Hunger and Shame in Philippines

This morning I watched a report on BBC World about Philippines, a country I love and feel very attached to after having spent one year of my life there.
The report wanted to highlight the effects that the economic recession has had on the country. The latest crisis has affected pretty much any nation, but the impact on developing countries like the Philippines is obviously far more devastating than in first world countries. As one of the many proof of that,
an Asian Development Bank report published in May 07 estimated that food price increases in the Philippines could send an estimated 2.72 million people into absolute poverty. This was the best-case scenario, based on an assumption that the cost of food would rise by 10 percent over the next year. More than 5.6 million people would be pauperised if food prices jumped by 20 percent and over 8.8 million people if the increase were 30 percent.
In such context, where a majority of people live so close to the poverty line, minimum changes in the economic conditions can have huge impact on the lives of million of people. It is therefore even more essential than in developed economies to have a proper social security system to assure basic survival needs to people in case they lose their jobs or get sick.
Unfortunately, according to the BBC report, only 20% of the world population can count on proper social welfare in form of healthcare and unemployment benefits. This 20% is all coming from rich nations. Another 30% of the global population can rely on some form of help and a staggering 50% has no coverage whatsoever.
The BBC report showed, amongst others, Filipino kids swimming in sewage water to collect items that they later on try to sell, the story of a young man who earns just over $1,000 per year but was asked to pay $4000 for hospitalization cost to cure his cancer, leaving him with two options: die or leave a life in debt.
What is most shocking to me is that the government does not seem to care much. Philippines is currently spending only 3.3% of GDP in social security. When asked why they are not investing more, Esperanza Cabral, Social Security Secretary of Philippines answered the BBC that they would like to, but there are other priorities, such as

"...debt repayment, national defense, infrastructure and many other things..."

She said that without any shame in front of a global audience. Frankly I do not really understand how those could be more important than letting your people starve.
Defense from whom? What are those dangerous threats that take priority over people's lives?
Developing infrastructure is essential to a country economy, but should come after having assured basic level of services to the people who live in that country not before. And by the way, whoever has visited Manila will wonder where the money have gone as infrastructure is to say the least not adequate to a capital.
Worse than that, the head of a think tank called Minimal Government Thinkers, Bienvenido Oplas, went on and declared publicly to the BBC that the government should allow poverty and that social welfare

"...corrupts the concept of personal responsibility of people. People can become lazy...and later on demand that certainly economic benefits are their rights" - Bienvenido Oplas, Minimal Government Thinkers.

To put it bluntly, Mr. Oplas, a Filipino living in Makati, is declaring to the BBC that he believes Filipinos to be too lazy to deserve a social security system as they'd would only exploit it by staying at home and collecting the government benefits instead of finding a job.
I hope only that these people do not seriously believe in what they say or I suggest they watch the video below. It is "Chicken a la Carte", a short movie by Ferdinand Dimadura that won public approval at the 56th Berlin International Film Festival (available at Culture Unplugged).

Watch the full BBC World report below:

Restorative Economy

This post is trying to answer one question: what can we do to stop the degradation we are currently in and make the plane flying again or at least try to have a soft-landing?
The pessimists say it is too late already; we have reached a tipping point and the processes we have initiated are irreversible.
The optimist instead believe there is still room for hope.
Whichever category you belong to, there is no excuse for not trying. Ethic imposes us to do the right thing, which often is not the easiest one. We can try and fail, but at least we'll have done our best to preserve ours and future generations well being.
Many solutions have been discussed on how to address the current problems affecting our society and environment.
In a perfect world, where people act based on what is the best for themselves, other people and the environment we all live in, the answer would be simple: just do whatever is right. If you have a choice between making 100 million while polluting a river and exploiting child labor, or making 50 million while preserving the environment and lifting living standards for people who work for you, the choice should be obvious (make 50 million!).
Unfortunately we live in a less than perfect world, run by corporations and governments whose main goal is to generate as much profit as possible. A pragmatic approach dictates that it's easier not to change the current social-economic framework, but instead work within it and adjust it to address the current issues we are facing.
That is the reason why I found very interesting the concept of Restorative Economy illustrated by Paul Hawken in his book "The Ecology of Commerce"(see the "Want to know more?" section of the blog).
The concept of restorative economy is based on the internalization of costs that today are not taken into account into companies income statements and balance sheets.
To make it simple, corporations today are measured on profits they make. Profits determine how much their stock is going to be worth, how much investments they are going to get for expansion and how much shareholder value they can create.
In a very simplistic way, profits are calculated as follows:

