SID, The Netherlands

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SID, The Netherlands

• Responding to World Poverty Human Rights and
  the Christian Faith
• Thomas W. Pogge
• Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for
  Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at ANU
  Professor of Philosophy at Columbia and Oslo
  Universities

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The Human Cost of Poverty I
 
 

• Among 6373 million human beings (2004), about
• 850 million are undernourished (UNDP 2005, p.
  24),
• 2000 million lack access to essential drugs
  (www.fic.nih.gov/about/summary.html),
• 1037 million lack access to safe drinking water
  (UNDP 2005, p. 44),
• 1000 million lack adequate shelter (UNDP 1998, p.
  49),
• 2000 million have no electricity (UNDP 1998, p.
  49),
• 2600 million lack adequate sanitation (UNDP 2005,
  p. 24),
• 799 million adults are illiterate
  (www.uis.unesco.org),
• 211 million children (aged 5 to 14) do wage
  work outside their family 8.4 million
  of them in the unconditionally worst forms of
  child labor, which involve slavery, forced or
  bonded labor, forced recruitment for use in armed
  conflict, forced prostitution or pornography, or
  the production or trafficking of illegal drugs
  (ILO A Future Without Child Labour, 2002, pp. 9,
  11, 17-18).

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The Human Cost of Poverty II

• Worldwide 34,000 children under age five die
  daily from
• hunger and preventable diseases (US Department
  of
• Agriculture U.S. Action Plan on Food Security,
  1999, p. iii,
• www.fas.usda.gov/icd/summit/pressdoc.html). The
  latest figure is 10.6 million per year (UNICEF
  The State of the Worlds Children 2005).
• One third of all human deaths some 18 million
  per year or 50000 daily are due to
  poverty-related causes (such as starvation,
  diarrhea, pneumonia, tuberculosis, measles,
  malaria, perinatal and maternal conditions) which
  could be prevented or cured cheaply through food,
  safe drinking water, vaccinations, rehydration
  packs, or medicines. Women and girls are
  substantially overrepresented among those
  suffering these deprivations (UNDP Human
  Development Report 2003, New York Oxford
  University Press 2003, pp. 310-330 UNIFEM
  UNRISD 2005).

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Death Toll of Century's Atrocitieshttp//users.er
ols.com/mwhite28/war-1900.htm
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Millions of Deaths
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Shares of World PopulationPoorest Households
versus Richest Countries
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Income Poverty Relative to the World Banks
1/day and 2/day Poverty Lines
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Shares of Global IncomePoorest Households
versus Richest Countries
Calculated in terms of market exchange rates so
as to reflect the avoidability of poverty.
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Reported Changes in Population Below
1/DayChina and the Rest of the World (Chen
and Ravallion 2004)
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Reported Changes inPopulation Below
2/DayChina and the Rest of the World(Chen and
Ravallion 2004)
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From UNDP HDR 2002, p.202 ODA per capita
ODA to LDCs Net grants by NGOs
ODA in m ODA as of GNP of donor
country as of total as of
GNP Country 2000 1990
2000 1990 2000 1990
2000 1990 2000
13
Related Annual Amounts
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The 1996 World Food Summit in Rome

• We pledge our political will and our common and
  national commitment to achieving food security
  for all and to an on-going effort to eradicate
  hunger in all countries, with an immediate !
  view to reducing the number of undernourished
  people to half their present level no later than
  2015.
• www.fao.org/docrep/003/w3613e/w3613e00.htm

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MDG 1 Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger

• Target To halve, between 1990 and 2015, the
  proportion of people whose income is less than 1
  a day.
• The target has largely been met in East Asia and
  the Pacific, but Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin
  America and the Caribbean, and parts of Europe
  and Central Asia are falling short.
• www.un.org/millenniumgoals/MDG-Page1.pdf

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Christian Responses to Poverty

• Charity neighbor, worst-off
• earth given to all in common
• 2. Justice right to aid (St.Ambrose)
• structures of sin (John Paul II)
• 3. Harm the Fifth Commandment?
• participation in design or imposition of social
  institutions that foreseeably lead to massive
  harms that are foreseeably avoidable.
• relevance of causal explanation of harm.

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• .

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Is Severe Poverty Homegrown?

