International Relations - Assignment Example

International relations Are you optimistic or pessimistic regarding the possible eradication of global poverty and hunger and why? Introduction This writer’s optimism about the possibility of eradicating poverty isn’t ill-founded. The word poverty conjures up a wide spectrum of images and concepts that invariably tend to skew one’s own perception of it in the light of the rapidly unfolding global economic problems. While many official definitions of poverty have been put out by national and international organizations very rarely they capture the very essence of the term in its all complexity and diversity. Despite all these difficulties there is still a glimmer of hope that poverty would be eradicated though gradually, as the time goes on. Ever since Malthus wrote down his theoretical underpinnings of global famine and the population explosion because population grew by geometric progression while food production increased according to arithmetic progression, the world has noticed almost everything growing by an exponential number except the population. Thus history has proved Malthus wrong (Sachs, 2006). Global poverty can be eradicated with little more positive action on the part of the developed world and more responsibility on the part of the developing world where most of those poverty pockets are found. Modern international relations essentially predicate upon the need to interact with the international community to solve internal problems to a certain extent. According to World Bank statistics in 2006 little more than 80% of the world population live on less than $10 a day and the poorest four deciles – i.e. 40% - of the global population live on just 5% of the world’s total income. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia account for a sizeable amount of world poverty and famine, especially affecting children. The richest countries in the world with approximately 1 billion people produced $36.6 trillion worth Gross Domestic Product (GDP) out of a global total of $48.2 trillion in 2006 (World Bank, 2008). This is roughly 76% of the total global output while the rest 24% was produced and consumed by approximately 5 billion people. Thesis statement The primacy and the immediacy of eradicating global poverty and hunger hinge on well coordinated efforts at the national and international levels and such efforts ought to recognize the fact that currently known causal factors of poverty and hunger aren’t necessarily the root causes but mere peripheral factors. Thus there is the ever pressing need for a reexamination of all poverty alleviation programs to identify and isolate the real causes and redirect resources to achieve carefully chosen poverty eradication objectives. Analysis Many of the world’s poor have been living in abject poverty. Sub-Saharan Africa is probably the worst affected region in the world with millions suffering from chronic malnutrition, (Pickett, Singer & Gardiner, 1990). Disease and poverty go hand in hand in these regions because deprivation has a negative cumulative impact on people’s living standards thus affecting their ability and capacity to afford healthcare at a price. This outcome reinforces the age old saying “we are poor because we are poor”. Poverty and undernourishment again lead to disease. This vicious cycle never ends though international government-to-government and International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) intervention has helped to reduce poverty levels by a considerable level throughout the world during the last three decades. Global poverty and hunger is essentially characterized by a lack of access to a minimum amount of resources on per diem basis. For instance access to drinking water and education in many parts of the world is still a huge problem. The economic argument that free access doesn’t guarantee a permanent solution to the problem is partially true though in fact national governments responsible for policy design and implementation have often failed to co-opt poor people in the development process. In other words it’s the denial of opportunities and total or near total exclusion of poor people from development activity that have inevitably led to the current dilemma. Lack of access to electricity, water, fertile land, health care and education still affects billions in some parts of the world. Despite all this there has been a wave of foreign aid to these countries and all that money has been targeted at poverty reduction. Independent analysts have pointed out that there is much less of a parallel now of “How the Other Half Dies?” scenario illustrated by Susan George in her book with the same title in 1976 (George, 1977). In fact the book had a stupendous success in the 1980’s and the early 1990’s. It doesn’t mean that global poverty has completely been eradicated since then. However poverty can be reduced by intervention and that’s what has exactly been happening since even before the book was written. International donor countries have been wary of poverty reduction programs in the developing countries due to the latter’s record of corruption and political graft. This aspect has been cited by many scholars on poverty and hunger alleviation as the most difficult obstacle to overcome in the face of rising resentment among civilian populations against their own governments in the developing world (Brainard & Graham, 2003). Poverty is much less regarded as a problem by some people despite their inability to cope with deprivation. For instance in countries like India children are an asset to the poor because poverty stricken existence perpetuates further poverty by enabling them to live a subsistence life. Children help their elders in bringing water from far away places and gathering firewood in the nearby forest. Thus children aren’t sent to schools for the fear of losing an income. They are a primary source of labor (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation & World Bank, 1994).People aren’t convinced about the future benefits by way of enhanced capabilities of their children to earn more after completing schooling. Poor people must be persuaded to keep their children in school and not at home. Poverty reduction and/or alleviation programs aren’t properly executed in the developing world because recipient governments of foreign aid often tend to be corrupt. Political graft has been one of the reasons for such resentment and suspicion among general public. More often than not such poverty reduction programs fail due to recipient governments’ in third world countries not prioritizing aid programs to include the needy. Despite all these operational constraints, the so called “trickle down effect” has had a much greater positive impact than was initially