Gross Profit = Revenue - Variable cost - Marketing cost - Fixed Cost

Net Profit = Gross Profit - Taxes

This is a very simplistic approximation, but it's good enough for this discussion. All public companies have to publish their financial data and you can have a look at websites such as Google Finance or Yahoo Finance for full details (click here for the full Nike Income Statement as an example).
Let's have a look at how corporation profits are calculated:

1. Revenue: this is the revenue derived from selling the goods. If your t-shirts sell at $10 per piece and you sell 100 t-shirts, your revenue is $1000 ($10 x 100).
2. Variable cost: this is cost that varies with the quantity of goods sold. If to produce your shirts you outsource part of the production process to partners and pay them $1 per shirt, your variable cost for 100 shirts is $100 ($1 x 100).
3. Marketing cost: this is the investment you make to let people know about your shirts across different channels, such as TV, radio, print, on-line, mobile, etc.
4. Fixed cost: this is cost that does not vary with the quantity of good sold. Typically this include personnel cost, office rentals, equipment you need for production, IT cost, travel cost, compliance costs, legal costs, etc.

In order for corporations to maximize profit, they are forced to maximize revenue while minimizing cost. That is, they try to sell you as much as possible, while reducing cost of personnel, cost of compliance to health and safety regulations, cost of employees benefits scheme (e.g. pensions, insurances), payout to partners, etc. They even play with legal cost. If the cost of implementing a certain regulation is higher than the legal cost the business would incur in case they got caught, business mandate not to implement the regulation and in fact breaking the law. In countries such as US, legal cost incurred by corporations are tax deductible by the way. This is a privilege that is obviously not granted to private individuals.

As you can see there is no entry that take into account the impact businesses have on the environment and people.
That does not mean that there is not such a cost. This cost exist and in most cases can be quantified. It is just "externalized", that is the corporation does not care about it.
For instance, if as part of your t-shirts production process you pollute a river, without being an expert I can think at least of

• Cost to reinstate the river original ecosystem (that is to clean-up the river)
• Cost suffered by local fishermen who cannot rely on fishing any longer to sustain themselves and their families
• Health care cost born by the people who live in the vicinity of the river, who may be drinking polluted water and breathe not clean air
• Health care cost born by people who eat the polluted fish

There is also another cost to take into account, which is the cost to future generation. If your production process increases the density of CO2 and causes global warming, future generation will suffer and incur cost.
This applies to all production/consumption systems.

"For example, in an economic study of the costs associated with cigarette smoking born by Californians, the University of California at San Francisco identified $7.6 billion in yearly expenses, mainly in lost wages and higher health care cost. This was equivalent to $3.43 for every pack of cigarette sold." - "The Ecology of Commerce", Paul Hawken

Who born the $3.43 cost for each packet sold? Not certainly the tobacco multinationals who are the actual cause of the cost. They reaped the revenues, but let society and tax payers bearing the cost of their output.

Restorative economy proposes that those costs are "internalized", that is incurred by the individual businesses who are causing them.

"One of the most effective ways for government to accomplish the task is with cost/price integration. The pioneer for this idea was A. C. Pigou, an English economist who published the Economy of Welfare in 1920. Pigou argued that competitive marketplaces would not work if producers did not bear the full costs of production, including whatever pollution, sickness or environmental damage they caused". "The Ecology of Commerce", Paul Hawken.

If governments enforced this type of economy, business would be left with only two options:

1. Increase the retail price of their goods to cover the additional costs and keep current profit levels, or
   
2. Re-design their processes to minimize or eliminate totally costs related to impact caused to the environment and people

As the costs associated to environment and social damage may be too high (how much is the cost of burning coal, causing global warming and threatening the same existence of future generations?) and in a competitive environment where prizes have to be kept low in order for consumer to be able to afford goods, most corporations will be forced to go for option 2, with obvious benefits to the society.

In today's free market economy, business who want to be ethical are penalized in the market as cannot be as competitive as others that instead are using polluting processes and exploiting cheap labor.
Competition should not be between companies destroying the same planet we all live in (including their shareholders, managers and employees) versus ones who are trying to save it.
Cost/price integration would enable a marketplace where competitions occurs between companies who are behaving ethically and are trying to improve everyone's quality of life while preserving the environment. As corporates are playing bigger and bigger roles in our society, it is just logical that they should do the right thing and governments should enforce the framework and control measures to make sure that happens.

