The rich and poor grow further apart
Westerners spend $37bn a year on pet food and perfumes. The UN says that would provide education, food, health care, water and sanitation for all those now deprived of the basics with $9bn to spare
By Larry Elliott and Victoria Brittain
Wednesday September 9, 1998
The United Nations today calls for urgent action to raise the living standards of the world's poor after disclosing that one billion people have been left out of the consumption boom of the past two decades.
In its annual Human Development Report, the UN says that gross inequalities between rich and poor countries are worsening, with 20 per cent of the global population accounting for 86 per cent of consumption.
With consumption increasing sixfold in the last 20 years and doubling in the last 10, people in Europe and North America now spend $37 billion a year on pet food, perfumes and cosmetics.
This figure would provide basic education, water and sanitation, basic health and nutrition for all those now deprived of it and still leave $9 billion over, according to the UN figures.
However, the UN is not joining the calls of some "small is beautiful" lobby groups to cut consumption, but rather to look for changes in patterns of consumption, according to the report's main author, Dr Richard Jolly.
"Abundance of consumption is no crime, but it is scandalous that the poor are unable to consume enough to meet even their basic needs," said James Gustave Speth, the UN Development Programme administrator.
Dr Jolly calls the inequalities "grotesque", and says the "gargantuan excesses" in consumption highlighted by the report will have to be changed.
According to the UN, the 225 richest people in the world have a combined wealth of more than $1 trillion - equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 per cent of the earth's population, some 2.5 billion people. The three richest people on the planet - Microsoft's Bill Gates, the Walton family of Wal-Mart stores and legendary investor Warren Buffett - have assets that exceed the combined GDP of the 48 least developed countries.
"It is estimated that the additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education for all, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food for all and safe water and sanitation for all is roughly $40 billion a year," the UN said.
"This is less than 4 per cent of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people."
The report shows that the inequalities of current consumption opportunities have excluded more than a billion people who do not meet even their basic consumption requirements. One goal of the UN report is to raise their consumption levels.
Among the 4.4 billion people in developing countries, almost three-fifths lack basic sanitation, one-third have no safe drinking water, one-quarter have inadequate housing, while one-fifth are undernourished and the same proportion have no access to modern health services.
Transport for most of the world's poor is by foot. There are five cars per 1,000 people in East and South Asia, 11 per 1,000 in Sub-Saharan Africa, and 450 per 1,000 in the industrialised countries.
These skewed patterns of consumption of fossil fuels place the people of the poorest countries in double jeopardy.
Burning of fossil fuels has quintupled since 1950, and it is the wealthiest one-fifth of the world who consume more than 50 per cent of them.
The poorest one-fifth of the world are responsible for just 3 per cent of carbon dioxide levels, but the stressing of the environment from carbon dioxide emissions - essentially from the industrialised countries - means that the poorest people, who live in low-lying regions such as Bangladesh and parts of Egypt, risk losing their homes as sea levels rise because of global warming.
Bangladesh could see its land area shrink by 17 per cent, while countries such as the Maldives and Tuvalu could vanish under the sea altogether.
A child born in New York, Paris or London will consume, pollute and waste more in their lifetime than 50 children born in a developing country. But it is those poor children who are the most likely to die from air and water pollution, the report says. "We have to focus on the prevention of pollution," Dr Jolly says.
Air pollution causes 2.7 million deaths a year, with 80 per cent of the victims in rural poor areas of developing countries. In Latin America and parts of Asia millions of children are at risk of losing four or more IQ points because of lead emissions. In these areas the growing economic crisis is already showing up in health and education cuts - no books, no school buildings, no medicines, no beds - which will accelerate the downward consumption trend already hitting these countries.
"The message of 'limits to growth' of the 1970s has changed - the new emphasis is not on the world running out of non-renewable resources, but on the threat to the renewable resources: air, soil, forests, fish, biodiversity, and water," says Dr Jolly.
The consumption of fresh water has almost doubled since 1960, the marine catch has increased four-fold, with a quarter of fish stocks depleted and another 44 per cent being fished at their biological limit.
Developing countries now face a strategic choice: they could repeat the industrialisation and growth processes of the past 50 years, or they could leapfrog to growth patterns that are pro-environment and pro-poor. |
