Reproducimos un artículo de The Economist, www.economist.com , que desde el mes de septiembre está publicando información sobre la situación tan compleja que estamos llevando al planeta, pocos con algo, muchos con nada y muy pocos con mucho. Pero no te engañes, de lo poco de que dispones para muchisimos es un mar de riqueza, lee el artículo y los asociados, te plantearás muchas cosas, si te cuesta el traducirlo, usa un traductor en linea. Gracias por dedicar tú tiempo.


THE statistics are alarming. Half the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day; and a billion people survive on less than $1 a day. The population in the poorest countries will grow three times faster than the world as a whole over the next 50 years. Some 14,000 people are infected each day with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Indeed, between 1996 and 1998, 85% of working teachers who died in the Central African Republic were infected with HIV.

So grim is the picture painted by the latest United Nations population report—entitled “People, poverty and possibilities”, and published on December 3rd—it is difficult to know how to respond to the challenge of world poverty. The UN’s Millennium Development Goals, endorsed by the General Assembly in September 2000, seem more elusive than ever. Halving global poverty by 2015 is itself an enormous task. But other goals, such as the provision of universal primary education by the same date, are now at risk because of the impact of AIDS.

Yet the report does offer a glimmer of hope by pointing to those measures that can be effective. Developing countries that have invested in education and health care—especially reproductive health care—have seen their fertility rates decline. Smaller families lead to slower population growth. That, in turn, results in more investment, higher savings and higher productivity.

The recipe might seem simple, but implementing it more widely is still an uphill struggle. The failure to invest sufficiently in the prevention of disease, instead of, as so often happens, focusing solely on curative care, means that birth rates will remain high. A rapidly rising population is usually accompanied by poverty and inequality—especially for women.

The UN reckons that better family planning accounts for a third of the decline in fertility between 1972 and 1994. But lower-income countries only spend, on average, $21 per person per year on health care—and much of that goes on short-term curative care rather than on prevention and family planning. International donors, says the report, have failed to deliver what is needed: they provided only $10.9 billion for such spending in 2000, which is less even than their own target of $17 billion.

Poverty is an obvious consequence of rapid and unsustainable population growth. So is inequality, both between different income groups and between men and women. Worryingly, both gaps are widening. Expenditure in certain areas can also have the effect of widening the gap. For example, spending on education tends to benefit relatively better-off groups in society, says the report.

Women are the biggest losers. More women live in poverty than men—and the gap continues to widen. Women now account for half of all adults infected by HIV, up from 41% five years ago. The report points out that, in the poorest countries, weak economic performance is closely related to gender inequality. It cites South Asia as a region where the gap between the genders has narrowed more slowly than in others—and where, as a consequence, the region has fallen even further behind.

But inequality is a problem in rich countries too. America’s infant mortality rate is the same as Cuba’s and higher than those of most European countries. This is because, although America spends more per head on health care than any other country, its expenditure is distributed unevenly across the population.

How to tackle the increasing problems of poverty, inequality and rising populations? Rich countries are making more money available but only if poor countries spend it wisely and do so more transparently. Ironically, says the report, the countries that are setting the highest standards are often those receiving the least amount of help.