A non sustainable model

I spent last weekend in Kyoto, a place where I go to relax and enjoy the full Japanese experience. My ryokan was in Higashimaya, a lovely pedestrian area close to temples, shrines and tea houses. On Sunday morning, I took my usual walk up to Kiyomizu temple.
Kiyomizu means clear water, or pure water. The temple is in fact named after the waterfall within the complex that comes out one of the nearby hills. People today still queue to wash their hands and drink the pure water.
I was enjoying the view when I took this picture:

The temple dates back to 798, and its present buildings were constructed in 1633. Not one nail is used in the whole temple, that is built in perfect harmony with the surroundings, using only natural elements such as wood and stones.
From the same spot I turned slightly on the left and took this other picture of modern Kyoto:

Trees and rivers replaced by concrete and asphalt. I could not help asking myself: when did it all go wrong?
Life on our planet dates back 4 million years, during which a complex, delicate, interwoven and perfectly balanced ecosystem was formed. Our current civilization is only 200,000 years old. If life on Earth was a 70 years old lady, we would be a 3 and half years old baby. Certainly, for a 3 and half years old we did a lot of good and bad.
Our ancestors respected the delicate balance inherited from Mother Nature and lived their lives in harmony with the elements, we unfortunately are not doing the same.
We all agree that in the last two centuries our civilization has made huge progress and scientific and technological advance led us all to live better and more comfortable lives. The biggest problem is that we are not doing that in a sustainable way, but we are in fact destroying the very same environment we live in that has taken 4 million years to form.
Sustainability to me is a very simple concept. Any system takes resources as input and produces output in form products and waste.
Without being an expert, my simplistic definition of a sustainable system is of one that:

• Use resources in a way that the same resources are not depleted over time, therefore assuring its very own survival. Imagine a rabbit in a island where there is one carrot field: if the rabbit eats carrots at a rate faster than the average carrot growth rate, the rabbit is doomed to starve over time. It may take one week, one month, one year or one century, depending on how hungry the rabbit is and how fast carrots grow, but math assures us without any shadow of doubt that the rabbit will starve sooner or later.
  
• Produce products and waste that can be re-used by the system itself or other systems as inputs. If the same rabbit waste (those little balls you may have seen on carrot fields) could not be transformed as soil, the ground would soon become unsuitable to grow carrots  and again the rabbit will starve sooner or later.
  

The main difference between natural ecosystems and man-made ones is that the first are cyclical and sustainable, the latter are not.
Plants take energy from the sun, transform it into life (the plant grows branches, leaves, fruits) and release carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Checking against my simple definition:

1. Use resources in a way that the same resources are not depleted over time, therefore assuring its very own survival.
   Answer: Yes. Solar energy is renewable and will never be depleted (or to be precise the moment the sun dies our entire solar system will be dead).
   
2. Produce products and waste that do can be re-used by the system itself or other systems as inputs.
   Answer: Yes. Fruits and vegetables feed other forms of life, including ours. Carbon dioxide released in the atmosphere makes our planet warmer therefore assuring the survival of other species, including ours. When leaves fall in autumn, they fed micro-organisms that transform them into soil, which in turn is the bed where new form of lives begin.

Your car uses fuel, transforms in kinetic energy (the car moves and take you where you need to go to) while producing waste in form of gasses that come out of the car exhaust pipe. Let's apply the same test:

1. Use resources in a way that the same resources are not depleted over time, therefore assuring its very own survival.
   Answer: NO. Fuel comes from oil, which is a non-renewable resource. At some point oil will be gone, some say within the next 10-30 years.
   
2. Produce products and waste that can be re-used by the system itself or other systems as inputs.
   Answer: NO. Gasses emitted by our vehicles are highly polluting and cause damage to human beings and the environment. They are not absorbed by the environment and not currently utilized in any other process. Basically we let those polluting gasses go in the air and stay there to increase illness on humans and global warming of the environment we live in.

When humans are involved in the process, I would also add a third ethical criteria to the sustainability definition:

•  Assure long-term well being and prosperity of the people involved in the process.

