1 / 53

SID, The Netherlands

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. The Human Cost of Poverty I.

kita
Download Presentation

SID, The Netherlands

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. 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

  2. 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).

  3. 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 World’s Children2005). 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).

  4. Death Toll of Century's Atrocitieshttp://users.erols.com/mwhite28/war-1900.htm

  5. Millions of Deaths

  6. Shares of World Population:Poorest Households versus Richest Countries

  7. Income Poverty Relative to the World Bank’s “$1/day” and “$2/day” Poverty Lines

  8. Shares of Global Income:Poorest Households versus Richest Countries Calculated in terms of market exchange rates so as to reflect the avoidability of poverty.

  9. Reported Changes in Population Below $1/Day:China and the Rest of the World(Chen and Ravallion 2004)

  10. Reported Changes inPopulation Below $2/Day:China and the Rest of the World(Chen and Ravallion 2004)

  11. 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

  12. Related Annual Amounts

  13. 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

  14. 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

  15. 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.

  16. .

  17. “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 year’s 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 WTO’s 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). Is Severe Poverty Homegrown?

  18. World Bank Chief Economist Nick Stern: “Cutting Agricultural Subsidies” -- globalenvision.org/library/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).

  19. 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.

  20. 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.

  21. 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. Other Global Institutional Features

  22. Global Institutional Order

  23. The International Resource Privilege … we confer upon a group in power includes the liberty to effect legally valid transfers of ownership rights in the country’s 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.

  24. 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.

  25. Global Institutional Order

  26. 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.

  27. (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.

  28. (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, one´s 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.

  29. 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.

  30. (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.

  31. 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. Individual Moral Claim I

  32. “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 Individual Moral Claim II

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

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

  35. 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 world’s 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

  36. World Poverty: 1820-1998 http://econ.worldbank.org/prr/globalization/text-2857/, page 8

  37. 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

  38. 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 IPL’s base year. For example: Naira 4560/year in Nigeria in 1993 = = $393/year PPP 1993 = = Rupees 2756/year in India in 1993

  39. 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 country’s national poverty line for the IPL’s 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

  40. 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 country’s national poverty line for the IPL’s 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

  41. World Bank Poverty Estimates are Not Robust w.r.t Choice of PPP Base Year The World Bank’s 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, Mauritania’s poverty rate estimate (1990 survey) was lowered from 31.4% to 3.8%, while Nigeria’s 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.

  42. How International Purchasing Power Comparisons are Base-Year Dependent Country AAV [A’s CPI V-W] AW [A’s CPI W-X] AX [A’s CPI X-Y] AY | | | | | | [PPP of| Year W] [PPP of | Year Y] | | | | | | Country BBV [B’s CPI V-W] BW [B’s CPI W-X] BX [B’s CPI X-Y] BY Base Year W Base Year Y

  43. How International Purchasing Power Comparisons are Base-Year Dependent Currency Units 8 | | | | | | | | 4 | | | | | | | | 2 | | | | | |A-currency | | 1 | | | | | | | | 1/2 | | | | | | ~ ~ V W X Y Years

  44. How International Purchasing Power Comparisons are Base-Year Dependent Currency Units 8 | | | | | | | | 4 | | B-currency | | | | | | 2 | | | | | | | | 1 | | | | | | | | 1/2 | | | | | | ~ ~ V W X Y Years

  45. How International Purchasing Power Comparisons are Base-Year Dependent Currency Units 8 | | B-currency | | | | | | 4 | | | | | | | | | 2 | | | | | | | | | | | | 1 | | |A-currency | | | | | | 1/2 | | | | | | ~ ~ V W X Y Years

  46. How International Purchasing Power Comparisons are Base-Year Dependent Currency Units 8 | | B-currency | | | | | | 4 | | | | | | | | | | | 2 | | | | A-currency | | | | 1 | | | | | | | | 1/2 | | | | | | ~ ~ V W X Y Years

  47. Poverty Trend 1987-98

More Related