• Rich countries cut their tariffs by less in the
  Uruguay Round than poor ones did. Since then,
  they have found new ways to close their markets,
  notably by imposing anti-dumping duties on
  imports they deem unfairly cheap. Rich
  countries are particularly protectionist in many
  of the sectors where developing countries are
  best able to compete, such as agriculture,
  textiles, and clothing. As a result, according to
  a new study by Thomas Hertel, of Purdue
  University, and Will Martin, of the World Bank,
  rich countries average tariffs on manufacturing
  imports from poor countries are four times higher
  than those on imports from other rich countries.
  This imposes a big burden on poor countries. The
  United Nations Conference on Trade and
  Development (UNCTAD) estimates that they could
  export 700 billion more a year by 2005 if rich
  countries did more to open their markets. Poor
  countries are also hobbled by a lack of know-how.
  Many had little understanding of what they signed
  up to in the Uruguay Round. That ignorance is now
  costing them dear. Michael Finger of the World
  Bank and Philip Schuler of the University of
  Maryland estimate that implementing commitments
  to improve trade procedures and establish
  technical and intellectual-property standards can
  cost more than a years development budget for
  the poorest countries. Moreover, in those areas
  where poor countries could benefit from world
  trade rules, they are often unable to do so. Of
  the WTOs 134 members, 29 do not even have
  missions at its headquarters in Geneva. Many more
  can barely afford to bring cases to the WTO (The
  Economist, 25 September 1999, page 89).

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World Bank Chief Economist Nick Stern Cutting
Agricultural Subsidies -- globalenvision.org/libr
ary/6/309

• In 2002 the rich countries spent about 300
  billion on export subsidies for agricultural
  products alone, roughly six times their total
  development aid. Cows receive annual subsidies of
  about 2,700 in Japan and 900 in Europe far
  above the annual income of most human beings. He
  also cited protectionist anti-dumping actions,
  bureaucratic applications of safety and
  sanitation standards, and textile tariffs and
  quotas as barriers to developing country exports
  Every textile job in an industrialized country
  saved by these barriers costs about 35 jobs in
  these industries in low-income countries. Stern
  was especially critical of escalating tariffs
  duties that are lowest on unprocessed raw
  materials and rise sharply with each step of
  processing and value added for undermining
  manufacturing and employment in developing
  countries, thus helping to confine Ghana and Cote
  D'Ivoire to the export of unprocessed cocoa
  beans, Uganda and Kenya to the export of raw
  coffee beans, and Mali and Burkina Faso to the
  export of raw cotton. He estimated that full
  elimination of agricultural protection and
  production subsidies in the rich countries would
  raise agricultural and food exports from low and
  middle-income countries by 24 and total annual
  rural income in these countries by about 60
  billion (about three quarters of the global poor
  live in such rural areas).

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Rules Governing Medical Research I

• Under the TRIPs agreement, inventors of new drugs
  are rewarded by a 20-year monopoly. This regime
  prices most existing drugs out of the reach of
  the global poor. It also skews medical research
  toward the affluent Medical conditions
  accounting for 90 percent of the global disease
  burden receive only 10 percent of all medical
  research worldwide. Pneumonia, diarrhea,
  tuberculosis and malaria, which together account
  for more than 20 percent of the global disease
  burden, receive less than one percent of all
  public and private funds devoted to health
  research. Of the 1393 new drugs approved between
  1975 and 1999, only 13 were for tropical diseases.

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Rules Governing Medical Research II

• One obvious alternative is a regime under which
  inventor firms are rewarded in proportion to the
  impact of their invention on the global disease
  burden.
• This solution would end the morally untenable
  situation of the drug companies, which must now,
  to recover their costs, price life-saving
  medications out of the reach of vast numbers of
  poor patients. The solution would align the
  interests of inventor firms and the generic drug
  producers. The former would want their inventions
  to be widely copied, mass-produced, and sold as
  cheaply as possible, because this would magnify
  the health impact of their inventions. If new
  drugs were sold at the competitive price, near
  the marginal cost of production, many poor
  patients would gain access to drugs they now
  cannot afford. And affluent patients would gain
  as well, by paying substantially less for drugs
  and medical insurance.
• This solution would also greatly expand research
  into diseases that now attract very little
  research dengue fever, hepatitis, meningitis,
  leprosy, trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness and
  Chagas disease), river blindness, leishmaniasis,
  Buruli ulcer, lymphatic filariasis,
  schistosomiasis (bilharzia), malaria,
  tuberculosis, and many more.
• In time, this one rule change alone would
  easily halve the number of annual poverty deaths.

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Other Global Institutional Features

• A global Polluter Pays regime that would raise
  funds
• from countries in proportion to their citizens
  and
• corporations contributions to transnational
  environmental
• pollution. Funds to be used for poverty
  eradication on the
• theory that the global poor generally benefit
  least, and
• are least able to protect themselves, from
  pollution.
• Rules setting a global minimum wage and minimal
  global
• constraints on working hours and working
  conditions in
• order to preclude the current race to the
  bottom where
• poor countries competing for foreign investment
  are
• outbidding one another by offering ever more
  exploitable
• and mistreatable workforces.

