Ghandi said, " Poverty is the worst form of violence."

What do I believe poverty is?
Poverty occurs when someone is lacking in a basic need: food, water, shelter, or clothing.

What causes poverty?
Unstable domestic political system
Lack of basic services and/or infrastructure
Spillover from external conflicts
Unresponsive government, no welfare
No system of order, police
Natural disasters
Lack of education
Underdeveloped medical services

In trying to alleviate poverty, should we focus on addressing basic needs or structural adjustments?
If you address the structural problems then the basic needs will consequently be covered. This though is a harder route to take. Covering basic needs such as food water and shelter through foreign aid is great in the short-term, but it is a policy that doesn’t have long-term vision. Though foreign aid might temporarily keep the poverty-stricken alive, they are dangerously dependent upon it and any fluctuations in aid that could occur. Humanitarian concerns are the driving force it seems to me behind the basic needs aid approach. I understand and sympathize with their stance, but at the same time I believe that in order to truly help those living in poverty one needs to change the position that the poor are in. I agree with Jasmine’s statement about stability. Achieving structural change, both materially by building up a country’s infrastructure and immaterially by examining the social and civil institutions to make sure that they are not creating systematic poverty, is how I think we can “solve” poverty. We, meaning the international community, need to keep up the battle against poverty, even though we can never entirely wipe it out.

I found Inayatullah’s article very interesting in his proposal of a tension between capitalist division of labor and the sovereignty of Third World countries. There is hypocrisy in the international community’s actions towards “poor” or Third World countries. The structure of Third World countries’ current economic system reflects these countries’ colonial history, which were systems designed to keep these countries dependent. The colonial economic systems were not structured with the interests of the colonized country in mind. We expect these countries though to pull themselves up by their bootstraps though, and ignore this legacy of inequality, believing that by simply having withdrawn intervention the country can fix itself. Sadly this method has not proven to work, and so through international aid, we (the international community) have again intervened in these countries. Foreign aid to these countries is often criticized as being ineffective, harmful in being misappropriated and damning in its continuation of a system of dependence. All these critiques have some merit and I think in considering foreign aid we should use these critiques to change the format of foreign aid. I believe that foreign aid is most useful through programs that are led by native peoples instead of foreigners. It is the natives who understand the best what their country needs and have the greatest stake in its success.