Poverty

We often hear about people's desire to solve world hunger, or to be able to feed the world and help alleviate the suffering associated with it. However, meaningful long-term alleviation to hunger is rooted in the alleviation of poverty, as poverty leads to hunger. I bet all of you will be shocked by the following statistics about poverty - half the world, nearly three billion people, live on less than two dollars a day and the GDP of the poorest 48 nations, that is a quarter of the world's countries, is less than the wealth of the world's three richest people combined. These numbers shocked the world; yet, they revealed how urgent the problem is and roused people from a state of blissful abstraction to look for solutions to it.

If no one is aware of the severity of poverty, probably there will be no one to help with it. Mollie Orshansky, statistician at the Social Security Administration, in Washington, D.C. once told a reporter for the Dallas Morning News in 1999, "Poor people are everywhere; yet they are invisible, I wanted them to be seen clearly by those who make decisions about their lives." Authority now concerns and realizes the problem, so the Senate in Washington has agreed to put an additional $1 billion this year into a program to help poor people with energy costs. Poverty is a consequence of multiple evils: lack of education, restricting job opportunities; poor housing which stultified home life and suppressed initiative and fragile family relationships which distorted personality development. Often we know what the relevant remedies are like education reforms and provision of more job opportunities. But these remedies need financial support and obviously, increasing budget for programs helping the poor is very essential and significant because this is the foundation of any further solutions.

With the basic foundation - a budget reserved, programs should be run more smoothly and successfully. However, their aims and implementations also matter a lot. An example is the Social Investment Task Force, established in April 2000, whose long-term aim was to achieve a move away from the culture of philanthropy, paternalism and dependence towards one of empowerment, entrepreneurship and initiative. They aim at creating a fair society and providing some benefits to the poor who was out of the way to make any investment. The Force did try to achieve the goal by making five recommendations and most of them were already implemented. The five recommendations were first to implement a general tax incentive which benefit investors with a tax credit; second to establish Community Development Venture Funds that would provide venture capital to businesses in the 25 % most deprived areas of the country; third to request British banks to follow the American practice of publishing details of their lending in disadvantaged areas; fourth to give charities greater