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From the United
Nations:
- 925 million people do not have
enough to eat - more than the combined populations of the
USA, Canada, and the European Union; (Source: FAO news
release, 14 September 2010)
- Nearly half the world’s
population, 2.8 billion people, survive on less than $2 a
day.
- About 20 percent of the
world’s population, 1.2 billion people, live on less
than $1 a day.
- Nearly 1 billion people are
illiterate and 1 billion do not have safe water.
- 98 percent of the world's hungry
live in developing countries; (Source: FAO news release,
2010)
I believe that no discussion of EG is
complete without a discussion of the world's poor where EG
means more than getting a new car or another vacation -- it
is a matter of life and death.
A discussion of the world's less
developed countries also allows us to return to the subject
of STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT (globalization) that we studied in
unit 1. This would be a good time to review your notes from
lesson 2a. Because of the economic growth that has resulted
from Structural Adjustment in the past few decades, millions
of people in the less developed countries have been lifted
out of poverty.
The figure below shows the great
decline in the number of people living on $1.25 a day or
less since 1990.
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