Who Is Helping Whom?

TWENTY PERCENT OF AMERICA'S children experience food insecurity, which, if memory serves, means that at least once if not more times a month a food insecure person does not have a way to obtain enough food to adequately meet basic nutritional needs. most of these kids are members of a single parent household in which the bread winner is either unemployed, underemployed, and/or reliant on nutritional assistance programs. Ironically, it is estimated that one half of America's food supply is thrown into the garbage bin each year. One scarcely need ask "what's wrong with this picture"? Depending On which Definition of poverty one employs, as many as four point three billion people globally live in perpetual poverty; by any standard, at least one billion people suffer from chronic malnutrition and poverty. Meanwhile, the eight wealthiest people in the world have more wealth than the poorest three and a half billion, a shockingly bizarre statistic which, horrifyingly, is verified by reliable statistical research. All this is amply detailed in an excellent new monograph by London School of Economics academic Jason Hickell in his seminal work "The Divide", which describes the processes, all systemic, by which the world's wealth is being hoarded by a tiny fragment of humanity, and by a few wealthy nations, at the expense of impoverished nations, most of which are located in what is termed "the global south". Hickell points out that there is more than enough food produced every year to very adequately feed everyone int he world, but that the problem is distribution, not production. Neither poverty, extreme economic inequality, individually or nationally, is a "natural" and unavoidable circumstance, Hickell asserts, but rather, is the direct result of political processes and policies pursued over a period of centuries by European nations and the United states. Before the era of European colonization, which began with the voyages of Christopher Columbus, regions of the world which are now widely impoverished, such as India and other parts of Asia, actually enjoyed a higher standard of living than did Europe. The conquest of central and south America by the Spanish beginning in the sixteenth century began a process, ongoing today, by which European nations plundered the wealth of indigenous populations, reduced them to poverty and servitude, and in many cases exterminated them altogether. Colonization greatly enriched Europe and the United States, but did permanent and disastrous damage to the victimized people's in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Poverty throughout these regions, much in evidence today, is not the result of inherent flaws in their culture, or corruption in their political systems. it is instead the direct result of a world economic system imposed upon global civilization by aggressive European nations and the United States. Lest we be tempted to praise the United States for its foreign aid programs, it is well to bear in mind that for every dollars the U.S. hands out in aid to developing countries, it extracts twenty four dollars, according to Hickell's research, in resources, such as mineral wealth, including precious metals and oil. The developed, wealthy world is doing nothing to help "develop" the undeveloped parts of the word. Rather, the poor nations of the planet have done and are doing much to develop the developed nations.