THE FIGHT AGAINST POVERTY
After decades of progress the fight to deliver global subsistence levels has gone into reverse. The COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have been enormous setbacks. The consequences could be dire By Carlos Opitz and Axel Reiserer, OPEC Fund
“AN URGENT NEED TO CORRECT COURSE”
P overty is a phenomenon that determines the entirety of human existence. Below a minimum subsistence level no development is possible and humanity is condemned to the basic struggle for survival. The former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, once summed up the all-encompassing dimension of what it means to be poor: “When I am asked, ‘What, in your view, is the worst human rights problem in the world today?’, I reply: ‘Absolute poverty’.” So, when the international community convened and agreed on the SDGs in 2015 there was mutual agreement that “No Poverty” had to be first. It came with a firm commitment “to leave no one behind” and the acknowledgement that poverty is more than the lack of income or resources. People live in poverty if they lack basic services such
as healthcare, security and education; they also experience hunger, social discrimination and exclusion from decision-making processes. The commitment to eradicate poverty was made before the background of significant progress. The proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty fell from close to 60 percent in 1950 to 8.4 percent in 2019. Similarly, the UN’s Human Development Index also shows a substantial and steady rise from 1990-2019. Progress in fighting poverty significantly accelerated with the (almost) universal acceptance of the market economy and free trade as the unchallenged growth and development model: Since 1990, the number of people living in extreme poverty decreased from 1.8 billion to 776 million in 2013. Yet a closer look could have shown us
even then that the development was by no means uniform or equal: According to the World Bank, almost 800 million of the one billion people lifted out of extreme poverty lived in China, while India slashed its corresponding rate by more than 50 percent. This means that most of the global poverty reduction was ultimately achieved by those two giant nations. In the World Bank’s assessment in both cases progress was “driven by decades of sustained high economic growth, fueled by a massive shift of workers from low-productivity agriculture to higher-productivity industry and, more recently, services.” In other words: globalization. As China became the factory of the world and India the global business service center the idea that an improved economy will benefit all participants (yet not to the same extent) was captured in the
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