La pobreza

David Giamboni, profesor de Economía del Colegio Suizo, tanto en el DF como en Cuernavaca, hizo reflexionar a los alumnos sobre la pobreza. Con la ayuda de datos, imágenes y un video nos proporcionó un panorama mundial de la pobreza.

¿Qué podemos hacer para terminar con la pobreza?

En el marco de esta pregunta los alumnos pudieron visualizar cómo esta situación afecta a millones de personas en el mundo, desde México, Centroamérica e incluso Alemania.

Los datos más relevantes que los alumnos pudieron conocer a través de un video fueron:

1.    In Kenya, at the end of colonial times, the white 1% owned about 50% of the arable land.

THE END OF POVERTY? – Press Notes (Source: Paul Maurice Syagga. “Land Ownership and Use in Kenya: Policy Prescriptions from an Inequality Perspective.” In Readings on Inequality in Kenya: Sectoral Dynamics and Perspectives. Nairobi: Society for International Development, Eastern Africa Regional Office, 2006, Chapter 8: 293, 295.)

2. The gap between the richest and the poorest country was 3 to 1 in 1820 35 to 1 in 1950  74 to 1 in 1997.

(Source: United Nations Development Program. 1999 Human Development Report.)

3. From 1503 to 1660, Spain took enough silver from the New World to multiply European reserves by 4. (Source: Earl J. Hamilton, “Imports of American Gold and Silver Into Spain, 1503-1660,”  Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 43, No. 3, May 1929, p. 468.)

4.   In Latin America, the richest 1% of the population receives over 400 times as much income as the poorest 1%. (Source: Terry Lynn Karl.  The Vicious Cycle of Inequality in Latin America. “In 1970, the richest 1 percent of the population earned 363 times more than the poorest 1 percent; by 1995, this had risen to a whopping 417 times.”)

5.   Since 1960, Third World countries have suffered a 70% drop in the price of agricultural exports compared to manufactured imports. (Source: Food and Agricultural Organization. The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets, 2004. http://www.fao.org/docrep/007/y5419e/y5419e02.htm)

6.   The richest 1% of the world’s population owns 32% of the wealth. 

(Source: UNU-WIDER, Estimating the Level and Distribution of Global Household Wealth.  Table 8, p. 28.

http://www.wider.unu.edu/publications/working-papers/research-papers/2007/en_GB/rp2007-77/)

7.    Today more than one billion people live in the slums of the South.

(Source: Millennium Development Goals Report 2007 http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/mdg2007. pdf)

8.    The developing world spends $13 on debt repayment for every $1 it receives in grants.

(Source: World Bank, Global Development Finance 2002: Financing the Poorest Countries, p. 22.)

9.     Almost 1/3 of the world’s population has no access to affordable clean water.

(Source: Population Reference Bureau. http://www.prb.org/pdf05/05WorldDataSheet_Eng.pdf )

10.   In 1970, 434 million people were suffering from malnutrition. Today, there are 854 million.

(Source: Food and Agriculture Organization, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2004 and 2006. cited at 

http://www.globalincome.org/English/Facts.html.)

11.   Cutting global poverty in half would cost $20 billion, less that 4% of the U.S. military budget.

(Source: For $20 billion estimate: Technical Report of the High-Level Panel on Financing for Development.

http://www.un.org/reports/financing/report_full.htm#appendix.  US military spending (not including Iraq and Afghan wars) based on FY 2008 estimate of request by Pentagon of $506 billion.)

12.    In Africa, in the 1990s the number of people living on less than $1 a day rose from 273 million to 328 million.(Source: Martin Ravallion, Shaohua Chen, and Prem Sangraula.  New Evidence on the Urbanization of Global Poverty. World

Bank Research Brief. Mar 21, 2007. http://econ.worldbank.org/external/default/main?theSitePK=469382&contentMDK=21268611&menuPK=574960&pagePK=64165401 &piPK=64165026)

13.   Of the 1 billion living on less than $1 a day, 162 million live on less than 50 cents a day.

(Source: Akhter U. Ahmed, Ruth Vargas Hill, Lisa C. Smith, Doris M. Wiesmann, and Tim Frankenberger, The World's Most Deprived:

Characteristics and Causes of Extreme Poverty and Hunger, International Food Policy Research Institute. 2020 Discussion Paper No. 43)

14.   Rising food prices could plunge an additional 100 million people into extreme poverty. (Source: “Food costs endanger UN poverty efforts.” Los Angeles Times.  April 21, 2008:  “World Bank President Robert Zoellick has warned that rising food prices could push at least 100 million people in low-income countries into poverty.” )

15. Almost 16,000 children die each day from hunger or hunger-related diseases. (Source: UNICEF, State of the World's Children, 2008. p. 4.  9.7 million children died in 2006 before the age of 5.  According to UNICEF, State of the World's Children, 2007, “Malnutrition and hunger-related diseases cause 60 percent of the deaths.”  Thus, the daily death rate of children from hunger is 9.7 million x 0.6