African Environmental and Human Security in the 21st Century By ...

regional effect of these issues. With this in mind, the following is a brief description of these issues.

Economic Insecurities

The first MDG is to eradicate hunger and poverty. How does one measure poverty? How meaningful is the “one-dollar-a-day” measurement of basic subsistence requirements, given that this figure does not capture the full extent of misery that people experience? The dollar-a-day measurement presumes that X amount of capital brings equal access to commensurate commodities, which is a spurious comparison. If that amount does not allow people to have the basic necessities of life—food, clean water, health, and so on—then perhaps this measure lacks meaning.²⁸ The UNDP claims that the best measure of global inequality is the global income distribution model. This model uses national household income data to build an integrated global income distribution model. This model suggests a huge gap between the very rich and very poor on a global scale that is greater than the inequalities within any one country. Two-thirds of this gap is caused by income inequalities among countries, while inequalities within countries are responsible for the other third.²⁹ The conditions of extreme poverty make clear their immediate connection to “disease, drought, and distance from world markets.”³⁰ Jeffrey Sachs, the world's leading economist, commented, “I began to suspect that the omnipresence of disease and death had played a deep role in Africa's prolonged inability to develop economically.”³¹ Further, he stated that “good governance and market reforms are not sufficient to guarantee growth if the country is in a poverty trap.”³²

Unfortunately, globalization has indeed created a poverty trap and hardened the distinctions between the haves and have-nots. Though fewer people actually live below the poverty line of one U.S. dollar per day, inequalities have, in fact, grown. According to the UNDP, stagnation has been a prevalent aspect of globalization, notably within twenty-five sub-Saharan African countries and ten Latin American countries. In Russia, after the Asian financial crisis, 30 million people slipped below the poverty line, and in Argentina between 2000 and 2003, the number of people