Can poverty ever be eradicated?

Even in today's world where many countries are experiencing massive economic development, many individuals and nations are still left behind in the bandwagon of poverty. Such is the extent of the situation regarding poverty that as according to celebrity economist Jeffrey Sachs, from the moment you wake up to the time you turn in today, 20,000 people would have died of hunger. And at least 20,000 more will die tomorrow, and the day after, and in the days after that - just because they are poor. In view of this, many non-profitable organisations have held campaigns and activities to raise awareness among the more well-off public, hoping to gain financial support and volunteers to help achieve their cause of eradicating poverty. Governments have also pledged to donate part of their tax revenues to aid this cause. However, looking at past experiences with other global problems, and also that of current events, I truly doubt poverty can ever be eradicated. Instead of thinking about eradication, we should look more towards curbing poverty, minimising it.

As stated in the article "Can a Poor Country Become Rich?" by Kamala Sarup, the fundamental causes of poverty for a nation as a whole lie in geography and culture of its people. However, from my point of view, culture is the most important factor. Though there is no one culture that is entirely bad, some may be counterproductive to economic development since they might be obsolete in today's world. One such cultural which proved to be economically counterproductive was the discrimination of females, providing them less of education and job opportunities then their male counterparts. This reduced the size of workforce of many countries greatly, hence hindering economic development.

In order for nations to eradicate poverty, these "negative" cultural beliefs have to be abandoned. However, looking at past events, old cultural beliefs die hard. Take Mao China for instance. Chairman Mao tried to force the Chinese to abandon their religious beliefs, correlating to culture, dubbing them as the "Opium of the People". Though during his era when religious events were no where to be seen on the streets, many people had continued to keep their faith secretly at home. Today, many Chinese openly show their religious beliefs, hence showing that culture, correlated to religion die hard. Therefore, with such economic counterproductive culture hard to kill, many of the poor nations would continue to live in poverty due to its peoples' beliefs.

Furthermore, the passing of these beliefs is a deadly cycle. When uneducated people strictly stick to their narrow minded beliefs, provision of education would be useless. Seeing that education would be useless, uneducated parents destroy the chance for their children to receive education. Their children in turn, being uneducated, would not see the benefits in education like their parents, would not send their own offspring to school, leading to the vicious cycle.

Next, as we look at the past and current experiences, we would see that eradicating poverty is almost or rather, simply impossible. Drug abuse is a major problem in the world. Even rich nations with huge stashes of resources are unable to eradicate this problem. The only success the world has against the problem today is curbing the abuse of drugs. Some countries turn to legalising drug abuse, but only under certain controls, while others make it totally illegal. Therefore, if we cannot even eradicate the problem of drug abuse, what chance do we have with the bigger and tougher issue of poverty? Therefore, I think the most we can get out of the whole effort is to minimise and curb poverty.

Though curbing poverty is more realistic, we should not stop ourselves from eradicating it for the good of mankind. We should always aim above our goal in order to be able to reach of real goals.