Unfortunately also this does not apply to our processes. For instance, corporations produce their products in low-wage developing countries, where they can get cheap labor. People in these countries are starving, cannot feed their kids and welcome as blessing big corporations who give them the minimum to survive. A girl in El Salvador gets paid 74 cents to produce a jacket that is sold in the US at 170 dollars. The same girls gets 3 cents to produce a shirt that sells at 15 dollars in the US.
Those little money will not allow the girl to go to school, to look after her health when she needs, to plan a future, but will assure her bare survival. The same corporations that are exploiting cheap labor from desperate people are instead turning over billion of dollars and singing the praise of free market economy.
Imagine a poor girl from El Salvador or China knocking at your door. She is desperate, is starving and cannot cater to her basic needs and she asks you to give her 3 cents in exchange for a shirt so that she can buy food. What would you do? Will you give her 3 cents or perhaps think you should give her more, pay for her tuition fees at school, buy her books, try to help her as much as you can within your affordability limits? To me the answer is obvious.
Corporations though, although legally treated as individuals, do not have feelings, ethical concerns are not mirrored in their income statements and they are only driven by profit. Ethic and common sense would suggest that instead of turning over 10 billion dollar per year and exploiting cheap labour from poor countries, companies like Nike could turnover perhaps 8 billion or even 9 billion and re-distribute part of their wealth to the people who are producing the goods that are making their shareholders rich. How much difference would 1 billion per year make to those corporations and how much to the poor people in Honduras, El Salvador, China that are exploited daily?

So to go back to Kyoto's pictures and my original question: when did it all go wrong?

It looks like it all started with the Industrial Revolution.
From Wikipedia: "The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and transport had a profound effect on the socioeconomic and cultural conditions in the United Kingdom. The changes subsequently spread throughout Europe, North America, and eventually the world. The onset of the Industrial Revolution marked a major turning point in human history; almost every aspect of daily life was eventually influenced in some way.
Starting in the later part of the 18th century there began a transition in parts of Great Britain's previously manual labour and draft-animal–based economy towards machine-based manufacturing. It started with the mechanisation of the textile industries, the development of iron-making techniques and the increased use of refined coal. Trade expansion was enabled by the introduction of canals, improved roads and railways. The introduction of steam power fuelled primarily by coal, wider utilisation of water wheels and powered machinery (mainly in textile manufacturing) underpinned the dramatic increases in production capacity. The development of all-metal machine tools in the first two decades of the 19th century facilitated the manufacture of more production machines for manufacturing in other industries. The effects spread throughout Western Europe and North America during the 19th century, eventually affecting most of the world, a process that continues as industrialisation. The impact of this change on society was enormous.
The First Industrial Revolution, which began in the 18th century, merged into the Second Industrial Revolution around 1850, when technological and economic progress gained momentum with the development of steam-powered ships, railways, and later in the 19th century with the internal combustion engine and electrical power generation."(see full article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution).
The Industrial Revolution certainly improved significantly certain aspect of our daily lives.
The picture below is a graph showing the World GDP per capita up to year 2003.

World GDP was pretty constant up until the late 1700, when the Industrial Revolution began. Since then has kept increasing, with the last 50 years representing the fastest growth. That is good.
Productivity increased in any sector, from manufacturing to agriculture and transports. However that meant also tha what used to take the work of ten farmers would now require one only. Therefore lots of families went broke and were forced to move to the cities, starting a trend that still continues today that has led to the formation of urban conglomerate of tens of million people. Today over half of the world population live in cities.

What started in the late 1700s is still continuing today at faster and faster rate.
We have replaced natural cycles with human processes for mass market production of more or less useful goods at the cheapest cost.
Forests have been replaced by endless fields and greenhouses where equally sized vegetable and fruits are grown using pesticide and fertilizers before they get shipped to supermarkets all over the world.
Grain is mass-produced using machineries that we could not even imagine one century ago that allow production  in USA only that could feed 2 billion people. Most of it though is used for live stock feed and biofuel production.
Growing need of meat is met by massive, concentration-style cattle farms where no grass grows and cattles are fed grain, protein and soy transported from far away by fleet of trucks.
The result of all of this is that it takes

- 100 liters of water to produce 1 kg of potatoes
- 4000 liters of water for 1 kg of rice
- 13000 liters of water for 1 kg of beef

without taking into consideration the huge amount of oil-produced energy involved in the production and transportation processes.
This combined with global warming causes one out of six people on this planet not have access to fresh water, one out of ten major rivers not to reach the sea any longer. Water is quickly becoming a scarce resource people around the world will be fighting for. Governments again are acting quickly but not in favor of the thirsty masses. In many countries water is now in control of multi-national corporations, who control and set prices for this vital resource. World Bank and IMF lending criteria usually include privatization of public resources such as water, that end-up in the hands of corporations again. Realizing that this vital resource is getting scarcer and scarcer businesses around the world are trying to get control over it to reap as much profit as possible, at the expenses of often times already poor people who have nothing, but the bare essential to survive, not to live.

