Tuesday, October 05, 2010

Food for thought

On the poverty front, both The Toronto Star and Gwynne Dyer (EMC newspaper) review progress of the Millennium Development Goals set out in 2000. Both see progress but too slow, and faltering. The Star reports that the number of hungry people has been reduced (other figures contradict this) from 20% to 16%, yet still children are dying at the rate of one
every six seconds. Dwyer sees progress in key areas such as literacy, access to clean water, and infant mortality, yet sees a rising population as a barrier to bringing everyone up to Northern Hemisphere standards. Pollution, global warming, and resource depletion would put a halt to any rise in living standards of the Third World. Neither, of course, can think outside the capitalist box and promote a complete reorganization of the economic and social systems under which we live today. To them a shared world of the provision of all needs for all to replace the total madness of capitalist production is not a consideration. It's about time that it
was! John Ayers

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