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• Global Institutional Order

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The International Resource Privilege

• we confer upon a group in power includes the
  liberty to effect legally valid transfers of
  ownership rights in the countrys resources. Thus
  a corporation that has purchased resources from
  the Saudis or Suharto, or from Mobuto or Sani
  Abacha, has thereby become entitled to be and
  actually is recognized anywhere in the world as
  the legitimate owner of these resources. This
  privilege has disastrous effects in poor but
  resource-rich countries. Whoever can take power
  in such a country by whatever means can maintain
  his rule, even against widespread popular
  opposition, by buying the arms and soldiers he
  needs with revenues from the export of natural
  resources. The resource privilege thus gives
  insiders strong incentives toward the violent
  acquisition and exercise of political power,
  thereby causing coup attempts and civil wars. It
  also gives outsiders strong incentives to corrupt
  the officials of such countries who, no matter
  how badly they rule, continue to have resources
  to sell and money to spend.

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The International Borrowing Privilege

• includes the power to impose internationally
  valid legal obligations upon the country at
  large. Any successor government that refuses to
  honor debts incurred by an ever so corrupt,
  brutal, undemocratic, unconstitutional,
  repressive, unpopular predecessor will be
  severely punished -- at minimum be excluded from
  the international financial markets. The
  international borrowing privilege facilitates
  borrowing by destructive rulers, and thus helps
  such rulers maintain themselves in power even
  against near-universal popular discontent and
  opposition. It imposes upon democratic successor
  regimes the often huge debts of their corrupt
  predecessors (Rwanda!), thereby sapping the
  capacity of such democratic governments to
  implement structural reforms and other political
  programs, thus rendering such governments less
  successful and less stable than they would
  otherwise be. And it strengthens incentives
  toward coup attempts Whoever succeeds in
  bringing a preponderance of the means of coercion
  under his control gets the borrowing privilege as
  an additional reward.

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• Global Institutional Order

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Human Rights Violators

• 1. Interactional Cases
• (a) Unfulfilled human rights
• (b) Causally traceable to human agent
• (c) Active agency
• (d) Official capacity
• (e) Intends, foresees, or should foresee.

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(c) Active Agency Condition

• can be satisfied by someone who accepts, or
  remains in, some position and then fails to
  fulfill responsibilities associated with it in a
  way that leads to unfulfilled human rights.
• Examples life guard ignoring emergency, police
  officer ignoring crimes.

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(b) Collective HR Violations (Relevance of other
Contributors)

• HR violators may make contributions that are
  neither necessary nor sufficient for harm (many
  acting together each with marginal contribution
  zero division of labor such that, but for
  another, ones contribution would have been
  harmless)
• Extends to upstream contributors and
  chain-of-command situations.
• Extends to facially harmless contributions
  (navigator)
• Extends to democratically authorized decisions.

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Human Rights Violators

• 2. Institutional Cases
• (a) Human rights deficit (may be statistical)
• (b) Causally traceable to social rules /
  institutional order
• (c) Active individual contribution to designing
  or imposing social rules that harm
• (d) Official character of rules, with claim to
  moral legitimacy and moral duty of compliance.
• (e) Agent intends, foresees, should foresee that
  rules produce human rights deficit and that there
  is an alternative institutional design that would
  not.

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(b) HR-Violating Character of an Institutional
Order

• An institutional order is human-rights violating
  if all four are true
• The institutional order is associated with a
  massive human-rights deficit among its
  participants.
• This association is reasonably avoidable through
  some alternative design of this institutional
  order.
• The association in (1) is foreseeable.
• Its avoidability (2) is also foreseeable We can
  know that the alternative institutional design
  would do much better in terms of giving
  participants secure access to the objects of
  their human rights.

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Individual Moral Claim I

• A human right to X gives you a moral claim
  against all others that they not harm you by
  cooperating, without compensating reform and
  protection efforts, in imposing upon you an
  institutional order (national, global, ) that
  contributes to your lacking secure access to X as
  part of a foreseeable and foreseeably avoidable
  human rights deficit.