assumed. According to the UN the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) have sizeable poverty pockets in rural areas and in sprawling cities which grow into conurbations in very short time periods. Poverty is thus associated with growing numbers of people. Population growth is not only due to a lack of education but also due to the need as pointed out above. A third reason for this increase in population in developing countries is the age-old attitude among men and women that women need not have an education to bear children. In other words women are just child-bearers who are there to be taken by men at the latter’s will. If women were to continue their higher education after the legally compulsory level of education there would not be many teenage mothers in these societies (Gosselin, 2008). As a corollary of the above poverty has become a weapon in the hands of extremists. They float the notion that revolution alone could solve the problem of poverty. In many parts of the world it’s still a class struggle, the rich versus the poor thus effectively replacing the Marxian notion of “the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat” (Kerbo, 2005). Political instability and social upheavals have produced such ideal circumstances for those with leftist ideological leanings to persuade the poor to remain so in the hope of a final Armageddon. When societies tend to grow in size and social transformations take place with little government direction there can be chaos and even poverty is a direct outcome of such misguided transformation. Poverty isn’t a direct outcome of economic policy failures because economic policy is designed to solve a country’s particular problem or problems. In the process failures might occur though such failures are amenable to correction in the end. Governments in the developing world especially those in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and South Asia have done very little with the probable exception of India to alleviate poverty. Even in China which isn’t in South Asia the differences that weren’t visible under the iron curtain are now coming to the center stage (Dodson, & World Bank, 2005). Recent riots in China show how ethnicity could be a reason for the creation of poverty pockets. The Uighurs are a Muslim ethnic minority group living in the Xinjiang Province in China. The riots erupted over their resentment of the majority Han Chinese who controlled everything from resources to jobs. Therefore it’s obvious that ethnic, religious and caste differences have been used and abused by interest groups belonging to majority communities to perpetuate poverty among those who basically belong to minorities. Religious minorities in India like Muslims and a sundry of others have been subject to this kind of systematic deprivation concerning education, jobs and other resources and opportunities by majority Hindus. The same is true of caste differences. Low caste Hindus or so called “untouchables” in India have been suffering maltreatment and deprivation at the hands high caste Hindus for centuries now. It’s these minorities groups that have been poor and deprived. Thus poverty in this instance is caused often by human action that is inevitably connected with social problems (Alam & South Asian Policy Analysis Network , 2006). Political processes too lead to poverty in societies where men seek to control economic resources. In other words power politics in poorer societies take a new turn with men of a different persuasion taking control of resources to the total or partial exclusion of access to others. African continent has been roiled by this kind of problems for centuries. While ethnic strife in Africa is probably the major reason for the existence of major poverty pockets there because minorities have been deprived by the politically powerful majority, there have been a complex and diverse number of other reasons too here. Indeed the African continent, as a whole, has the least amount of natural resources such as mineral deposits, fertile soil, good climate and water (Chossudovsky, 1996). When a few members of the majority community with powerful political links to the ruling elite happen to control these meager resources the fate of the minorities and those of the majority who aren’t even remotely connected with the ruling clan would be naturally denied the access to these resources. Gender has played a still greater vicious role in poverty in the developing world than many other causes. Women are often the target of crime in poorer societies and this is a well known premise. However gender has been taken to a further extreme by men in these societies in order to economically weaken women so that male domination of the societal structures would continue without challenge or hindrance. In fact according to World Bank statistics cited above it’s the children and women who have suffered and continue to suffer in poorer countries while men in general continue to enjoy an inproportionate share of the national wealth simply because they are men. This is true of Africa, Asia, Latin America and above all Islamic societies except those countries like Turkey and Morocco (Wodon & Blackden, 2006). In the Middle East in particular and the Islamic societies in general women have been subject to a variety of denials including those related to the marriage customs. However paradoxically enough, in the Middle East the man’s right to take a second spouse is determined by his economic capacity to support the first by way of paying alimony. Despite this legal provision, women in the Middle East have fewer rights than men in every sphere of societal relations. In fact it extends to the possession of movable and immovable property as well. Women cannot own certain type of property and in some instances cannot own anything. Thus it’s obvious that women in these societies have become poorer simply because they are women. Such human-engendered deprivation is particularly stronger and highly prevalent among some societies (George, 2006). In such instances poverty needs to be redefined as “eradicable deprivation caused by human agents”. Causal factors for modern day poverty and hunger can be stated with no end though such causes are basically eradicable and therefore the very outcome, i.e. poverty can be eradicated. Indeed some of these residual poverty pockets connected with social structures such as religion-based attitudes or customs mightn’t be eradicated so soon because the very basis on which these circumstances rest is the deep-rooted religious customary law. Religion-based discrimination isn’t that easy to eradicate. According to the UN publications there is more poverty in the world than has been recorded. But nevertheless such measures as the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) and