Poverty—The ‘Silent Emergency’
“WE HEAR a lot about loud emergencies of global warming and ozone layers and ocean pollution,” said United Nations adviser Dr. Mahbub Ul-Haq, but he added: “Global warming and many other loud emergencies have yet to kill anybody [while] the silent emergencies are wasting many lives in the developing countries every day.” Dr. Ul-Haq commented on one of those silent emergencies. “Poverty,” he said, “is really the greatest killer.” How so?
For many of the 1.3 billion people worldwide who scrape along on one dollar or less a day, poverty indeed turns into a deadly disaster. Up to 18 million people, reports the magazine UN Chronicle, die of “poverty-related causes” each year. This number is staggering! Imagine the “loud” headlines if, for instance, the entire population of Australia, some 18 million, starved in one year! Yet, the deaths of these millions of poor, commented a UN Radio broadcast, are “not talked about much.” This is, in fact, a ‘silent disaster.’
To break the silence, representatives from 117 countries attending the first-ever World Summit for Social Development spoke about ways to tackle the world’s poverty problem. “One hundred and fifty years ago the world launched a crusade against slavery,” reminded James Gustave Speth, the United Nations Development Programme administrator. “Today we must launch a world crusade against mass poverty.” Why the concern? Poverty, he warned, is “breeding despair and instability and [is] imperiling our world.”
However, even as the delegates were discussing ways to end poverty, a ‘poverty clock,’ keeping track of the number of babies born into poor families every day, showed that the global poverty picture was darkening. The clock, displayed at the convention site, indicated that during the week-long summit, nearly 600,000 newborns were added to the ever-swelling ranks of the poor. At the end of the summit’s final day, the clock display was turned off; but in reality, as Speth noted, “the clock ticks on.” The question now is, Will it be heard?