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Individual Moral Claim II

• Everyone is entitled to a social and
  international order in which the rights and
  freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be
  fully realized ( 28)
• including the right to a standard of living
  adequate for the health and well-being of himself
  and of his family, including food, clothing,
  housing, and medical care ( 25).
• Universal Declaration of Human
  Rights

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Population Living in Extreme Poverty by Region
www.un.org/millenniumgoals/MDG-Page1.pdf
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Population Living in Extreme Poverty by Region
www.un.org/millenniumgoals/MDG-Page1.pdf
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World Bank Upbeat

• After increasing steadily over the past two
  centuries, since 1980 the total number of people
  living in poverty worldwide has fallen by an
  estimated 200 million even as the worlds
  population grew by 1.6 billion.
• James D. Wolfensohn Responding to the
  Challenges of Globalization Remarks to the G-20
  Finance Ministers and Central Governors, Ottawa,
  November 17, 2001
• www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/whatsnew2001.htm

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World Poverty 1820-1998
http//econ.worldbank.org/prr/globalization/text-2
857/, page 8
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The Conventional (World Bank) Method of
Defining Poverty

• 1. Stipulate an international poverty line (IPL)
  defined in terms of the purchasing power that
  some arbitrary US income had in the United
  States in some particular base year. The World
  Bank has successively introduced two IPLs under
  the 1/day label, defining as extremely poor
  those living in households whose income per
  person falls below, respectively
• 365/year PPP 1985 or 393/year PPP 1993

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The Conventional (World Bank) Method of
Defining Poverty

• 2. Use official purchasing power parity
  conversion factors (PPPs) to translate the chosen
  -amount into other-currency amounts deemed to be
  equivalent in purchasing power in the chosen base
  year. This yields national poverty lines
  supposedly equivalent to the IPL in the IPLs
  base year. For example
• Naira 4560/year in Nigeria in 1993
• 393/year PPP 1993
• Rupees 2756/year in India in 1993

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The Conventional (World Bank) Method of
Defining Poverty

• 3. Use the national consumer price indices (CPIs)
  of the various countries to inflate or deflate
  each countrys national poverty line for the
  IPLs base year so as to derive national poverty
  lines for the same country for other years. For
  example
• 293/year in the US in 1985
• 393/year in the US in 1993
• 504/year in the US in 2003
• Rs 1562/year in India in 1987
• Rs 2756/year in India in 1993
• Rs 5510/year in India in 2003

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The Conventional (World Bank) Method of
Defining Poverty

• 3. Use the national consumer price indices (CPIs)
  of the various countries to inflate or deflate
  each countrys national poverty line for the
  IPLs base year so as to derive national poverty
  lines for the same country for other years. For
  example
• 293/year in the US in 1985
• 393/year in the US in 1993
• 504/year in the US in 2003
• Rs 1562/year in India in 1987
• Rs 2756/year in India in 1993
• Rs 5510/year in India in 2003

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World Bank Poverty Estimates are Not Robust w.r.t
Choice of PPP Base Year

• The World Banks switch in PPP base year from
  1985 to 1993 produced the following changes
• For most countries, poverty lines were uniformly
  lowered for all years -- e.g. by 20 for the US
  and by 61 for Mauritania.
• For a few countries, poverty lines were uniformly
  raised for all years -- e.g. by 42 for Nigeria.
• As a consequence, Mauritanias poverty rate
  estimate (1990 survey) was lowered from 31.4 to
  3.8, while Nigerias poverty rate estimate (1985
  survey) was raised from 31.1 to 72.2.
• Likewise, the 1993 poverty rate for Latin America
  was lowered from 23.5 to 15.3, while the 1993
  poverty rate for Sub-Saharan Africa was raised
  from 39.1 to 49.7 percent.

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How International Purchasing Power Comparisons
are Base-Year Dependent

• Country A AV As CPI V-W AW
  As CPI W-X AX As CPI X-Y
  AY
• PPP of Year W PPP of
  Year Y
• Country B BV Bs CPI V-W BW
  Bs CPI W-X BX Bs CPI X-Y
  BY
• Base Year W Base Year Y

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How International Purchasing Power Comparisons
are Base-Year Dependent

• Currency
• Units
• 8
• 4
• 2
• A-currency
• 1
• 1/2

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How International Purchasing Power Comparisons
are Base-Year Dependent

• Currency
• Units
• 8
• 4 B-currency
• 2
• 1
• 1/2

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How International Purchasing Power Comparisons
are Base-Year Dependent

• Currency
• Units
• 8 B-currency
• 4
• 2
• 1 A-currency
• 1/2

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How International Purchasing Power Comparisons
are Base-Year Dependent

• Currency
• Units
• 8 B-currency
• 4
• 2
• A-currency
• 1
• 1/2

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Poverty Trend 1987-98
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Growth in Real Income for Different Groups of
World Population over 1990-2001 Globalization
PeriodWDRs iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/js
p/index.jsp
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Growing Income Disparity
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Income Disparity1820 - 1997