In 2004, 2.5 billion people, 40 per cent of humanity, were living in severe poverty. Every year, 18 million people, a third of all who die, die early from poverty-related causes.
In this brilliantly original study, Thomas Pogge, Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University, shows how the rich countries' governments' policies cause the poverty. The world order they impose `foreseeably produces an avoidable massive human rights deficit'.
One reviewer called this book `an analysis without villains', but in fact Pogge shows that our governments, corporations and `those who represent us in WTO negotiations and at the IMF' are true villains. Doing harm foreseeably and avoidably is morally indefensible.
The shortfall is just $300 billion a year, less than one per cent of the rich countries' total gross national incomes. The rich countries' subsidies to their richest farmers were $300 billion in 2005. Their tariffs on manufactured imports from poor countries are four times higher than on those from other rich countries. In 2005, just $7.63 billion of the total $106.78 billion of aid went to basic social services - 0.02 per cent of the rich countries' combined GNP.
Pogge explains that we cannot excuse ourselves by blaming the poor countries or their rulers because "the national causal factors we most like to highlight - tyranny, corruption, coups d'état, civil wars - are encouraged and sustained by central aspects of the present global economic order." The IMF, the World Bank and the EU demand privatisation, which, as he points out, is a way for rulers to enrich themselves by selling public property: "the sale of public property really is an important causal contributor to the incidence of undemocratic government."
We are implicated because we let our rulers do this great harm to the poor. Pogge asks, why don't we find ending this poverty morally compelling? He exposes the self-deceptions that make this glaring injustice possible.
We should never endorse injustice, or give our vote to those who practise it. We have to take responsibility, take control, and end the poverty by ending the villainy.