by Kallie Szczepanski

Created on: April 16, 2008

Today, 300 million African people live on less than $1 US per day. The incidence of extreme poverty never seems to go down, despite decades of work by African governments and NGOs, outside NGOs, and foreign government aid programs. What causes this entrenched poverty, on a continent rich with natural resources?

Unfortunately, poverty in Africa doesn't result from just one or two causes. There are a number of different factors at work, all interacting with one another, and making the problem of entrenched poverty extremely difficult to solve.

Some of the major causes of poverty include: war and armed conflict, poor farm policy, lack of access to credit, rampant unemployment, lack of access to education, and disease.

WAR AND ARMED CONFLICT

One-fifth of all African people live in countries seriously disrupted by armed conflict. When war is ranging all around, it's very difficult to grow crops, continue to work in an office, or earn money. Ordinary life becomes impossible, as people are forced to flee their homes.

Thus, productivity goes down, and poverty rates shoot up. Countries at war produce an average of 12.5 per cent less food per person than they do during peace time.

One example is Angola, where a 27-year long civil war killed half a million people and left 3.8 million people displaced. Virtually all the country's infrastructure was destroyed in the conflict, and more than three-quarters of the population fell into extreme poverty. Today, 85% of Angolans make their living through subsistence farming, working fields that conceal left-over landmines.

POOR FARM POLICY

The agriculture sector accounts for about 60% of African workers. Three-fifths of them are subsistence farmers, trying to eke enough food from their plot to feed their family. The rest work for large multinational industrial farms, or labor on huge export-crop fields.

Cash-strapped African governments try to squeeze every last penny out of their agricultural sector, imposing export taxes and commodity taxes on production. This drives up prices and drives down wages, increasing poverty rates. Meanwhile the governments of European nations and the US do the opposite: they subsidize farmers to the tune of $300 billion US per year.

In addition, African governments often are forced to sell their crops for bargain prices, in order to remain current on their foreign debt load. Importing nations in the developed world know that the producers have to sell at whatever price, so offer artificially low amounts for

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>