In impoverished countries such as Ethiopia, Cambodia, Sudan, Haiti, Uganda, Guinea and many others, people are dying due to lack of basic needs. Internal wars rage over water and food. Yet, when we look to the industrialized nations, people seem to be flourishing. So, why are people still dying of hunger and preventable diseases? To where is the wealth of the earth’s abundant resources going? Well, in the United States, eight billion dollars is spent on cosmetics although a mere six billion dollars would be required to provide education for every child in the world. Through lack of appropriately directed resources, nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read and write.
In Europe, eleven billion was spent on ice cream even though one billion people do not have access to clean water and 40% of the world’s population does not have basic sanitation. To put this into proper perspective, the cost of clean water and sanitation for all is only nine billion dollars. In Europe, ten billion is spent annually on alcohol, yet it would take only 12 billion to provide reproductive health for all women, a mere fraction of the cost of alcohol consumption.
Furthermore, a staggering 780 billion dollars is spent on the military around the world, but the cost of basic health and nutrition for all people of the world is estimated to be only 13 billion. Despite the earth’s wealth and the billions of dollars traded annually, 30,000 children die each day due to malnutrition and disease occasioned by poverty.
We have to ask ourselves, why are these injustices allowed to happen? Why are the ‘poor’ poor? The answer falls on the wealthy. The wealthy consume at the expense of the poor. Someone has to pay for the developed countries over-consumption and that burden is placed on the poorest countries of all. Global decisions, policies, and practices around the world are influenced and formulated by the rich and powerful, such as leaders of the rich industrialized countries. In order to maintain their countries' culture of over-consumption, they must keep the ‘poor’ poor.
If everyone in the world lived like a typical American, it would take five and a half earths just to sustain the resource consumption. After all, developed countries like Canada, United States, and Britain consume 45% of all meat and fish, 58% of total energy, 84% of all paper, and own 87% of the world’s vehicles, yet, where are all these resources cheaply obtained? Of cause they are from poorer nations.
Not only are the natural resources of these countries exploited by the western world, human labour is grossly mistreated. Adults and children as young as eight years of age toil long hours in often unbearable conditions to barely earn enough to feed their families. Those with jobs are the lucky ones; many others are forced to beg or steal to simply survive. However, many do not.
Not only is the ideology of consumerism appalling, the actions of rich nations are even more shocking. Large multinational corporations strip developing countries of their resources, land, and basic human needs so they can feed their growing profits and satisfy their shareholders. This makes it impossible for the governments of poorer nations to develop economically. The production, processing, and consumption of commodities requires extraction of valuable natural resources - resources that get extracted from countries who need them the most and that get wasted on the wealthy.
Currently three quarters of the world’s resources are consumed by one-quarter of the world’s population. If today’s poor attempted to reclaim their resources for their own survival, it would pose a threat to the wealthier nations who currently consume and waste those resources. To give a clearer picture of the waste accumulated by industrialized countries, look at the United Kingdom, for example, where 30- 40% of all food is never eaten. It is estimated that a mind-boggling 38 billion dollars worth of food gets thrown away every year. In the United States, 40- 50% of all the food ready for harvest never gets eaten.
To put this inequality into sharper focus, consider the fact that one billion people suffer from hunger and three and one-half billion people have a deficiency of vitamins and minerals. Yet, in the western world, 1.2 billion suffer from obesity. If the starving of the world attempted to cultivate their own resources now it would not be possible because western society controls the majority of them. Thus, the hungry become hungrier and the well fed become overfed.
So, if there is not enough money to feed the starving because it gets spent on weapons, ice cream and alcohol, and if there's not enough food for the world because nearly 40% of it gets thrown away, and if poorer countries are unable to develop because they are stripped of all the resources they need to make money, how can there ever be a peaceful future? How can there ever be a world where everyone is fed? It's simple really. If the rich of this world open their eyes and realized that we’re losing this planet because of greed and unbridled over-consumption, and heeded the warnings of those who promote world sustainability, perhaps there will be hope.
We have one earth and are one species, and all of us need to work together equally to ensure the planet’s future, a future we can look to with hope. To achieve this, we need to educate and empathize with all the people of the world. If we make others hurt, we are hurting ourselves. If we help those who are struggling with poverty, disease and intolerable living conditions, we are ensuring the earth’s survival and our own survival as well. There can be no room in this planet’s future for cultures who engage in over-consumption. This culture must realize its damaging ways so it can change. Otherwise, chaos, despair, sadness and disaster will ensue. In many respects, it already has.
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