1. Doesn’t corruption in developing nations prevent aid from reaching the most impoverished people? While corruption exists nearly everywhere, including the United States, it is by no means a justification for ignoring the plight of the world’s poor. In recent years, experts have developed numerous strategies for bypassing corruption and ensuring that the world’s most vulnerable people receive assistance. The United States even set up a funding program (MCC) that requires countries to address corruption before they can receive assistance. This ensures that aid coming from the United States goes directly to the people.
2. Is the problem too big to address? While the problem is huge, the solutions are easy, affordable, and proven to work. In 2015 the UN completed its Millennium Development Goals, which in part sought to cut global hunger in half. This goal was achieved early, and the UN now targets zero hunger by 2030. It estimates that this lofty goal can be achieved with an additional $264 billion spent globally per year. This is less than the United States currently spends on interest payments on the national debt $283 billion and less than half of the U.S. defense budget $612 billion.
3. Why should the United States address poverty abroad when we have it here? These are not competing interests. Our foreign policy should be focused on international poverty because it’s the right thing to do and because it’s in our strategic interest. And for the same reasons our domestic policy should focus on poverty at home.
4. How is poverty fought on the ground? The strategies range from teaching farmers how to increase crop productivity to giving small loans to women so they can buy ovens and earn money selling bread.
5. Why do CEOs and the business community want the U.S. to end global poverty? The world’s poor are now viewed as the largest untapped market on earth. As people transition from barely surviving into being consumers of goods and products, U.S. companies gain new populations to which they can market their products. Many corporations have already benefited substantially from the poverty reduction that has occurred in India, China, and other parts of the world, and they realize that their future earnings are tied to whether or not U.S. leadership is working to reduce global poverty.
6. Why do defense experts view global poverty as a threat to the United States? Poverty creates desperate people and unstable conditions. As the National Security Strategy of the United States says, “A world where some live in comfort and plenty, while half of the human race lives on less than $2 a day, is neither just nor stable.”