views of philosophers changed and their resources were diminished and they stopped this programme.
At the next autumn, the birds came to Denmark as usual and in seeing that there was no food and no tents, they flew away southwards to the Mediterranean. Thousands of birds which had been eating ‘free food’ for years flew back, without reaching the Mediterranean, as they could not cope with the long journey anymore without stopping for food and rest along the way.
The Birds died on arrival at the tents sites in Denmark.
The veterinarians discovered that the joints of their wings were swollen as they had been pampered and eating free food for too long.
We are not talking about birds but man. The philosophers and the rich were equally at fault. The birds did not ask for help in the first place. They had been flying from the North Pole to the Mediterranean even before the Danes started to provide tents and food along the way. They were resilient and capable without being pampered. The birds did not ask for help. They were pampered and had nothing to thank for.
I am against helping merely for the sake of helping.
However, in the case of a person in extreme poverty due to geographical, climatic and other reasons beyond their control, what they need in order not to be pampered is to be in the ‘water cycle’ that I have mentioned earlier.
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