Vicious Cycle of Poverty

Mahatma Gandhi once said, ‘Poverty is the worst form of violence.” When poverty consolidates with hunger, it worsens and adds insult to injury. Poverty is a lack of food, shelter, and clothing. It is widely a manifestation of hunger, malnutrition, and limited access to education and basic necessities such as health and infrastructure. It also includes social discrimination and exclusion in terms of decision-making. Organizations like the United Nations, United Nations Development Programs, and the World Bank, claim that they have uplifted half of the world's population out of poverty. They measure the poverty rate by one dollar per day, but these very organizations today also acknowledge the persistence of acute poverty and simultaneously hunger in more than 11 percent of the world population who are living in extreme poverty, mal-nutrition and are struggling to acquire basic necessitates like education, health, and access to safe drinking water and sanitation. Why many countries are failing to liberate poverty and hunger and are easily tractable in other countries?

Poverty has been overshadowed in recent times. People in primitive times used to produce subsistence food, domesticated animals, and adequate shelter. The aberrant enigma related to poverty and hunger particularly, and development and economic growth generally is the result of the gloating world order. The manifestation of inequality and dependency exacerbate the social and cultural development of many countries. This is evident in the way that only a few country's cupidity for riches or rather malpractices surge poverty, underdevelopment, and plummeting growths in many other countries. This fractious system has put billions of people in precarious conditions. Today more than 783 million people around the world are living below the poverty line. Moreover, most of these people live in countries that have either remained unreceptive or repellent to adjust their development and growth according to the new world order. Most developing countries mainly endure impoverishment in multifaceted areas of socio-economic and political development. Hence face tremendous poverty, hunger, and under-development.

It is imperative to analyze how these countries are unable to catch other developed countries. Developed countries are enjoying unprecedented benefits in their progress, development, enhancement of the standard of life, and economic growth. Most of these developed countries in their initial stage of development and growth, warped a system that was an amalgamation of strong democracies, quality education, R&D, and economic systems such as capitalism, which is paradoxically germane to their development and simultaneously invasive to most of the other countries. The conundrum is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer; this is evident through horizontal and vertical inequalities between countries. As Annalee Newtiz rightly says, ‘Capitalism is, fundamentally an economic system that promotes inequality.’ Lion’s shares of developing countries are facing extreme problems in terms of acquiring what is already arduous and opaque under capitalism. In developing countries around 22,000 children die each day due to poverty and about 805 million people do not have enough food to eat. Moreover, there are some 1.1 billion people in developing countries that have no access to water and 2.6 billion are lacking basic sanitation.

Contrary to the laudable benefits of liberal order and capitalism, we have a significantly polarized world where peripheries unwillingly mimic core countries that further outbreak a vicious circle of poverty and hunger. Developed countries based on empirical data proclaimed eradication of poverty around the world, notwithstanding almost all developing countries are facing an acute relentless struggle for basic necessities of life, which is portrayed as cut down under so-called capitalism and liberal order. Contrary to that, it is reflecting continuous improvements in the well-being of developed countries; who are enjoying all the perks of life and on the other hand more the half quarter of the population in the world is either facing challenges of development and growth or restlessly moving farther down into the vicious circle of poverty, hunger, and malnutrition.

It is time to cure the ills to break the vicious circle of poverty and uplift the poor in developing countries. Neither Western countries ever have aimed to make developing countries fully adequate of their own nor do they lead countries to break the cycle of dependency that is ineluctable for many developing countries around the world. It is therefore imperative for developing countries struggling with poverty, hunger, and malnutrition to swallow hard pills. First, they need to learn from countries like China and East Asian countries, how they stand with tooth and nail and achieve sustainable development and growth. They have also uplifted most of their population out of poverty within a very short period. Secondly, countries that are facing problems of hunger and poverty, need not rely on others' dictation but enhance their capacities and strengthen to redress these difficulties with will, commitment, and perseverance. As rightly said by Samuel Johnson, ‘Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.’ In today’s transforming world, where vast opportunities are at the steps, the only thing that matters most is the willingness and commitment of governments to address the needs and demands of the vast majority. Otherwise, the menace of poverty and hunger under capitalism is extirpating human esteem and demolishing the very fabric of humanity in developing countries.