The Poverty Of The World Bank
MANILA: If you look at the word cloud above, from its own website, the World Bank is focused on poverty alleviation, adjustment, reduction, halving – but not liberation . That's a clue about how this world agency looks at solving global poverty, thinking from poor to not-so-poor. It was on 17 October 1987 when a hundred thousand people gathered at the Trocadero in Paris, "to honor the victims of extreme poverty, violence and hunger." Those gathered "proclaimed that poverty is a violation of human rights and affirmed the need to come together to ensure that these rights are respected." The Trocadero is where the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed in 1948. On 22 December 1992, the UN declared 17 October every year as the "International Day for the Eradication of Poverty" ( un.org/en ). So, how does the UN propose to eradicate poverty? Current patterns of production and consumption, for example, are neither meeting the current needs