This year’s theme is: Universal access to decent work and social protection as a means to uphold human dignity for all people.
According to the United Nations, “8.4% of the world’s population, or as many as 670 million people, were living in extreme poverty at the end of 2022. An estimated 7% of the global population – around 575 million people – could still find themselves trapped in extreme poverty by 2030.”
Poverty is not a choice for anyone. Human beings prefer to live with enough food , clothing, shelter, medical care, education, security of person and family, and the like. These are the basic minimum requirements for ordinary level human existence.
Poverty occurs when people are denied of their rights: rights to the utilization of their resources.
Resource depletion just does not happen. Africa, Asia, and Latin America were rich with resources. But, when other nations eyed their resources and plundered their wealth, they left the citizens of those colonized nations poor and resourceless.
Today, multinational corporates do similar things through neocolonial tactics, often in connivance with native governments.
Poverty has to do with marginalising people by denying them their human and constitutional rights, by displacing them from their lands.
Poverty has to do with governments allowing a few friends and cronies to amass wealth through illegal and corrupt means. Such illegal wealth may have to do with corrupt practices, cheating people, or looting people’s resources.
Poverty has to do also with corrupt governments creating unwelcome situations like unemployment, denial of proper wages, right to education and medical facilities.
Let not people, who happen to be poor, be treated as victims as if deserving our pity and occadional pittance out of our charity. Charity is one thing. Works of charity may boost our ego, or console us with the distorted idea that we are helping ‘these poor victims’ of poverty.
Rather, we need to reach out to people by giving them right wages, enabling them to stand for their rights, and lending a voice to the voiceless.
Politicians make many promises.
They are for poverty alleviation, not for poverty eradication. If poverty is eradicated, politicians will become unemployed. They will have no chance to make loud-mouthed promises to hoodwink people or use people as vote bank.
To eradicate poverty, socio-economic system has to be made a balanced one. That means equitable distribution of wealth and resources. That means moratorium on amassing wealth at the expense of people.
That also means allowing rights and privileges of people. That means governments becoming earnest and sincere about implementing people-oriented legislations. That has to do also with not allowing crooks to run away with hefty loans from banks.
Poverty is not a choice. It is a man-made situation where some want to keep others as victims under checks and balances.
“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
(Dom Helder Camara, late
Brazilian Catholic Archbishop)
