Princes and Paupers Essay -- Wealth Poor Rich Economy Essays

Princes and Paupers Year by year the world becomes more sharply divided by two. On the one hand, there are the advanced, industrial, developed, with mature economics. And then there are the rest--developing, less developed, underdeveloped, undeveloped, and pre-industrial. The exact description is unimportant; for the basic division is, of course, one between the rich and the poor. What does it mean to be poor? It has always been advantageous to be born on the right side of the tracks. But the accident of birth has never had quite the significance that it holds today, for every child born to parents in the developed countries, seven are born in the underdeveloped world. This fact, above all else, will determine the course of their lives. The chances are that most of the seven children will be born, and brought up in poverty. Being born poor, the chances are that you will spend your life being hungry. This is not ordinary hunger as we may know it, but actual starvation and ill health brought on by lack of nutrition. Two-thirds of the world suffers from malnutrition, and thirty thousand children under five years of age die from malnutrition everyday. It is hard to imagine that within a twenty-four hour period we actually lose that many children. The total food resources in the world today would be perfectly adequate to feed everyone properly, unfortunately, there is an unfair distribution among nations and social groups. The United States is the net importer of food and agriculture from the rest of the world. While we make only five- percent of the worlds population, we import forty- percent of all beef traded, we buy one-third of all the fish and seafood and one-third of all dairy products. The overcompensation of... .... It costs only pennies a day and could make a tremendous difference in a child's life. Think about all of the small change that we spend everyday. The facts provided are not given to be critical of any one person or any particular Western country. Yet, they are facts, and are grim reality for so many disadvantaged people in these Third World countries. Instead of turning our backs on these individuals, we must start educating ourselves on the large gap that consist between the rich and the poor. They are trapped in a pattern of overlapping vicious circles. The people in these poor countries had no choice in where they would be born, but we do have a choice in trying to make a difference in their lives. We must remember that they are human beings just as we are, and have been put at a disadvantage and we in the West are in the position to lessen their suffering.