CROP Vision
The most widely underfulfilled human right today is “the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself and of one’s family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control” (1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 25(1)).
This human right remains unfulfilled for over half of humankind: Some 2.5 billion lack access to basic sanitation, 2 billion lack access to essential medicines, almost one billion lack adequate shelter, nearly as many lack access to safe water, 1.6 billion lack electricity, 774 million adults are illiterate, 218 million children are working for wages outside their household, and the number of chronically undernourished human beings has recently broken above one billion for the first time in human history. About one third of all human deaths, 18 million each year, are due to poverty-related causes.
Lifelong severe poverty has always been the fate of a majority of human beings. What is new in recent decades is that such poverty is almost entirely avoidable. In the year 2000, the poorer half of humanity had only 1.1 percent of global household wealth while the richest percentile had 39.9 percent. In 2005, the poorest three-quarters of humankind had only 9.7 percent of global household income, the poorest half had 2.9, and the poorest quarter just 0.77.
This extreme polarization has occurred over a 200 year period and is still ongoing. During 1988-2005, the poorest quarter lost one third of its relative position, declining from 1.16 to 0.77 percent, while the top tenth of humankind increased its relative position from 64.7 to 68.5 percent. These 3.8 percent of global household income, which have gone to expanding the share of the top tenth, would easily sufficie to double all incomes for the bottom half of humankind. In fact, just 1 percent of global household income — some $350 billion annually — would suffice to end severe poverty worldwide.
In light of these facts, the response to the problem by the world’s elites is appalling. Insisting on a go-slow approach, they are celebrating the Millennium Development Goals that — repeatedly diluted — envision, between 2000 and 2015, a 21-percent reduction in the number of extremely poor people.
The dominant narrative, produced by the World Bank, presents the persistence of poverty as due to various local problems that the affluent countries are working to overcome with their experts and development assistance. This narrative ignores that economic polarization takes place in the context of a highly integrated global economy, governed by an elaborate regime of treaties and conventions about trade, investments, loans, patents, copyrights, trademarks, double taxation, labor standards, environmental protection, use of seabed resources, production and marketing of weapons, maintenance of public security, and much else.
Designed and imposed primarily by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations for their own benefit, this regime influences profoundly the evolution of poverty and global inequality. It fails by and large in human-rights terms by perpetuating poverty and dependence and by bringing on new risks and vulnerabilities with which the poor are least able to cope: economic crises, for example, as well as environmental degradation, resource depletion, climate change, and extreme weather events.
Yet, this regime also includes some positive elements — such as the recognition of human rights, women's rights, equality and non-discrimination standards, labour rights and environmental protections — which were typically gained by activists from South and North in protracted struggles and now provide openings in many countries for the poor and disenfranchised to hold their governments to account and to protect their human rights.
Building on these achievements, CROP will work for the prominent incorporation of the imperative of poverty avoidance into the design of the global institutional order. Such incorporation in turn requires a much fuller understanding of the nature, extent, depth, distribution, trends, causes and effects of poverty.
We need a better grasp of what poverty consists in than some poverty line denominated in international dollars — an understanding that is responsive to the lived experiences of poor people and can be shared by them. We need better explanations of how the emerging rules of the world economy have affected the global distribution of income and wealth, education and health care, job opportunities and disease vectors, violence and environmental burdens. We need better moral analysis of who bears what responsibilities in regard to the vast human rights deficits that, so plainly avoidable, are blighting our age.
These are critical tasks, developing a second opinion against the dominant defenses of the status quo. And they are collaborative tasks that require cooperation with researchers in the poor countries and also the production of clear, comprehensible research outputs that are immediately accessible to policy makers, activists, the media and the general public.
References
1.6 billion lack electricity — UN-Habitat, “Urban Energy”
World income distribution and evolution data ¬— Branko Milanovic, Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press 2005), pp. 107-08, as updated in correspondence with Branko Milanovic (World Bank).
MDG dilution — Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (2nd edition, Cambridge, Polity 2008), pp. 11-13, as updated in Thomas Pogge, Politics as Usual: What Lies behind the Pro-Poor Rhetoric (Cambridge, Polity 2010), chapter