the real per capita income of a population don’t adequately capture the level of poverty in these societies due to many structural distortions both in the society and the economy. GDP growth rates and national incomes don’t give out the real picture behind poverty. In fact these measures aren’t reliable when it comes making comparisons between countries. GDP figures for the middle income countries like China and Russia aren’t so accurate because in the first instance these countries have had a socialist or communist tradition of government. In fact, China still has the same communist political establishment while Russia has been subject to a rapid transformation under its policies of “glasnost and perestroika” (openness and restructuring respectively). The former has a very bad reputation for doctoring economic statistics while the latter country has been accused of adopting a reverse policy in the recent times. In other words both still have the vestiges of the same old policies which are less likely to promote poverty eradication at the grassroots. Communist party officials in China have all the privileges associated with their political clout while in Russia with the dismantling of the party hierarchy former communist party officials have adopted other ruses. Democracies like that of the US and Western Europe aren’t particularly immune to poverty either. The era of unstoppable GDP growth is over. Economic stagnation and rampant unemployment have been responsible for the erosion of living standards of many Americans and Western Europeans. President Obama’s stimulus programs are aimed at somewhat halting this decline in the living standards of the Americans rather than stimulating the economy and tiding over the recession. Thus poverty is a cumulative phenomenon and it could be found in even those rich societies (Smith, 2008).The only difference between the two is focused on the fact that in the poor world it’s much more widely prevalent among a bigger cross section of the population. The UN agencies, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been involved in eradicating poverty in the world. But nevertheless so far it has been a dream because poverty is not ineradicable but because it’s much less understood in all its forms. Poverty is an elusive concept due to its varied forms in smaller and bigger societies both. Governments, NGOs, INGOs and international financial organizations all have been trying to eradicate poverty and not its root causes. This allegation is now very old though still it has some relevance in Sub-Saharan Africa as much as it has some relevance in South Asia. The UN agencies including the United Nations’ International Children’ Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and United Nations’ International Development Organization (UNIDO) have been very much involved in countries to eradicate poverty. However, both conflict and prevalence of illiteracy and disease have prevented such programs being fully implemented. Right now in Africa (Sudan) and in Asia (Afghanistan and Pakistan) conflicts are raging but there is very little that can be carried out by these agencies through intervention to reduce poverty. Similarly in Africa deadly diseases like Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) or Human Immuno-Virus (HIV) have affected the society at large thus reducing the effectiveness of poverty eradication programs. Poverty can be reduced if not totally eradicated within a stipulated time frame (Oyen, Cimadamore & Comparative Research Programme on Poverty, 2002). The root causes of poverty aren’t well understood and international aid agencies are much less prepared for unforeseen circumstances in the countries where they intend to initiate such programs. The US government’s involvement in poverty eradication is much less targeted at the right people and so are the EU sponsored programs. According to UN statistics only one third of the total amount of aid intended to eradicate poverty in many developing countries reaches the really poor people while much of it is pocketed by officials and contractors who tend to be connected to the ruling party or government agencies. Millennium Goals can be met with equal dedication. Conclusion This writer holds the position that poverty can be reduced if not totally eradicated. Yet it can be eradicated to a greater extent with little more vigilance being exercised by funding agencies and INGOs. The current level of poverty has been the result of specific individual circumstances prevalent particularly in the developing world such as political graft, corruption, gender differences, diseases, human agency caused deprivation, negative attitudes, war and conflict, religious, caste and ethnic differences and above all misuse and abuse of power by those in power (World Bank, 1997). Governments in the developing world have been much less bothered about who should receive aid and who should not etc. This attitude and negligence have been one of the major seasons for the failure of poverty eradication policies and programs in the developing world. However it must be noted that there are smaller poverty pockets even in other parts of the world including in the developed world. Malthus has been proved wrong. In fact poverty and deprivation have been reduced in a bigger way since his times. This writer holds the view that it can be reduced and it can be eradicated to a greater extent with dedication on the part of all those concerned. REFERENCES 1. Alam, I. & South Asian Policy Analysis Network , (2006). Poverty in South Asia. New Delhi: South Asian Policy Analysis Network. 2. Brainard, L. & Graham, C. (2003). The Other War: Global Poverty and the Millennium Challenge Account. Washington: Brookings Institution Press. 3. Chossudovsky, M. (1996). Global Poverty: IMF, Macro-Economics Reform and the Exacerbation of Poverty. London: Zed Books Ltd. 4. Dodson, B. M. & World Bank (2005). Reducing Poverty on a Global Scale: Learning and Innovating for Development : Findings from the Shanghai Global Learning Initiative. Washington: World Bank Publications. 5. George, H. (2006). Progress and Poverty. New York: Cosimo, Inc. 6. George, S. (1977). How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger. London: Penguin Publisher. 7. Gosselin, A. (2008). Global Poverty and Individual Responsibility. Maryland: Lexington Books. 8. Kerbo, H. (2005). World Poverty: The Roots of Global Inequality and the Modern World System. Ohio: McGraw-Hill. 9. Oyen, E., Cimadamore, A. D. & Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (2002). Best Practices in Poverty Reduction : An Analytical Framework. London: Zed Books. 10. Pickett, J., Singer, H. W. & Gardiner, R. K. A. (1990). 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