Poverty, Development and Hunger in a Global Age

Abstract

This paper opines that the issues of poverty, development, and hunger have become increasingly prominent since the end of World War II. It stresses that in the early phase, this occurred as decolonization failed to bring about economic and social progress in what was then portrayed as the Third World, at the same time that industrially advanced Western countries were experiencing historically unprecedented levels of economic growth. As global economic disparities widened, some argued that colonialism had given way to ‘neocolonialism’, political domination having been replaced by more subtle but no less effective economic domination. Others heralded the emergence of a ‘North–South divide’. This paper emphasizes that in this context, bodies as different as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), on the one hand, and a host of development Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and activist groups on the other, came to view the task of reducing the gap between rich countries and poor countries as amoral imperative. However, the paper stresses that poverty, development, and hunger are complex and deeply controversial issues. It examines the orthodox mainstream understanding of poverty, development, and hunger, and contrasts this with a critical alternative approach. Consideration is given to how successful the development orthodoxy has been in incorporating and thereby neutralizing the concerns of the critical alternative. The paper then closes with an assessment of the likelihood of a globalization with a human face in the twenty-first century.