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Articles: News | US has highest poverty..!
- Mr. Ravi Kumar Sunkara
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'If the US government designed and implemented the policies according to the human rights standards, much of the problem of poverty could be resolved,' he said while on a visit to the US last month.
The UN in its release said that by choosing to visit the US, Sengupta wanted to illustrate that extreme poverty is a societal problem irrespective of the level of income of a country and is not only a problem of poor developing countries.
The statistics also showed a significant disparity in poverty between African Americans (24.7 per cent), Hispanics (21.9 per cent) and non-Hispanic Whites (8.6 per cent), it added.
Moreover, despite the overall US economic recovery, the incidence of poverty, including food insecurity and homelessness had been on the rise over the past years, the international body maintained.
Sengupta noted that despite the various programs, the increasing number of people experiencing poverty and the testimonies of people and civil society organisations indicated significant gaps in the current system in the US.
'The high costs of healthcare, inadequate access to quality education and vocational training, low wages, limited protection of tenants and lack of low-cost housing, were seen to pose serious obstacles to people struggling to get out of poverty and to make many low-income families vulnerable to extreme poverty,' he contended.
Sengupta toured various poverty hot spots, including New York urban areas, immigrant farm workers in Florida and hurricane-devastated New Orleans,
He also visited Jackson and the Delta region in Mississippi, where he heard testimonies on poverty faced by many African Americans, and the Appalachian mountains in Kentucky where he saw similar poverty affecting a mainly white population.
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