IS THE EXISTENCE OF EXTREME POVERTY IN THE WORLD
A FORM OF GENOCIDE BY OMISSION?
SOME TENTATIVE THOUGHTS
By Zeki Ergas *
… Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?
He said ‘I don’t know; am I my brother’s keeper?’
And the Lord said, ‘What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!’
Genesis 4: 1-16
There are more things to admire in men than to despise.
The doctor, in:The Plague of Albert Camus
FOREWORD
The two quotes above summarize, in a nutshell, all that we need to know.
In the first quote, the Lord asks Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel? Cain answers, ‘I don’t know; am I my brother’s keeper?’ By giving that answer, Cain does two things: one, he lies; and, two, he expresses his feelings of shame and guilt at having killed Abel, his brother. The Lord, of course, knows the truth, and He punishes Cain by cursing him. But, after Cain complains that his fellow human beings will try to punish him by murdering him, He also, because He is merciful, places a mark on him, so that he will be spared. That Biblical ‘story’ is still a good metaphor to illustrate the human condition today. The Lord, I am sure, is asking humanity: ‘What have you done, what are you doing, to your fellow human beings?’ And humanity is answering, ‘Nothing. I have done nothing bad. Actually, I am doing all I canto do good to my fellow human beings.’ That is essentially a lie, of course, because what humanity has managed to do in the course of perhaps eight to ten millennia of its history (since the discovery of agriculture, say, in the Mesopotamian basin) is to create a world primarily defined by violence, injustice and greed. And the Lord is still telling humanity – through the pangs of conscience that many good willed man feel who, whether it is immortal or not, do have a soul, ‘Listen; you are not doing what you must need to do and I am very angry at you because I can hear “ your brother’s blood … crying out to me from the ground!” ’ And that is the reason why Cain’s mark still is on humanity’s brow.
In the second quote, Albert Camus, through the words of the admirable character of the doctor in his great novel, The Plague, expresses his optimism on humanity’s true nature, despite all its faults and shortcomings. Like Rousseau Camus believes that man is essentially good. What Camus is telling us, in other words, is, The glass is half full. But, the pessimist does not agree, The glass is half empty, he tells us, and it is emptying fast, not filling, and based on the evidence of what is happening in the world presently, he appears to be more justified in his conclusion than Camus. Personally, I say, I don’t know: things can still turn out badly or well. The struggle is still on. I hope that Camus will prove to have been right. That humanity will prove, or demonstrate, that it is capable of building a world in which peace, justice and solidarity prevail. The jury (as the Americans say in their colourful language) is still out. So, I say, let us wait and see, and hope for the best, and in the meantime, work towards that ideal, the building a better world.
INTRODUCTION 1
I begin with widely accepted definitions of genocide and extreme poverty.
The ‘UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’, adopted in 1948, defines genocide as follows:
‘Genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’ 2
A more inclusive definition of extreme poverty is one that incorporates physiological, psychological, and even metaphysical aspects. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and other UN agencies have defined extreme poverty as having to live with the equivalent of less than 1 US dollar a day; more than one billion people in the world are estimated to suffer from it – in addition, about two billion people have to make ends meet with less than 2 US dollars a day. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (also adopted by the UN, in 1948) clearly states that extreme poverty is a violation of essential human rights. The latter include economic, political and cultural rights, but, for the purposes of this short essay, I shall concentrate primarily on economic rights. These, at a minimum, include the satisfaction of five essential basic human needs (BHN) that have to do with: food, shelter, clean water, health and education. The non-satisfaction of these essential BHN entails a great deal of physical pain and psychological suffering for the extremely poor people. One important expression of psychological suffering is the shame (and also guilt) parents feel for their inability to provide these minimal BHN for their children.
Having defined genocide and extreme poverty, the next step, it seems to me, is trying to attribute, or to ascribe, responsibility for that catastrophic situation in the world. Only after having established that responsibility, shall I turn to the main , largely philosophical, question, or argument, of this essay: Can the presence, or existence, of extreme poverty in the world be compared to a form of genocide by omission.
THE QUESTION OF THE RESPONSIBILTY FOR THE EXISTENCE OF EXTREME POVERTY IN THE WORLD
It is difficult, it seems to me, not to attribute, or to ascribe, the primary responsibility for the existence of extreme poverty in the world to economic and political leaders who, deep inside themselves, know that they have the power to stop it, but are not doing it. I shall argue below that the leaders of Big Business and of the governments of rich countries are primarily responsible. I begin with the following quote by Franz Baerman Steiner who is able to define for us what that power in the hands of these leaders means: 3
‘In the lives of those people whom we are thinking of there is only one variety of power: power over other groups of people – that is to say military, political and economic power, power which guarantees the exploitation of other groups … (I)t may well be that a new technological advance (including the sociological adaptations which this enforces) means an increase in the power of ‘Man’. In the life of the planet and at the present moment, it simply means an increase in power over other people.’