Is all of this sustainable? The answer is clear to me: NO.

Our social-economic model is ill-designed and based on profit at all costs. The model forces corporations to generate as much revenue as possible with the least possible cost returning the highest possible profit to the shareholders without taking into account impact on people and environment.
This will not last forever as the model itself is not sustainable destroying the very same resources it's based upon at faster and faster rates.
While corporations are benefiting from profits, they are not incurring any of the costs related to damaging the environment and other people lives.
I believe a serious paradigm shift is needed, whereby whoever causes a problem pays the cost. If a factory pollutes a river, owners of the factory should also bear the cost of cleaning-up the river to restore its natural habitat, the cost incurred by the fishermen who are not able to live out of fishing anymore and the healthcare cost people eating polluted fish will incur.
Those cost are currently born by society, by the taxpayers, but not by the corporations who are the actual cause of them. If business had to bear them, they'd have to make a choice to either increase their prizes (which will get them out of business) or to re-design their processes to be environmental friendly and respectful of other people well being and lives therefore guaranteeing the sustainability of the model. Technology is already available and many examples exist where this is happening already. All we need is government regulations to enforce basic common sense rules to make sure we can guarantee a future on this planet to our kids and future generations.

Artic ice melting in 10 years

I belong to a generation that is experiencing the changes in climate. When I was in primary school, I studied the concept of "permanent glaciers". Those are glaciers that never melt, despite the season. We have (or used to have) some in the Alps, but the two recurrent and most relevant ones were obviously the ones at the North and South Poles. Since I was a kid, I was led to believe that those glaciers will always be there, unless something catastrofic happened.
During a trip to Stockholm a few years ago  I learnt about lives lost over centuries of expeditions across the Northwest Passage, a a sea route through the Arctic Ocean , along the northern coast of North America via waterways amidst the Canadian Arctic Archipelago connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. For centuries human beings have tried to find ways to cross the passage, as this would have immense benefits to trade and commerce, but most failed and died with their entire crew lost amid the glaciers.


All of this is now changing. On September 17th, 2007, the Northwest Passage was reported ice free for the first time since satellite records began in 1978.
Climate models had projected the passage would eventually open as warming temperatures melted the Arctic sea ice—but no one had predicted it would happen this soon.
"We're probably 30 years ahead of schedule in terms of the loss of the Arctic sea ice," said Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado.

Today, as I was writing this blog, BBC News
announced that Arctic ice could be melted completely during summer within 10 years (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8307272.stm). Again, scientists had foreseen this to happen, but not that soon.  Professor Peter Wadham, from the University of Cambridge, who has been studying Arctic ice since the 60s, said "It's like man is taking the lid off the northern part of the planet...You'll be able to treat the Arctic as if it were essentially an open sea in the summer".
Our governments are reacting quickly to those events. But not as you'd expect to understand the gravity of the problem and take actions to limit damages to our ecosystem and (if it was at all possible) reverse the situation.
The rapid melting is spurring international competition for control over the newly accessible shipping lanes and exposed natural resources.
Canada, for example, claims it has full rights over the parts of the passage that pass its territory. The U.S. and European Union say the passage is in international waters. Meanwhile Russia laid claim to the sea floor at the North Pole, planting a flag there in the hopes of securing the Arctic's potential bonanza of oil and minerals.
Once again profit and commercial interests take priority over social and ecological issues affecting all of us, wherever we live, and all of other species living on this planet.



It's worth noting some of the catastrophic effects ice melting could create to the planet

1. Climate changes: Earth's climate is largely regulated by the thermohaline circulation (THC). Simply said, this is a combination of currents that brings warm water from the Caribbean up north towards the North Pole and is regarded as one of the factors that make Europe climate temperate. Likewise, as warm water flows north, deep cold water goes down south, as in a conveyor belt that links most oceanic basins on the planet. The thermohaline circulation is therefore sometimes called the ocean conveyor belt, the great ocean conveyor, or the global conveyor belt and has effects on global climate. Massive influx of freshwater from melting ice into the ocean could cause a slowdown (some say shutdown) of the ocean conveyor belt, which could result in unpredictable, drastic and sudden climate changes to the entire planet.
   
