Poverty

Abstract

According to the World Bank there were a thousand million people in absolute poverty in 1980; the situation cannot have improved since then. Ninety per cent of them lived in the rural areas. Half of them were small farmers, and about a quarter landless labourers (World Bank, 1982, p. 78). Such poverty is not merely a question of insufficient income; it spills over into squalid housing and living conditions, malnutrition, high infantile and adult death rates, poor general health and substandard education — the latter including, of course, a high illiteracy rate. These other aspects of poverty will be examined in later chapters.