It can be realistically argued, and I will do so, that Big Business and the governments of the rich countries are two of the ‘Big Four’ powers which control the political and socio-economic life of the planet -- the other two being civil society and international organisations. Metaphorically speaking, these ‘Big Four’ powers can be compared to the four wheels of a big vehicle -- a large truck, for example, or a tractor. Of course, all four wheels are needed for the vehicle to advance on a road that is in bad shape – that is, on a road full of potholes and bumps (representing all the obstacles on the path of ‘sustainable development’, to use a term fashionable these days). But, and this caveat is essential, I believe that only two of the wheels have real traction; they are those of Big Business and of the governments of the rich countries. The other two wheels, those of the civil society and of the international organisations, while, obviously, necessary for the vehicle to advance, have no real traction. That means that they can slow down the vehicle, or even bring it to a stop, but by themselves they cannot make it advance. The reader will have guessed by now that real traction is the metaphorical equivalent of money, or capital, the lifeblood of socio-economic (and political) life, which is controlled by Big Business and the governments of the rich countries.
Three statements can be made, at this juncture, with some degree of confidence concerning these ‘Big Four’ powers:
1) Big Business and the governments of the rich countries are cooperating well, establishing contacts and making deals, at various venues, such as the conferences, meetings and summits of: the World Economic Forum (WEF), the G-8 and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The primary purpose of these ‘contacts’ is the promotion of the globalisation ‘agenda’.
2) The international organisations are part of the globalisation ‘agenda’, but more implicitly and indirectly, and in that respect, a distinction needs to be made between: on the one hand, some of the specialised agencies of the UN -- foremost among them, the UNDP, the main agency behind the UN’s Millennium Project that has imagined and promotes the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); and, on the other hand, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the WTO. 4
3) Only civil society, through its myriad of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) representing social, cultural and religious groups -- women, youth, children, workers, peasants, Christians, Muslims, and so on -- is openly against, or in conflict, with the globalisation ‘agenda’. Increasingly, at the annual meetings of the World Social Forum (WSF), socially-oriented (as opposed to profit-oriented) alternative models of ‘sustainable development’ are being introduced and discussed. There were, in 2006, three WSF meetings in Bamako (Mali), Caracas (Venezuela) and Karachi (Pakistan); in 2007, there will be only one, in Nairobi (Kenya).
THE GROWING ABYSS BETWEEN THE VERY RICH AND THE EXTREMELY POOR
Some statistics and what they mean.
A) According to a very recent (2005) Bloomberg Agency report, there were, in 2005, in the world, about one million families with fortunes superior to US$ 10 million. These families, together, controlled a total wealth of US$ 92,000 billion (US$ 92 trillion). By 2008, it is projected that the number of these families will almost double to 1.9 million, and that their total ‘worth’ will be US$ 154,000 billion (US$ 154 trillion). Let us make, in an effort to grasp more fully what these mind-blowing numbers mean, some comparisons. In 2005, the US had a Gross National Product (GNP) of close to US$ 13,000 billion (or US$ 13 trillion). Assuming – generously – that the latter will grow to about US$ 14,000 billion in 2008, the world’s richest 1.9 million families will, in that same year, own wealth representing about eleven times the American GNP. Now, assuming that these 1.9 million families total 19 million people (again, a generous assumption of ten persons per family), they constitute about 0.3 per cent of the earth’s population. Let us, also assume, conservatively, that this total of US$ 154,000 billion is invested, very safely, and generates an income of only 5 per cent a year. That is US$ 7,700 billion. Divided per 19 million people, the latter yields a per capita income of US$ 400,000 a year, which translates at about US$ 1,232.5 per day (or, for a family of ten, US$ 12,325 per day). That is before taxes. Let us, finally, assume a tax rate of 35 per cent (once more a generous assumption that doesn’t take into account all the loopholes that the rich are very adept at exploiting; chief among those, tax evasion in the tax havens of the offshore banks); we end up with a disposable income of about US$ 821.5 a day per person (for the family, US$ 8,215 per day).
B) In shocking contrast, as mentioned above, more than one billion people in the world must live with less than US$ 1 a day (and two more billion, with less than US$ 2 a day). Together these people represent about half of the planet’s population (of about 6.5 billion).
