Poverty, conflict and humanity

Regional and global organisations hold conferences and special sessions every year to ponder over factors contributing to poverty across the world. Politicians and members of the global elite make solemn pledges at such events to wipe out poverty, hunger and starvation but they evaporate within no time.

It is believed poverty and related diseases claim over nine million lives every year, 25000 precious souls daily, which unfortunately also includes over 10000 children. Hunger and undernutrition are the greatest threats to public health, killing more people than HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. Some 854 million people worldwide are estimated to be undernourished, and high food prices may drive another 100 million into poverty and hunger.

Certain natural calamities like earthquakes, floods and storms also add to poverty, especially multidimensional poverty, destroying buildings, damaging infrastructure, rendering people homeless and devastating crops besides killing both human beings and animals. For instance, a tsunami on the one hand decimated tens of thousands of people across the world and on the other, led to the destruction of infrastructure on an epic scale that increased multidimensional poverty in certain parts of the world.

Similarly, Hurricane Katrina and other cataclysmic storms not only decimated people but also destroyed livelihoods besides causing massive damage to infrastructure in the US and other countries. Floods in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and other parts of the Global South not only took away people's lives but also deprived them of their livelihood, leaving behind a trail of devastation and destruction which led to a surge in different diseases.

Pandemics and epidemics also add to multidimensional poverty. For instance, the Covid-19 pandemic that affected over 704,753,890 did not only kill 7,010,681 since the eruption of the lethal virus in 2019 to April this year but it also rendered millions of people jobless. For instance, according to the International Labour Organization, 114 million jobs were lost in 2020 alone because of Covid which, in combination with working-hour reductions within employment, resulted in working-hour losses approximately four times as high as during the financial crisis in 2009. The global labour body estimates that the working hours lost in 2020 (compared to pre-pandemic levels) were equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs, leading to $3.7 trillion in lost labour income.

All the above-mentioned factors contribute to multidimensional poverty in one way or another. Some of these factors are unpreventable. However, it is not only natural catastrophes or pandemics that exacerbate poverty but there are also man-made disasters that are fueling hunger and starvation leading to a phenomenal surge in diseases that end up killing human beings on a colossal scale.

Conflicts, wars and military confrontations are some of the factors that are fueling multidimensional poverty everywhere in the world. For instance, the conflict in Iraq is believed to have decimated more than 2.5 million people since the illegal invasion of the Arab country by the US. The war also rendered millions of people homeless, having a spillover effect on neighbouring Syria where it plunged more than 600,000 people into the abyss of death. The conflict also created one of the biggest humanitarian catastrophes, rendering over 11 million Syrians homeless, and forcing them to undertake perilous journeys. The ISIS-led insurgency also saw Damascus lose over 100 billion dollars because of the destruction of the infrastructure.

The ongoing humanitarian catastrophes unfolding in several conflict-ridden zones have also made it clear that wars, invasions and military confrontations are the biggest cause of multi-dimensional poverty that has flattened town after town and city after city, destroying hospitals, targeting schools, contaminating water and bombing sanitation systems.

It is not a fig of somebody's imagination but a bitter reality. A recent report by a global body corroborates the claims of pacifists that wars and conflicts greatly hamper human development and fuel multidimensional poverty. The report jointly published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) based at the University of Oxford features original statistical research on multidimensional poverty for 112 countries and 6.3 billion people, as well as fine-grained analysis of the relationship between conflict and poverty. It reveals a staggering 455 million of the world’s poor live in countries exposed to violent conflicts, hindering and even reversing hard-won progress to reduce poverty.

The report, which also includes new survey data for 20 countries and released by the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) on October 17, found that 1.1 billion people live in acute poverty worldwide, with 40 per cent living in countries experiencing war, fragility and/or low peacefulness.

According to the report, “Countries at war have higher deprivations across all ten indicators of multidimensional poverty, underscoring the devastating impact of conflict on the world’s most vulnerable populations. For instance, in conflict-affected countries, over one in four poor people lacks access to electricity, compared to just over one in twenty in more stable regions. Similar disparities are evident in areas such as child education (17.7 per cent vs 4.4 per cent), nutrition (20.8 per cent vs 7.2 per cent), and child mortality (8 per cent vs 1.1 per cent).”

Every war creates immense hardships for ordinary people by damaging infrastructure on an epic scale. The report also noted that: “Deprivations are markedly more severe in nutrition, access to electricity, and access to water and sanitation for the poor in conflict settings relative to the poor in more peaceful settings.” It further said: “Poverty reduction tends to be the slowest in countries most affected by conflict – where poverty is often the highest.” It noted that in Afghanistan 5.3 million more people fell into multidimensional poverty during the turbulent period 2015/16–2022/23. “Data are available now to examine Afghanistan’s post-conflict situation and the results are alarming. In 2022/23, nearly two-thirds of Afghans were poor (64.9 per cent).”

Many believe that children are the worst victims of wars and conflicts. In Iraq, more than 500,000 children perished because of the barbaric US sanctions. Many other conflict zones also witnessed the merciless killings and maiming of children. The report says that over half of the 1.1 billion poor people are children under the age of 18 (584 million). “Globally, 27.9 per cent of children live in poverty, compared with 13.5 per cent of adults. Large proportions of the 1.1 billion poor people lack adequate sanitation (828 million), housing (886 million) or cooking fuel (998 million). Well over half of the 1.1 billion poor people live with a person who is undernourished in their household (637 million). In South Asia, 272 million poor people live in households with at least one undernourished person, and in Sub-Saharan Africa 256 million do.”

The global community cannot shrug off its responsibility by asserting that English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was right about human nature and that war is a natural phenomenon that can never be prevented. Ironically, we who claim to be superior beings could not prevent the more than 280 conflicts that have erupted since 1945 but Native American tribes managed to spend not years but several decades in peace, sorting out their disputes through talks and negotiations.

It is time we implemented in letter and spirit the global principles meant to seek resolution of disputes through talks, penalising those who use force or threat of force to resolve issues. The end of wars would not only reduce multidimensional poverty but would also put an end to the brutalisation of humanity that has been exacerbated by wars and conflicts.

The writer is a freelance

journalist who can be reached at:

egalitarianism444@gmail.com