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4 Fighting the Diseases of Poverty
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to maintaining liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which are
among the inalienable rights of human beings.
A composite human development index. Using an approach
similar to that employed in the United Nations Development
Program (UNDP), this index combines indicators for life
expectancy, education, and per capita income (UNDP, 2000). 2
After examining trends in the above indicators, this chapter will
address whether differences in human well-being have widened
between developed and developing countries and whether urban
residents fare worse than rural residents. Finally, it will discuss the
factors that appear to be responsible for the remarkable cycle of
progress that has accompanied modern economic growth.
Hunger and undernourishment
Concerns about the world’s ability to feed its burgeoning population
have been around at least since Thomas Malthus’s “Essay on
the Principle of Population” two hundred years ago. Several Neo-
Malthusians of the twentieth century confidently predicted apocalyptic
famines in the latter part of the century in the developing
countries (Ehrlich, 1968; Paddock & Paddock, 1967). But even though
the world’s population is the largest it has ever been, the average
person has never been better fed.
Since 1950, the global population has increased by 150 per cent
(FAO, 2005), increasing the demand for food, but at the same time
the real price of food commodities has declined 75 per cent (Mitchell
& Ingco, 1995; World Resource Institute, 1998; World Bank, 2005).
Greater agricultural productivity and international trade have made
this possible (Goklany, 1998). As a result, average daily food supplies
per person increased 24 per cent globally from 1961 to 2002, as indicated
by Table 1. The increase for developing countries was even
larger, 38 per cent. The decline in real prices, moreover, increased
the availability of food for people in the lower rungs of the economic
ladder.