Last month Supachai Panitchpakdi, The Secretary General of the UN Conference on Trade and Development reported that Global poverty had doubled since 1970 and that the amount of people living in extreme poverty “increased by three million people per year during the boom years of 2002 and 2007,” which makes a total of 421 million people in 2007.
The Secretary General said, “What happened is that in the past 30-40 years, the number of LDC’s (least developed countries) have doubled so it has actually deteriorated, the number of people living under the poverty line has doubled from the 1980s.” The report indicated that in the past few years the numbers have sharply increased and that the LDC’s are very fragile with a huge dependency on foreign aid.
“The import dependence has become quite devastating, the expenditure for LDCs on food imports rose from 9 billion dollars in 2002 to 23 billion in 2008,” said Supachai. “All these shortcomings are now hindering the nations’ post-recession development prospects,”
It is clear that this money is extremely needed right now in aiding The U.S recovery from recession. However, with The U.S.’s financial problems comes the growing of LDC’s, which causes the U.S. to pay out of pocket for the countries to maintain and remain from going under an even worse epidemic of starvation. It is clear that the aid cannot stop and that the only way to fix the predicament is by developing better systems for these LDC’S.
The UN reports on these issues and recognizes the need for change but come to no conclusions of what should actually be done.
TITLE: Global Poverty doubled since 1970’s: UN
Source: Information Clearing House
Author: Agence France-Presse
URL: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26918.htm
Student Researcher: Dane Steffy, Sonoma State University
Faculty Evaluator: Shelia Katz, Sonoma State University