Mission World - October, 2009
03.09.2009
Are the rich to blame for poverty?
Rome (ZENIT) - The radical causes of poverty are not colonization, or the multi-nationals or the egoism of rich countries.
Although the rich of the world bear responsibility and culpability, they are not at the root of the poverty of poor peoples.
There is the slogan: "Ten percent of the world population consumes 90% of the resources, and 90% of people consume only 10% of the available resources." This must be corrected to read: "Ten percent of people produce and consume 90% of the resources, and 90% of people produce and consume 10% of the resources."
The root of the problem is that first one must produce if one is to consume: One consumes if one produces, and in poor countries not enough is produced to maintain the rate of growth of the population.
Africa increased from 300 million inhabitants in 1960 to more than 800 million today, but basic agriculture is still to a large extent at the level of colonial times. Some "catastrophists" say that there are too many people to be able to surmount famine. It's not true.
Japan, which has 342 inhabitants per square kilometre (Italy has 194), and has one of the highest densities of population in the world in a wholly mountainous country (only 19% of the territory is cultivable), and a difficult climate, is self-sufficient in the basic food it consumes, namely rice.
Famine does not come from too many men and women, but from the fact that they are not taught how to produce more, beyond the level of pure sustenance.
The distance between the rich and the poor in the world is not above all an economic fact, but a cultural-political one. In Europe, after centuries of slow progress toward modern industry and agriculture, we have the technology, the capacity, the entrepreneurial and work mentality (in addition to democracy and the free market) to produce.
Whereas at the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s, many peoples of the global South passed from pre-history - that is, absence of written languages - to modernity in one century, with two World Wars in between!
The popular masses use mobile phones and television, but the head, the habits, the customs of life, the underlying mentality have remained more or less in the past. Religious faiths and cultures cannot change rapidly; time is needed.
Development is not only a technical and economic event, but stems above all from culture, from education: It is the work of individuals and not of money, it comes from people and not from machines, it is born through education, which is a long, patient process, not accomplished by emergency interventions, but by living together with a people.
We Westerners do very little for the education of poor peoples, and we never hear of the role of cultural and religious values that lead to development: It is a topic that is ignored by the mass media and the Western "experts" that favor economic and technical aid.
Fr Piero Gheddo, is currently Director of Mondo e Missione and of Italia Missionaria. He is the founder of AsiaNews and the author of more than 70 books.
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