Tag: extreme poverty

World on the brink of worst food crisis in 50 years, UN warns

– June 10, 2020

Food systems are failing and the pandemic is mitigating the situation, said UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, on June 9, 2020.

“Unless immediate action is taken, it is increasingly clear that there is an impending global food emergency that could have long term impacts on hundreds of millions of children and adults.”

Although harvests of crops are holding up and export bans and protectionism have been largely avoided so far, the worst of the pandemic’s impacts and the recession that will follow is yet to be felt.

This year, about 49 million more may fall into extreme poverty due to the coronavirus as the number of people who are severely food insecure will rapidly expand.

“Even in countries with abundant food, we see risks of disruptions in the food supply chain,” Guterres pointed out. “We need to act now to avoid the worst impacts of our efforts to control the pandemic.”

The secretary-general plotted a three-point plan to restore the world’s ailing food systems and avoid further harm.

First, countries must focus aid on the worst-affected regions to ward off immediate disaster and for governments to prioritize food supply chains.

“That means designating food and nutrition services as essential while implementing appropriate protections for food workers. It means preserving critical humanitarian food, livelihood, and nutrition assistance to vulnerable groups.”

“And it means positioning food in food-crisis countries to reinforce and scale up social protection systems,” he added.

https://watchers.news

Tax the Rich: Pope Francis Calls for Global Wealth Redistribution

Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D. – February 6, 2020

Tax cuts for the wealthy constitute a “structure of sin,” Pope Francis said Wednesday in a passionate address calling for international wealth redistribution.

“Every year hundreds of billions of dollars, which should be paid in taxes to fund health care and education, accumulate in tax haven accounts,” the pontiff told participants in a Vatican seminar, “thus impeding the possibility of the dignified and sustained development of all social agents.”

“Today’s structures of sin include repeated tax cuts for the richest people, often justified in the name of investment and development,” Francis told the meeting organized by the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences.

During his discourse, the pope repeated his conviction that poverty is on the rise worldwide and “the poor increase around us.”

With the passage of time and the advances of civilization the number of poor people increases rather than diminishing, Francis similarly asserted last June, and “the poor are always poorer, and today they are poorer than ever.”

As a Brookings Institution report noted in late 2018, however, the world is currently experiencing “the lowest prevalence of extreme poverty ever recorded in human history — less than 8 percent,” and that number falls with each passing year.

According to the widely used “international poverty line,” people are considered to be in “extreme poverty” if they live on less than $1.90 per day or its equivalent.

In the world today, less than 10 percent of the global population lives in extreme poverty, whereas just 30 years ago (1990), some 37 percent of the world lived in extreme poverty. Two centuries ago, nearly everyone in the world lived in extreme poverty.

https://www.breitbart.com