C) The average income gap between these two groups, the very rich and the extremely poor, is, probably, conservatively put, about 500 to 1. And what is more, that ‘abyss’ is still growing.
D) More statistics that support the contention that the very rich are getting richer: In the US, in 1960, the income gap between the top 20 per cent and the bottom 20 per cent of the population was 30 to 1; in 2005, it was 75 to 1. Thirty years ago, the average annual compensation of the top 100 chief executives in the country was 30 times the pay of the average worker. In 2005, it was 1000 times the pay of the average worker. 5
E) What follows is a very partial list of the net profits made, in 2005, by some of the world’s leading transnational or multinational corporations (TNCs or MNCs):
Exxon (petroleum products), US$ 36.0 billion; City Group (bank), US$ 32,24 billion; HSBC (bank) US$ 15,53 billion; UBS (bank) US$ 14,03 billion; Nestlé (food products) US$ 7.99 billion; Novartis (pharmaceuticals) US$ 6.13 billion; Hoffmann la Roche (pharmaceuticals) US$ 5.8 billion; Zurich Financial Services (insurance) US$ 3,21 billion.
These net profits are roughly divided into four parts:
dividends to shareholders;
payment of taxes;
payment of salaries and performance bonuses to employees; and additional windfall profits to shareholders in the form of bolstering reserves, and schemes to buy back shares that increases the share’s market value.
These statistics, inter alia, mean that:
one, the number of the very rich is growing very rapidly; two, the very rich are getting richer; and three, the number of the extremely poor, if not growing, is not diminishing as rapidly – a notable exception may be the poor people in the CRIB countries (China, Russia, India and Brazil); poverty has indeed decreased in the CRIB countries, and in other Asian and Latin American countries, but that good news appears not to apply to extremely poor people – such as, the 300 million ‘wretchedly’ (from the ‘Wretched of the Earth’, of Frantz Fanon) poor people in sub-Saharan Africa.
BIG BUSINESS ‘EFFORTS’ TO ERADICATE EXTREME POVERTY
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), has, in the past half dozen years or so, financed, promoted, supported, or collaborated with, a number of ‘Council Projects’, ‘Sector Projects’ and ‘Initiatives’. 6
A few representative examples:
i) A research project in which Oxfam GB, Novib (Oxfam Netherlands) and Unilever Indonesia (UI) participated. Some ‘key findings’ : 3,000 people are ‘direct employees’ of UI, another 2,000 are ‘contract workers’; … ‘About 300,000 people make their livelihoods in UI’s value chain’, but ‘Participation in value chains such as the UI does not automatically guarantee improvements in the lives of people living in poverty.’
ii) A workshop on ‘Sustainable Livelihoods’ in Central America, in which sixteen leading companies of Honduras participated. Some findings: Grupo Alcon, a Cargill subsidiary that produces food products, is working on a ‘corporate social responsibility’ strategy …; Plastico Vanguardia ‘generates direct and indirect employment through its plastic recycling activities, to date, they have recycled 37 million pounds …; and Manufacturas des Tropico has initiated a community project in which ‘micro-entrepreneurs are trained to help manufacture furniture.’
iii) The ‘Deutsche Bank: Microcredit Development Fund’ Project. Some findings: ‘Microfinance has emerged in recent years as one of the most effective weapons in the fight against poverty. By providing unsecured micro-loans of typically US$ 100 to the world’s poorest, institutions as the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh have enabled literally millions to rise above the poverty line… The Deutsche Bank Microcredit Development Fund has been working to assist such institutions by providing capital and technical support … A loan from the Deusche Bank … of US$ 75,000 was made to the Society for Helping and Awakening Rural Poor through Education (SHARE) …Since the inception of the Fund, as a result of the US$ 937,500 in loans made to twelve micro-finance institutions in nine countries, an additional US$ 19 million is leveraged in private financing and cumulative lending capacity to the very poorest.’
iv) The ‘Concrete Innovation with Mi Casa: Holcim Apasco Project in Mexico). Findings: ‘Since 1996, Holcim Apasco has set up more than 120 standardised Mi Casa locations (building material depots) … A parallel scheme has trained more than 10,000 self-builders in the skills needed to build their own homes … It is estimated that through Mi Casa initiative Holcim Apasco has supported the construction or improvement of about 400,000 homes all over Mexico.
These ‘efforts’ can be seen as a timid, or very modest, step in the right direction. But, in and by themselves, they are by far insufficient to deal effectively with the massive problem of extreme poverty in the world.
