What does poverty look like in 2021, and how will it evolve?
Poverty is a major issue now, in the midst of a global pandemic. The official UN website says that even before Covid-19, the world was off target to eradicate global poverty by 2030. However, the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed at least 71 million more people into extreme poverty – the first increase in decades according to the UN’s poverty report in 2018. As well as that, many people are facing housing eviction crises. This means that they aren’t able to pay their rent as there are less jobs available and therefore they are being kicked out. This is increasing the amount of people having to depend on government subsides meaning that there are many more people who are living on the brink. According to the American Payroll Association, 74% of all employees are living pay check to pay check and according to the Federal Reserve 40% of Americans cannot afford a surprise $400 expense. These are alarming statistics anywhere, but for the richest country on earth to be pulling these numbers makes it all the more shocking, and both of them were pre-pandemic.
‘74% of American employees are living
AMERICAN PAYROLL ASSOCIATION REPORT, 2018
paycheck to paycheck in 2018‘
So that is where we are now, but how exactly might this continue, especially post pandemic? Well, natural disasters caused $23.6 billion of direct economic losses according to the UN in 2018 alone. Natural disasters are major causes of poverty, even in the richest of countries like America. Where events like hurricane Katrina, the almost annual Californian wildfires and, of course, Covid-19, which, at the time of writing, has killed 2.65 million people worldwide. Of these deaths, over a million have come form the 1st world, with the USA having notably racked up figures over 550 thousand. Recent studies show that poverty levels increase by at lest one percentage point in areas hit by super severe disasters according to the Atlantic.
‘Of those people who are able to leave,
AUDREY DENNY, AGRICULTURAL EXPERT
many of them are gone’
One instance were the rampant wildfires which ravaged the towns of Paradise and Chico in California. The poor were undoubtedly the hardest hit. In Paradise and Chico, there were still hundreds in temporary shelters months after the fires ended. According to Audrey Denney, an agricultural expert, ‘Of the people who were able to leave, many of them are gone.’ This means that the people who can move do, leaving only the people who cannot move left, increasing the percentage of people in an area who are poverty stricken. For those left behind, life gets harder still with fewer jobs and increased expenses. One of the reasons for this is because things like insurance costs will rise exponentially as insurance companies are much more reluctant to offer protection as it seems that it will be a loss of money. For many of the people left in areas such as Paradise and Chico, Puerto Rico or Louisiana, dire housing crises emerge, with rent spikes and little patience from the landlords. This leads to more homelessness and a bigger strain on the people still living there, pushing even more into poverty and debt.
‘Any kind of injury becomes a decision of
healthy body or healthy bank account’
One way in which richer countries could try to combat this is with better social security and disaster infrastructure. However, in the USA over 22 million people have no health insurance and no safety net provided by the government. This is appalling as it means that any kind of injury becomes a decision of healthy body or healthy bank account. These people would have to go into debt just to ride in an ambulance to get to the hospital, before they have even started shelling out for treatment. One terrifying statistic is that one of the largest insurers in the USA is GoFundMe, a fundraising website. Nearly a third of all donations go to health care costs, totalling an amount surpassing $650 million according to the company’s CEO. These people are forced into begging online in the hope that enough kind strangers will give them money so that they don’t go bankrupt. May I reiterate, this is in the USA alone. The richest country on earth, the supposedly freest and best country on earth, has a crowdfunding website as one of, if not its single largest, insurers.
Outside of the developed world, it isn’t much better. According to the UN, over 4 billion people worldwide have absolutely no form of social protection. One should bear in mind that this data is from 2016 and is most likely significantly worse in 2021. These people are left behind by western society, and even in their own countries they are largely marginalised, forgotten and ignored. They make up over 50 per cent of the world’s population but they have less cumulative wealth than the richest 26 people combined. They suffer the most in natural disasters and their problems are not going away, no matter how much they are side-lined. The UN said that unfortunately they don’t think that they are on target to reach zero people living in poverty by 2030. Whilst a decline has been seen virtually worldwide for the past few decades, the rate of decline has been decreasing every year for a long time now and in 2020 it even rose. The percentage of people worldwide living in poverty was at 15.7% in 2010 according to the UN. That fell to 10% in 2015. In 2019, the estimated percent was at 8.2. That means that in 4 years, the total percent fell by just 1.8, whereas in the 5 years prior, it fell by 5.7%.
All in all, the current situation for the worlds poorest is bleak. They are underrepresented and systematically ignored and mistreated. All of this has been made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic which has increased the population of those in poverty and severe poverty for the first time in decades. The UN estimates the proportion of the world’s population in poverty has risen in 2020 and at least 70 million people have now fallen from poverty to extreme poverty. With the current pandemic fully affecting all of society, the worlds governments are focusing even less on the most deprived. With jobs dwindling, unemployment rampant (50 million people filed for unemployment in the USA in 2020 alone), and a Covid vaccine not expected to fully reach much of the developing world for at least another year, the situation looks dire to say the least. While there is always a silver lining and whatever goes up, good or bad, must come down, even being optimistic one can say that it will be worse before it gets better.
Milo Herdale, 20/3/21
Sources:
The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/why-natural-disasters-are-worse-poor/580846/
Grist: https://grist.org/article/as-the-rich-move-away-from-disaster-zones-the-poor-are-left-behind/
The UN: https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal1
WHO: https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/84/1/news10106/en/
Worlds Bank Blogs: https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/impact-covid-19-coronavirus-global-poverty-why-sub-saharan-africa-might-be-region-hardest
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