Understanding global security - Peter Hough

ECONOMIC THREATS TO SECURITY
We have the means; we have the capacity to wipe hunger and poverty from the face of the
Earth in our lifetime. We need only the will.
President John F. Kennedy of the USA, World Food Congress,
Washington, DC, October 1963
Poverty and food security
The concept of human security accommodates the consideration of a wide range
of threats to life, of which poverty is undoubtedly the most significant. Poverty
kills directly in huge numbers, when people are unable to secure sufficient food to
live, because they lack the economic means to purchase or produce it. Additionally,
poverty is an underlying cause of human death by other security threats. As Thomas
states, ‘the pursuit of human security must have at its core the satisfaction of basic
material needs of all humankind. At the most basic level, food, shelter, education and
health care are essential for the survival of human beings’ (Thomas 2000: 7).
Satisfying the ‘basic material needs of humankind’ is not solely an economic
task but it is, without doubt, principally achieved by the possession of money,
personally and societally. Money is not the root of all of humanity’s ills nor the sole
cause of starvation and hunger. On the one hand, droughts and other natural phenomena
can disrupt the food supply, and on the other, it is possible to feed yourself
without buying the food. Money, however, can be used to secure yourself against
natural hazards and insure you against fluctuations in the food supply caused by
either natural or economic disruptions. In addition, self-sufficiency in food production,
either for individuals or states, is an increasingly difficult means of achieving security.
Money, so the saying goes, ‘can’t buy you love’ but it can buy you a certain measure
of that other of life’s most precious commodities, security.
Table 4.1 illustrates the point that the wealthy of the world live longer while the
poor die young. There is not a precise correlation between wealth and life expectancy
but the match up, particularly at the bottom of the scale, is still striking. The world’s
poorest people are also the world’s most insecure, epitomized by the plight of the
people of Sierra Leone, bottom of both lists.
The fact that there is more to survival than money is borne out by some
anomalies in comparing income and life expectancy. Second to bottom in the life
expectancy rankings is Angola, even though it is not among the world’s most poor
states since the country is an oil and diamond producer. Chronic political instability
and a long-running civil war are the principal factors behind the short lifespans of
Angolans. At the other end of the scale, the prominence of gun crime in the USA is
a factor in that country’s citizens having an average life expectancy not in line with
its wealth. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), to get over the
limitations of judging development purely in economic terms, calculates a ‘Human
Development Index’ to rank a country’s progress (UNDP 2002). This figure combines
income, life expectancy and educational attainment to give a more thorough picture
of how a state’s wealth is being utilized to the benefit of its people. Hence states
which, for various reasons, do not utilize their resources for the benefit of all of their
people, like Angola or higher up the scale like Saudi Arabia, are judged to be less
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