food, water, shelter

1.4 billion people live in poverty, living on less than $1.25 per day. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7583719.stm)

Every five seconds a child dies from starving (http://www.bread.org/learn/hunger-basics/hunger-facts-international.html)

If you do not have water you will die. If you do not have food you will starve. If you do not have shelter you will be subjected to the cruelties of the natural world. You may freeze. You will be subjected to disease. And because you do not have the basic needs necessary to live, it is safe to assume you do not have money, in which case you will not be able to afford medicine. You will probably die. You will not have time to worry about the structural problems of the nation in which you live because, frankly, you may not be breathing the air of that nation tomorrow because you may stop breathing tonight.

 

Without fulfilling the aforementioned basic needs, the structural aspects matter little. To solve poverty we have to work from ground up, starting right at the roots, right at the basics. However, this does mean that the structure of a nations government, cities, workforce, etc does not matter. Rather, I mean to say that we can’t solely focus on stabilizing such structures and expect that this will give way to a solution to poverty. We have to work on both issues simultaneously because they are both interconnected. Although providing immediate food, water, and shelter to those who are in dire needs of it will save lives, it will only provide a short term solution – no real progress will be made because the second the helping hand recedes back, the death and poverty rate will rise once again. Furthermore, when poverty is a prevailing problem, the entire nation suffers, because every human who doesn’t have food and water is a human who is too weak to be a cog in the work force. The nation is losing money by not investing money in helping the poor acquire their basic needs. Basic needs are called basic because every single person should be able to easily afford them. There is something seriously wrong when our world cannot provide what it is has in mass quantities. It should not be this hard.