Poverty in the world

Submitted by: Amira Eldisoky

          Samar Wahba is a Lebanese mother who abandoned her son and left him in front of a hospital because of poverty. That single mother who has five children was not able to afford the cost of the healthcare for her sick child. She said "I hope if I can get him back to me again, and I regret what I did, but that was for him. If he stayed with me, he would be dead.” That story is one of millions stories that poverty creates every day. The Lebanese mother lost two daughters because she was disabling to provide them the medicine and the food that could save their lives, and she made the decision to leave her son to save his life. Poverty rolled individuals’ lives and force them to do unexpected behavior such as Samar when she decided to leave her child to someone else to take care of him to save his life instead of raising him and see him growing up in front of her eyes. 

          "The world today has become an island of the rich surrounded by a sea of ​​the poor" as the description of South Africa President, "Mbeki" last year at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg about poverty which increase day after day, despite the progress that made by individuals in various fields, and despite their effort to provide welfare for the six billion people in the world. The United Nations Day is 17 October of this year has just passed with no changes in the situation but only adds another year full of death, disease and hunger to the age of the world's poor. The questions that everyone wondering everyday are, Has poverty in the world became really a dangerous issue? What are the underlying causes of this dilemma? Are the rich people in the world make any effort to solve this problem? Are there any hidden results of this phenomenon more than hunger, disease and death?

          There are 6 billion people living in the planet. 4.3 billion who live in the developing countries and 3 billion of them lived below the poverty line as low as two dollars a day, and among these there are 1.2 billion earn less than 1 dollar a day. In contrast, statistics show Western terms as the industrialized countries have 97% of privileges all global, and international and intercontinental companies owns 90% of the privileges of technical, production and marketing. Moreover, more than 80% of the profits of the total foreign direct investment in developing countries go to 20 rich countries.

           In developing countries, we find that the rate of 33.3% of people has no clean drinkable water, and 25% don't have adequate houses. 20% don't have basic health care standard, and 20% of children do not attend schools for more than the fifth grade. And 20% of students suffer from poverty and undernourishment. In contrast, the wealth of three richest men in the world is equivalent to the GDP of the poorest 48 countries in the world, and the wealth of 200 of the world's richest people exceed the income rate of 41% of the population of the world combined. Studies show that if they contributed 1% of this wealth will cover the cost of primary education for all children in the developing world. While the die of 35 thousand children a day because of hunger, disease, and poverty.
             All of these numbers show the disorder in the concentration of global capital, a disorder cannot be ignored from our side because it has negative effects on humans which seriously threaten the Social Peace. Poverty is a global problem which leads to hunger, homelessness, ignorance, and death. Also, nowadays, it became a dangerous issue that threatened the Middle-class people that they can become poor under any circumstances as consequences of economic crises and financial issues. Also, in developing countries, poverty increases not only because of ignorance, backwardness and lack of democracy, but also because most these countries wealth goes into the pockets of the rich which make the rich richer and the poor poorer.