News about poverty affecting the elderly, children and other more vulnerable sections of the population, including people with disabilities, is multiplying.
The reports are cruel and each individual situation reveals injustices that outrage and revolt. A grandmother who finds herself in a situation of poverty having her granddaughter in her care after her daughter’s death. An elderly couple in poor health threatened with eviction and without seeing a solution if this outcome materializes. Another elderly couple who, having already lost their home, use a car as a place to spend the night without having anywhere to say they have found an address.
Global data tells us that there are more than 400 million children living in poverty around the world and that one in five suffers serious deprivation in terms of health and well-being. We are also told that in Portugal there will be more than 2 million people living in poverty. We are also told that the situation is getting worse compared to the rest of the European Union when it comes to poverty among the elderly.
There are obvious questions to ask. How is this possible? How can these situations be avoided and poverty combated? What needs to be done and where do you start?
The answers will be no less obvious. Poverty should not be possible, but it is unavoidable. In a world in which Humanity has the production capacity that exists today, it is possible to produce enough to meet human needs so that there are no people living in poverty. This world, however, is an unequal world, in which a minority appropriates the immense wealth created by the vast majority. In this original inequality we find the root of the roots, the cause of the causes of economic and social injustices and inequalities that are multiplying around the world. Poverty is one of the most acute forms that these inequalities and injustices take.
Direct and immediate action on each and every individual circumstance in which poverty is expressed is essential. This is the way to overcome the individual human suffering of those who find themselves struck by poverty suddenly or as a result of a concatenation of factors combined throughout their lives and/or perpetuated over several generations.
At the same time, action on the cause of poverty, which is rooted in the mode of production or economic system that generates it, is essential. Without this action of a structural nature, that other cyclical action will be of little use, being limited to a kind of placing patches in a cloth that never stops having holes.
Noting the need to combine these two dimensions for the action to be consequential, there will be those who decide to put it into practice so that all lives truly change and those who remain in the lament of other people’s poverty.
This week, the European Parliament will hold a first vote on the text that will be the report on the European Union’s strategy to combat poverty. You will also see there those who roll up their sleeves and those who dry crocodile tears.