The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) was released this month.
The facts it presents underscore the marginalization of the vast
majority of the world s people and the increasing polarization between
rich and poor, both amongst nations and within them. These facts are
an indictment of the governments of the rich across the world; despite
all their promises that their "international values" of a free-market
economy, political pluralism, and bourgeois human rights would improve
the lot of the world s people, the opposite is the case.
According the report, over 1.4 billion people in the world 20% of
humanity live in abject poverty, surviving on less than the equivalent
of $1 US a day. Another 3.3 billion people 60% of humanity live in
extreme poverty.
The report also highlighted the devastating situation in the countries
of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe where poverty has
increased 30-fold since 1988. The poverty is only expected to grow as
governments speed up the anti-social offensive of privatization and
liberalization.
Within the world s richest nations, more than 100 million people live
in poverty, defined by the UNDP as an income level that is less than
half the national median. The report ranks Canada as the country with
the "highest human development index," an index measured in terms of
the bourgeois notion of human rights. At the same time it criticizes
Canada s high child poverty rates and the rates of poverty, suicide,
unemployment and illness amongst the Aboriginal peoples.
CPC(M-L)
Shawgi Tell
Graduate School of Education
University at Buffalo
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