   
2. Rising of sea levels will affect million of people living along coastlines in developed and emerging countries. Tuvalu, a small country in the Pacific Ocean is the first victim of sea level rising.  Tuvalu has no industry, burns little petroleum, and creates less carbon pollution than a small town in America. This tiny place nevertheless is on the front line of climate change.  Tuvalu is the first country where people are trying to evacuate because of rising seas, but it almost certainly will not be the last. Maldives government ministers are taking scuba lessons and learning underwater signs in preparation for an unprecedented Cabinet meeting at the bottom of the ocean intended to highlight the threat global warming poses to the low-lying nation.
   
   
3. Serious threats of extinction for animal species living at the North Pole, relying on the ice surface for their movements. Each year more polar bears are found dead as they have to swim longer and longer distances between icebergs. Most of them are now drowning because of exhaustion. Penguins are affected too in their migration to bring food back to their chicks.

The plane is falling

Once upon a time, human beings tried to fly. They built crafts but did not succeed and the reason was simple: the plane they built was not designed to fly and being subject to the law of gravity it would crash.
Our society, so called “civilization”, is not designed to fly. We are in a plane that is falling, but as we cannot see the ground yet we believe the plane is flying.

There are facts that clearly show the society we have built is not well designed to assure long-term, sustainable growth and well-being for the majority of the people living on this planet:

1. 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. The bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth (report from World Institute for Development Economics Research at United Nations University).
   
2. 1.4 billion people (around 25% of the world population) live under the poverty line of $1.25 a day
   
3. Today 1 in 6 people have no access to fresh water. Water consumption due to human activity is growing fast. Instead of countering the problem, governments and international financial institutions are already making sure this scarce but vital resource is privatized and handed to few privileged corporations.
   
4. Global climate changes due to human activities are occurring today, causing disasters affecting million of people and species. As I am writing this blog, BBC News has announced that the Arctic Ocean could be largely ice-free and open to shipping during the summer in as little as ten years' time (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8307272.stm).
   
   
   

   "The Catlin Arctic Survey data supports the new consensus view - based on seasonal variation of ice extent and thickness, changes in temperatures, winds and especially ice composition - that the Arctic will be ice-free in summer within about 20 years, and that much of the decrease will be happening within 10 years.

   "That means you'll be able to treat the Arctic as if it were essentially an open sea in the summer and have transport across the Arctic Ocean."
   Professor Peter Wadham, University of Cambridge
   
   
   

   
   
5. Every year, up to 30,000 species disappear due to human activity alone. At this rate, we could lose half of Earth's species in this century

Ask yourself questions:

• How many people do you know who live with less than $1.25 a day? My answer is none.
  
• How many people do you know who have no access to fresh water? My answer is none.
  

Yet the numbers do not lie. We should expect that 1 out of 4 of our friends live below the poverty line and 1 out of 6 cannot access fresh water. For each 4 people you know who are earning more than $1.25 a day, there is somebody, somewhere else who has to have 2 out 4 friends who are poor. If you know 8 people who are not poor, somewhere somebody else has to have 3 out 4 friends, relatives, family members who are surviving on less than $1.25 a day.

By now the pattern is clear. People who have the education and resources to change things for the better are the ones who do not see the problem first hand as belong to the so called "first world". The worse is that we are so busy with our jobs, daily lives, that we do not stop for a second to acknowledge we live in a flawed world, where a minority of us is given the illusion of well-being, while the majority is abandoned.

The picture below shows where the poor are. If you live in the blue countries, chances are you have seen poverty only on TV.

Percentage of Population Living Under Poverty Line

In China and India, the fastest growing economies in the world, between 21%-40% and 41%-60% respectively, survive with less than $1.25 a day. Though, when you watch the news all you hear is about how fast those economies are growing.
India’s capital of Delhi has a million and a half out of fourteen million living in slums. Mumbai is worst with greater percentage living in slums.
What media tell us is that at 8% growth rate of Indian economy will push per capita GDP to $2,000 level in about twenty to twenty-five years. Assuming that the population does not explode in the near future but continue a healthy 1.5 to 2% growth poverty and slums could end. On the other hand if the above does not happen then slums dwellers will triple in 25 years and so will the poverty.                 

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Our social model is not catering for the needs of the majority of the population and the species who with us inhabit this planet. By prioritizing selfish profit above anything else, a small percentage of us is given the illusion of well-being, while at the same time endangering the survival of our poorer brothers and sisters, depleting natural resources and extinguishing the very existence of animal species. The pursuit of maximum profit at all cost is causing the destruction of the same world we live in. If we don't change direction soon, no profit will be left to be made, the plane will soon crash to the ground.