IS EXTREME POVERTY A GENOCIDE BY OMISSION? SOME PHILOSOPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS 7
I will proceed in this section by providing a series quotes that, I believe, are very relevant to the subject at hand in this essay. Moreover, I believe that these quotes represent a whole that is more than the sum of their parts.
‘(S) social and economic inequalities … continue to increase, not decrease or stop altogether, as the 21st century unfolds.’
‘Human beings are capable of great evil ... (one) (d)efinition of evil (is): the perpetration of reasonably foreseeable intolerable harm to victims.’
‘Grave injustices threaten humanity.’
‘The human race is one and the same species throughout the world.’
‘Crimes against humanity attack the human dignity of their victims.’ ‘(T)he Coming Age of Scarcity ( a collection of essays) (argues that): (U)nchecked economism, rapacious exploitation, (and) (t)he global industrialisation program … (are) unsustainable.’
‘The dominance of the idea of unlimited growth (cancerous economics), the immiseration of the many for the sake of the few, the shameless excessive consumption of the privileged, all conspire against the establishment of a rational society in balance with nature, human requirements, and the individual pursuit of personal fulfilment.’
‘All peoples are united by common bonds …’
‘There is virtually no limit to human folly and lust for power.’
‘(Humanity is)engaged in a kind of systematic lunatic denial of what is actually happening.’
‘The main engine of modern industrial civilisation may be hell bent on self-destruction, but there are many people who are trying to stop the machine, or at least to slow it down so that the drivers can come to their senses … Are resisters a tiny and insignificant minority? Can we reverse the forces that now govern the world? We must believe that resistance is possible. Then we must make that belief the basis of our philosophy and our lives.’
We must develop character, in the Aristotelian sense. A virtuous character is pleased by doing what is right and ashamed of doing what is wrong.’
‘Sympathy is directed toward the victims; shame is directed toward ourselves. Sympathy wants to relieve the suffering and pain of others.’
‘The shame which the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another, … is the shame of a bystander, who, instead of doing something to prevent a crime or to interrupt it, allows the crime to occur. We are diminished by having failed to act or by being the heirs or perhaps beneficiaries of such omissions … (M)ore realistic is self-accusation, or the accusation of having failed in terms of human solidarity.’
‘There is another, vaster shame, the shame of the world. Citing John Donne, we live together and we are responsible one for another, “ every bell tolls for everyone”. Each of us is called to do what we can to care for the suffering and the hungry. There is an ocean of pain in the world … ‘
‘One standard of failure is the standard of responsibility for the life and well-being of others, responsibility to care for the needy and aid the suffering. The problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.’
‘(W)e are the masters of the art of pretending not to know what we cannot help knowing. If we remain deaf to the endless cry, it means we are pretending not to hear.’
‘Crucial needs include political, economic and educational aid – somewhat along the lines of a post-Second World War Marshall Plan – to defuse potentially genocidal situations.’
‘Not only are there many NGOs that do have deep commitments to humanitarian causes, but those organisations, along with many governmental ones, are staffed by individuals who often display immense courage, persistence and resilience in battling against war, injustice and greed.’
SOME CONCLUSIONS
I believe that, in view of the information and arguments I presented above, and considering that millions of men, women and children continue to suffer unnecessarily from extreme poverty, and die every year from hunger, malnutrition, disease and violent conflicts, it is not far-fetched or harebrained to conclude that the persistence of the existence of extreme poverty in the world can be compared to a form of genocide by omission. I also believe that the Powers That Be, of Big Business and of the governments of the rich countries (the two wheels with traction) are primarily responsible for this catastrophic state of affairs because, by far, they are not doing what needs must be done to eradicate, once and for all, this terrible scourge from the surface of the earth. Ultimately, I believe, it all boils down to a question of human dignity and human solidarity which are being today trampled under the feet of profit-driven neo-liberal globalisation. Human dignity and human solidarity demand that the BHN of the extremely poor are satisfied. That this very severe violation of an essential human right is stopped.
I would like to close (like Camus) on an optimistic note, even though I believe that, at this point of time, is not justified. Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the UN Millennium Project, said recently:
‘We live in a time of profound paradox, but also profound possibility, and profound hope. The paradox is that this (extreme poverty) continues in a world of vast wealth and knowledge. The hope is the fact that we live in an age of vast possibility. If we choose correctly, this kind of extreme poverty could be ended in our generation.’
I hope Jeffrey Sachs is right. The overarching goal remains building a world in which peace, justice and solidarity prevail. But for that to happen structural changes in the political (power) and economic relations between the rich and the poor countries are needed. It is a subject that I have tried to address in an on-going series of other essays. 8
‘Justice for weak is the glory of the strong’, said Alphonse de la Martine, who was not only a great poet, but also a great statesman in the revolutionary times of the nineteenth century France. Let us hope that the strong will end up hearing that message.
