Articles on Poverty

"Poverty" - In Need Of A Few Distinctions
You can't measure wealth by cash alone

Poverty & Globalisation  
Vandana Shiva  

"Recently, I was visiting Bhatinda in Punjab because of an epidemic of farmers suicides. Punjab used to be the most prosperous agricultural region in India. Today every farmer is in debt and despair. Vast stretches of land have become water-logged desert. And as an old farmer pointed out, even the trees have stopped bearing fruit because heavy use of pesticides have killed the pollinators - the bees and butterflies." 

"Missing the Target: The Price of Empty Promises"  

Oxfam International Report on Poverty Reduction

"Missing the Target", reviews progress towards the international development targets for 2015.  The report highlights the grave danger that none of the targets will be met and calls for a series of actions, such as increased aid and debt reduction for health and education; increased budget allocation for priority social services; the phasing out of cost-recovery in basic health and primary education; and economic growth linked to redistribution in favor of the poor.

Human Poverty Report 2000

Globalization with a human face.

Some urge that globalization is not new, and that the world was more integrated a century ago. Trade and investment as a proportion of GDP were comparable, and with borders open, many people migrated abroad. What's new this time_

This report look at the new markets, the new actors, the new rules and norms and the new ways of communications.

Fidel Castro's speech at opening session of South Summit, 
April 12, 2000

For two decades, the Third World has been repeatedly listening to only one simplistic discourse while one single policy has prevailed. We have been told that deregulated markets, maximum privatization and the state's withdrawal from the economic activity were the infallible principles conducive to economic and social development. Along this line the developed countries, particularly the United States of America, the big transnationals benefiting from such policies and the International Monetary Fund have designed in the last two decades the world economic order most hostile to our countries' progress and the least sustainable in terms of the preservation of society and the environment.

Voices of the Poor
What is Voices of the Poor_

Poverty is pain; it feels like a disease. It attacks a person not only materially but also morally. It eats away one's dignity and drives one into total despair. —— a poor woman in Moldova

Poverty is like living in jail, living under bondage, waiting to be free. ——a young woman in Jamaica

What is poverty_ Who are the world's poor women and men_ What are their htmlirations_ Why do the poor remain poor_

As the new millennium begins, the World Bank has collected the voices of more than 60,000 poor women and men from 60 countries, in an unprecedented effort to understand poverty from the perspective of the poor themselves. Voices of the Poor, as this participatory research initiative is called, chronicles the struggles and htmlirations of poor people for a life of dignity. Poor people are the true poverty experts. Poor men and women reveal, in particular, that poverty is multidimensional and complex -- raising new challenges to local, national and global decision-makers. Poverty is voicelessness. It's powerlessness. It's insecurity and humiliation, say the poor across five continents.

Implementation of the first United Nations Decade for the Eradication of Poverty (A/C.2/54/L.3)  

Fidel Castro's Speech to the UN about World Poverty   

"... each year, 12 million children under five years of age die.... Nowhere in the world, in no act of genocide, in no war, are so many people killed per minute, per hour and per day as those who are killed by hunger and poverty on our planet..."