Poverty in Plenty

THE aim of all developmental drives, in Bangladesh and beyond, is to reduce hunger and malnutri­tion that afflict a vast number of people. Hunger, a general term related to not getting enough to eat, is possibly the worst form of capability deprivation. In fact, it is a denial to development and free­dom.

Disconcertingly, the twenty-first century dawned with some disappointing disarray - allegedly termed’ dirty development' ,In a world that takes a pride in plenty, prosperity and progress, millions of people remain chronically undernourished and food insecure; a little over billion live on the equivalent of less than a dollar per day. It's not very difficult to grasp the gruesome gravity of the pitiful position: many people don't have enough to eat to keep them on an even keel. That means that they are in a state of hunger - chronic or transitory.

The ugly face of the discordance between wealth of the few and the woes of the millions is unveiled by an eminent economist named Kausik Basu . Leafing through Forbes magazine and some World Development Reports, he contends that total income (in 1998) of Hollywood's richest 50 individuals would exceed the total income of Burundi's entire population of 7 million. If Bill Gates - supposedly spearheaded by a spending-spree - decided to encash and consume the increase in the value of his total assets that he reaped over the past year, he would be able to consume more than the total annual consumption of the 60 million people of Ethiopia."These numbers reflect both the phenom­enal scope for wealth and economic well-being that the modern world makes possible and also how easy it is for this enormous potential to bypass large masses of humanity’’.

A priori, the perception was that inequality would wane, if not wiped out, through spill-over or "trickle down" effects during the process of growth and accumulation. But that didn't seem to have happened.To corroborate the concern, the state of'poverty in plenty' can be highlighted through the following frightening facts:

•           925 million don't have enough to eat - more than the population of USA, Canada, and Euro­pean Union;

•           98 per cent of world's hungry live in developing countries - 65 per cent living only in seven countries: India, China, DRP Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia;

Women make up a little over half of the world's population but they account for 60 per cent of   world's hungry;

•           A malnourished child dies every seven seconds; and

•           The cost of under-nutrition to national economic development is estimated at US$20-30 billion per annum.

Thus, the failure to fight against hunger may turn out to be a holocaust. If allowed to go unabated, the "have-nots" might swell the societyto make hell the lives of the'Haves'- a message that abounds history. Hunger hurts the whole society, not the hungry ones alone. The sooner we feel it, the better it is.

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