Posted on: Thursday, August 14, 2003

ISLAND VOICES
Half-truths of world poverty

By David L. Watson
Professor emeritus at the University of Hawai'i

The July 13 Advertiser commentary asked "Why don't rich (nations) help poor?" Two billion people around the world live on less than $2 a day. This means that many babies die, that children don't go to school and that medical help is too expensive to be used.

For less than 1 percent of our gross domestic product, Americans could save millions of lives and expand markets abroad. Why don't we? There are several half-truths that keep us from doing more. Each of these "facts" is half-true, yet there is an important "but" that goes with each that shows why we are doing less than we might.

• We already are providing aid. True, we are.

But: The current value of our aid is about 0.2 percent of our GDP. Most developed countries give a higher percentage than we do. Much of the aid we give is tied to our foreign policy, or is aimed at directly benefitting the United States as a trading partner. We give aid to countries whose governments we want to support, or countries with whom U.S. businesses want to trade. If you don't fit one of those criteria, you're out, no matter how many citizens are starving.

One step in the direction of giving aid just because it is needed is the new U.S. policy of providing money to reduce AIDS in Africa.

• Much aid money has been siphoned off by corrupt government officials, or by the ruling elite of the country. True, this is sadly often the case.

But: not always. Some honest governments really try to benefit their citizens, not merely enrich themselves. There are both Christian and Islamic governments that serve their people well: The Advertiser article named Bangladesh, Bolivia, Ghana, Senegal and Tanzania. Transparency International, a German watchdog group that monitors government corruption worldwide, names other relatively non-corrupt governments: Mexico, Peru, South Africa. Couldn't the United States provide aid to poor countries with good governments?

Moreover, not all aid has to pass through government hands to reach the poor. The new movement of "micro loans," in which small amounts of money — as little as $50 — are loaned to local entrepreneurs has been very successful.

• A lot of poverty is due to overpopulation, and as long as these people keep having too many babies, they are going to be poor. True, too many mouths to feed make it even harder when there is not enough food to begin with.

But: This gets alarmingly close to blaming the victim. "You're so dumb, you keep having these babies, so we're just going to let them starve." Part of the problem is due to the behavior of the poor, but their acts are imbedded in a larger context, the root causes of their poverty. The women who are having too many babies are usually illiterate. Maybe our aid should be directed at moving the women from illiteracy and teaching them the rudiments of planning a family.

• It's a bottomless pit. We feed them today, and then we will have to feed them tomorrow.

But: Give a man a fish and you provide him one meal. Teach a man to fish and he can feed himself. All aid does not have to be stopgap. Aid can mean training, education, planning.

• The poor will always be with us. "It's like dust," one man said. "It is messy, but there will always be dust, and there will always be poverty."

But: There is relative poverty (You make a lot more than I do, but I am not starving) and absolute poverty (I don't have enough money to get medicine for my malaria, and the water we drink is polluted). Two billion people live in absolute poverty.

We all like to believe that we live in a world where things are just. It is upsetting to think that 2 billion people are so poor they can't afford medicine. It is not just. These folks are not dust. In some cultures, people just like you and me are very, very poor. They are stuck at the bottom. Should we help them?