The West and its lack of empathy in times of crisis

Global poverty has fallen, but the problem is that there are large parts of the West that do not recognise common humanity, writes Sholto Byrnes

A visitor from another planet might infer that developed nations consider the citizens of less fortunate countries to be more expendable (the same applies to the innocent victims of drone and bomb strShow more

It is barely a week since the United Nations adopted the sustainable development goals – the most important of which is the aim to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030 – and already they are having a huge effect. How else, after all, to interpret the World Bank's recent prediction that extreme poverty will fall below 10 per cent of the global population this year? This will be an even more remarkable achievement given that the bank is now using an updated international poverty line of $1.90 a day, as opposed to $1.25 before.

Of course, I am being slightly facetious in attributing the progress World Bank president Jim Yong Kim announced to the SDGs.

The scepticism many feel about anything the UN does has to be acknowledged; as does the argument that achieving the millennium development goals of halving global poverty (five years early) had nothing to do with the MDGs (the SDGs’ predecessors), and everything to do with the fruits of capitalism – growth.

But it is surely not too starry-eyed to agree with Mr Kim when he said: “This is the best story in the world – these projections show us that we are the first generation in human history that can end extreme poverty.” And even critics of the SDGs such as Foreign Policy magazine, which recently declared they “should stand for Senseless, Dreamy, Garbled”, agree that they could at least work as “idealistic rhetoric that will motivate more people in the rich and free countries to care about the world’s poor and shackled”.

This, I would argue, is in fact one of the most important aspects of goals such as these. The same applies to the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives launched by the Vice President and Ruler of Dubai on Sunday.

By 2025, the newly-launched foundation aims to have supported and educated 20 million children, and prevented or treated blindness and eye disease in another 30 million people.

Both are about the need to recognise our common humanity. That may seem an obvious, even facile, thing to say. But it is hard to see that genuine fellow feeling exists when the peoples of developed nations are prepared to tolerate levels of poverty, hunger and ignorance in other countries that would be unthinkable at home.

In 2007, for instance, the UN estimated that 162 million people were living on less than50 cents a day. What on Earth can that buy? Could it conceivably be acceptable for anyone to subsist on so little in the US?

The same study found that, at that time, 60 per cent of the population of Burundi endured in a state of “ultra-hunger” – they consumed 600 calories less than the average daily energy requirement for adults. On Monday an international conference in Canada produced another appalling statistic. “Nearly 80 per cent of all maternal deaths and about 75 per cent of all newborn and child deaths in the world occur in just 20 countries,” reported the Vancouver Sun. No prizes for guessing in which regions those countries are.

It is impossible not to conclude that such dire and deathly inequalities can only persist because the developed world sees those afflicted as “people of whom we know nothing” living in far away countries, to paraphrase the pre-war British prime minister Neville Chamberlain.

Today, we do not have that excuse. Modern communications have made a village of the world, and we know about famine, drought, persecution and war wherever it happens. There is still, though, a lack of embedded empathy; the kind that would force governments to work together to address these problems seriously, as opposed to the temporary outpourings that follow events such as Live Aid.

Too often they lead to a flood of donations – which are helpful – but then a sense that everyone has “done their bit” and the crises can be forgotten about again.

But in almost all cases, those crises are still unsolved, and for most of the time, the status quo appears to be palatable.

A visitor from another planet might infer that developed nations consider the citizens of less fortunate countries to be more expendable (the same applies to the innocent victims of drone and bomb strikes). That “they” aren’t like “us”. That the businessman in New York doesn’t recognise anything of himself in the subsistence farmer in Bangladesh. How else could the situation be allowed to continue?

That surely has to change, for reasons of principle, but also of changing realities. The 21st century is going to see inexorable growth in developing countries while the old powers decline in relative terms. The “rest” that are “rising” are going to demand to be treated more and more as equals – and developed countries desperate to shore up their own economies will be increasingly willing to acquiesce.

In the meantime, however, more connection, more recognition, is required. Germany’s willingness to take in 500,000 refugees a year “for several years”, as the vice chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said this week, is a stunning step in the right direction. So is the World Bank announcement.

That businessman in New York needs to remember that it is only by accident of birth that he is free from the hunger and poverty that stalk the farmer in Bangladesh – and pressure his government to act accordingly.

Is that hopeless idealism? I would say it is only recognising that both are members of mankind – not different species, as it sometimes appears the developed world regards the developing one.

Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia