Poverty in Asia,
caste and progress.
In this FAO Poverty In Asia map,
Darker is Poorer but some light areas are just 'no data' - see our Poor in a Rich World page.
A majority of the worlds poorest people today are in Asia - mainly because it holds a majority of the world's population. Of course some Asian countries like Japan and South Korea are not as poor as others like Cambodia, with Asian poverty being concentrated in South Asia.
Asian poverty
1. Poverty in some Asian countries seems largely due to the pressure of excessive population growth on scarce resources and inadequate governments allowing strongly negative caste discrimination.
2. Education, medicine, clean water and sanitation are often inadequate also
3. In some Asian countries land ownership being problematic also encourages poverty.
4. Asia till recently attracted less foreign investment than Latin America, but more of it has been stable longer-term European investment.
Some of Asia has shown good progress on poverty in recent years, like China and South Korea and more recently to a lesser degree India. This has generally involved the adoption of more progressive scientific policies, and in China good progress was notably helped in part by controls on population growth
though that has been strongly opposed by some religions and may have been maintained somewhat too long. But Asia, with the largest populations, still has many extreme poor. Asian farmers need to use more fertilisers and more technology, but they are often too expensive and too difficult for many to use.
The current world recession is also causing family remittances from overseas workers or migrant workers to fall. As more migrant workers lose jobs in Western Europe and the USA, remittances to their poor families in Central Asia are being hit hard. And the likely prospect for aid in the short term is a sharp fall.
# The new green selected food crops have been helping in reducing poverty in Asia, but the newer genetically modified food crops and their monopoly providers seem to have been unhelpful to date ? And the recent growth of microfinance in South Asia has not always proved helpful.
# For one small charity trying to do some good extreme-poverty work in India today, see SEED at seedkolkata.org or for another similar good small extreme-poverty charity working in Cambodia, see the Sao Sara Foundation at ssfcambodia.org
Good small charities like these often lack the money they need to do as much as they would like.