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The economic disparity gap continues to widen with economic disparity. A large portion of the population is dispossessed, while the poor continue to get poorer. They struggle to earn a minimum wage and access quality education and health care, suffering disinvestment from persistently low incomes. These widening gaps and growing inequalities have the greatest impact on women and children.
The Oxfam International report is known to have expressed concern that, on the one hand, the wealth of some people in the world is increasing at a rocket speed. And the number of rich people is constantly increasing. As a result, the income of the common man is increasing very little, while the wealth of the rich class has increased manifold.
Not only in India but in many other countries of the world, the gap of economic inequality is continuously widening. Oxfam International in its annual report on economic inequality at the World Economic Forum meeting last month, said that the gap between rich and poor has widened rapidly in the last few years. Oxfam's report has revealed many worrying issues. The report says that the past few years have been particularly bad in terms of economic inequality and that billions of people around the world have been impoverished in the last four years due to parameters such as the Corona epidemic, war and inflation, as of 2020 there are now about 5 billion people in the world.
The report expressed concern that while on one hand a few people are earning huge incomes, on the other hand crores of people are being impoverished. According to the report, the wealth of the top 5 richest people in the world has doubled from 405 billion US dollars to 869 billion billion in the last four years, which clearly means that the wealth of these five richest people has increased in these four years. They earned 14 million dollars per hour (about Rs 116 crores).
According to Oxfam, the richest people have built their wealth through crony capitalism and inheritance.
While people are getting richer, the number of poor is also steadily increasing and people's incomes are decreasing. Oxfam says that if you add up the net worth of all the world's billionaires, it has grown more than the gross domestic product GDP of many large countries in 4 years. The combined wealth of the world's billionaires has grown by US$ 3.3 trillion in the last four years, while India is the fifth largest economy in the world.
India's GDP is around $ 3.5 trillion. According to the report, the world's 148 industrial houses made a profit of about 1800 billion US dollars, which is 52 percent more than the three-year average. While wealthy shareholders are well compensated, millions faced salary cuts. According to Oxfam, if current trends continue, poverty will not be eradicated from the world for the next 229 years.
According to Oxfam, the wealthiest have acquired wealth through crony capitalism and inheritance capitalism. A large share of the wealth created has been appropriated, while the poor still struggle to earn the minimum wage and access quality education and health care.
Questioning governments, Oxfam said in its report that the private sector around the world is promoting low tax rates, systemic loopholes and opacity. Tax rates are being kept low due to lobbying while formulating tax policy, thereby causing loss to the public exchequer, when the same money could have been spent on the welfare of the poor but it does not seem to be happening. Corporate tax was 48 percent among OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries in 1948, which is only 23.1 percent in 2022.
Oxfam International’s Executive Director Amitabh Behar clearly states that this situation of inequality is not an accident but the billionaire class is ensuring that the current system provides them with more wealth at the expense of everyone else. He alleges that inequality is increasing in the world due to corporate and monopolistic attitudes. In fact, by oppressing workers, taking advantage of tax breaks, privatizing state-owned companies, and promoting change, the rich are increasing their wealth while abusing power and undermining rights and democracy.
The production of grain in the world has increased so much that it can feed all the people. Despite the fact that science has made it very easy for people around the world to access all material things, millions of people around the world are victims of starvation and are forced to sleep on empty stomachs.
While on one hand there is overproduction of food, on the other hand 230 crore people of the world do not have access to food or nutritious food. This is a great contrast where today's age is called the age of knowledge and science, where man is making unlimited progress, news of new inventions are coming every day, which make the life of man. Many things that a person needs can be made available through tolerance. Even where there is abundance, most of the people here have to live a very hard life.
The situation is that every seventh person on our planet has to go to bed hungry, every third person does not get enough food and 9.8 percent of the world's population i.e. 83 crore people are victims of hunger. In such a situation, different goals are set every year to solve this problem and many types of solutions are proposed, but still the question arises why this situation does not improve.
Here we will talk about food security and essential energy from food. If we talk about balanced and nutritious food, the capitalist system fails in its availability. If we look at the entire history of mankind, there has never been as much food as we have today. Food production has been steadily increasing in the last three decades.
Today, the world has produced so much grain that every person on earth can be supplied with 6,000 calories of food per day, which is 2.6 times the requirement of a normal person.
According to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the production of food products increased steadily globally from 2005-2020. Production of sugarcane, maize, rice, wheat and fruits increased by more than 50 percent, while the production of vegetables increased by 65 percent, milk by 53 percent and meat by 53 percent. It was 40 percent. Despite this, after 2019, the number of hungry and malnourished people globally (around 15 crore) has increased.
If the grain production is increasing, is it natural that the human population will increase even faster ?
A common thought has spread in our society or it would be more correct to say, it has been spread that most of the problems of humanity be it poverty, hunger, water, environment, have their roots in overpopulation. From school books to newspapers, this topic is constantly being discussed. This theory was first proposed in the late eighteenth century by a researcher named Malthus It was argued that population increases faster than food production, the inevitable result of which is overpopulation of the earth. But today, despite the fact that food production has increased more than population, the same thinking is still prevalent in society today, and from time to time organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund refer to population growth as the biggest obstacle to economic and social development and blame all the problems.
The real reason for the increase in food insecurity is the current system, where the goal of production is to make a profit. Everything here is created not to fulfill human needs but to make profit. In the present system every thing for human consumption has been turned into a commodity and today even the food sector is under the control of these capitalists.
All branches of the world's food sector, such as seeds, agrochemicals, production and exchange infrastructure, are controlled by a few well-known companies. A company called Bayer dominates the seeds sector, followed by Corteva, CamChina, BASF and Groupe Limagrain The situation is similar in the field of agrochemicals. Overall, just six corporations dominate 58 percent of the global seed market and 77.6 percent of the agrochemicals market. These companies have made record profits over the past few years while millions have struggled to get enough food.
Currently, 9.8 percent of the world's population, or 83 crore people, are victims of hunger, but nearly one-third of the world's grain is wasted before it reaches anyone because it cannot be sold at a profit. This picture shows the barbarism of the current system, where food grains are allowed to rot but are not allowed to reach the needy because it will reduce profits. What's more, companies often artificially increase the prices of food grains through actions like grain hoarding and futures market speculation. Such companies in 2008-2011 ; Most notably, Goldman Sachs has boosted wheat prices by 40 percent due to such initiatives.
Not only this, the places where food grains are produced the most have the highest number of people suffering from hunger. In countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan and Myanmar, crops such as soybeans, wheat, rice and maize are grown on about 50 percent of the agricultural land, accounting for 86 percent of the world's total grain exports. Despite this, 17 percent of the people in Thailand and Pakistan and 25.5 percent of the people in Myanmar are food insecure. Many underdeveloped countries mainly grow commercial crops, so these countries import most of the food they need from other countries, thus the people of these countries continue to suffer from food insecurity.
As Oxfam India has said, India is the fastest growing economy in the world but it is one of the most unequal countries. The top 10 percent of the Indian population owns 77 percent of the total national wealth. 73 percent of the wealth created in 2017 went to the richest 1 percent, while the 670 million Indians, who are the poorest part of the population, saw only a 1 percent increase in their wealth. According to Oxfam, the wealth of the country's billionaires has grown nearly 10- fold in a decade and their total wealth is more than the entire Union Budget of India in the financial year 2018-19. Due to the unequal distribution of wealth, the number of poor people around the world is increasing.
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