ABSTRACT
According to the World Bank’s Global Monitoring Report 2004, per capita consumption of US$1 a day represents a minimum standard of human existence in the low-income nations of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle-East. Yet more than a billion people live on much less. For middle-income economies, the World Bank estimates a poverty line of US$2 as closer to the basic minimum. Overall, in 2002 an estimated 2.8 billion people (roughly half the population of the developing world), lived on less than US$2 a day. Given that the poor have very limited purchasing power, they suffer from malnutrition and debilitating diseases as they cannot meet the per capita daily caloric intake threshold of 2,350 calories that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) defines as the basic minimum for an adequate diet. Moreover, the vast majority of the poor live in relative isolation in rural areas – where the basic necessities of life in terms of food availability, access to clean water, shelter and health care, and basic services such as access to education, transport, communication, and law and order are disproportionately far worse than in the urban areas.
