Full text PDF - International Policy Network

4 Fighting the Diseases of Poverty◆to maintaining liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which areamong the inalienable rights of human beings.A composite human development index. Using an approachsimilar to that employed in the United Nations DevelopmentProgram (UNDP), this index combines indicators for lifeexpectancy, education, and per capita income (UNDP, 2000). 2After examining trends in the above indicators, this chapter willaddress whether differences in human well-being have widenedbetween developed and developing countries and whether urbanresidents fare worse than rural residents. Finally, it will discuss thefactors that appear to be responsible for the remarkable cycle ofprogress that has accompanied modern economic growth.Hunger and undernourishmentConcerns about the world’s ability to feed its burgeoning populationhave been around at least since Thomas Malthus’s “Essay onthe Principle of Population” two hundred years ago. Several Neo-Malthusians of the twentieth century confidently predicted apocalypticfamines in the latter part of the century in the developingcountries (Ehrlich, 1968; Paddock & Paddock, 1967). But even thoughthe world’s population is the largest it has ever been, the averageperson 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 timethe 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 madethis possible (Goklany, 1998). As a result, average daily food suppliesper person increased 24 per cent globally from 1961 to 2002, as indicatedby Table 1. The increase for developing countries was evenlarger, 38 per cent. The decline in real prices, moreover, increasedthe availability of food for people in the lower rungs of the economicladder.