* Dr. Zeki Ergas, a writer and a scholar, is the founder of Millennium Solidarity Geneva Group (MSGG), www.millennium-solidarity.net. He is also the General Secretary of P.E.N. International’s Swiss Romand Center.
NOTES
1 I happened to be reading, John Roth, Ed., Genocide and Human Rights. A Philosophical Guide (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), in which two dozen or so philosophers discuss the subject described in the title, when I was writing a short essay entitled, ‘Big Business and Extreme Poverty: A Timid Step in the Right Direction? Or an Exercise in Deception: Throwing some Crumbs While Keeping the Loaf?’ – that essay was published (like several others on comparable issues), in www.peacejournalism.com . Suddenly, as I was reading the book, the idea of ‘genocide by omission’ – as opposed to that of ‘genocide by commission’, which the ‘paradigmatic’ genocides of the Holocaust, the Cambodian and the Rwandan genocides clearly are -- came to me, and I associated that idea in my brain with that of extreme poverty. I was, of course, very upset by that association, wondering if I was not going too far, establishing a connection that was spurious. It was then that (as if to tell me that I was not wrong to make that connection), my unconscious mind made another link with the distant past. Many years ago, when I was a graduate student, I had read a book by Jacques Monod entitled Random and Necessity, in which the French Nobel prize-winning biologist argued that, in evolution (in life in other words), selection was due both to random and to necessity. I concluded from that mental ‘message’ that I was justified to make the association between extreme poverty and genocide by omission. Whether I am right, or not, is, of course, ultimately for the readers to judge. What I propose to do in this short essay is to take a closer look at that association.
2 In Roth , op. cit. p. 127
3 Franz Baerman Steiner, one of the leading poets and anthropologists of the twentieth century, was born in Prague, in 1909, and died in exile in London, in 1953, at the early age of 44. The quote is from his ‘On the Process of Civilisation’, in, Michael Mack, ‘The Rational Constitution of Evil: Reflections on Franz Baerman Steiner’s Critique of Philosophy’, in Roth, op. cit. p.110.
4 Other international organisations whose work can be seen as benefiting primarily the poor countries include: the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD); the International Labour Organisation (ILO), and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). For a complete list of the international organisations that are part of the UN system (also the World Bank, but not the IMF and the WTO), see the NGLS (United Nations Non-governmental Liaison Service) ‘Compendium’ : UN System Engagement with NGOs, Civil Society, the Private Sector and Other Actors (UN, New York and Geneva, 2005)
5 Bill Moyers, ‘Restoring Public Trust’, in www.TomPaine.com
6 The WBCSD has a permanent office in Geneva in which work some fifty people. The Council has presently 180 members, mostly large MNCs or TNCs based in rich countries -- 64 in Europe, 49 in North America and 24 in Japan -- which have a total annual turnover of US$ 5,200 billion (US$ 5,2 trillion), and a total market capitalisation of US$ 5,400 billion that represents more than 40 per cent of the American GNP. The WBCSD was initiated in 1991 with the aim of having a business representation at the UN-organised Rio Summit of 1992. In the following ten years that led to the Johannesburg Summit of 2002, the WBCSD was active working in ‘sustainable development’, developing new concepts – such as, ‘Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and ‘Global Reporting Initiative’ (GRI) – and conceiving projects and initiatives. See, Catalyzing Change. A Short History of the WBCSD.
7 Based largely on Roth, op cit. See especially the following chapters: Stephen D. Davis, ‘Genocide, Despair and Religious Hope: An Essay on Human Nature’; James R. Watson, ‘Beyond the Affectations of Philosophy’; Patrick Hayden, ‘Repudiating Inhumanity: Cosmopolitan Justice and the Obligation to prosecute Human Rights Atrocities’; Roger S. Gottlieb, ‘”The Human Material is too Weak”’; and Michael L. Morgan, ‘Shame, the Holocaust, and Dark Times’.
8 See, inter alia: Extreme Poverty, Extreme Wealth: Are the Two Linked? Some Preliminary Thoughts; Settling an Historical Debt as a Prerequisite to Build a Better World; Why Civil Disobedience Campaigns Will Be Necessary to Eradicate Extreme Poverty in the World. A Tentative Analysis; and Why Justice Comes First and not Liberty. All these essays were published, in:
www.peacejournalism.com and
www.globalmarshallplan.org
peacejournalism.com
