Physical hunger and physical poverty is something I could only imagine. I've been poor when I was in China... As kids we never had to starve, but just didn't have enough meat, enough rice.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
We were poor, but we didn't know it. There were no government bureaus in those days presuming to determine where poorness begins and ends, but I don't remember ever being hungry.
There are cultural reasons, economic competitiveness reasons. There are a lot of reasons why people are in poverty. The difference today is that increasingly they are in perpetual poverty.
The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.
People are hungry not because there aren't enough farmers or food, but because they don't have access to it or can't afford it.
Poverty is not just about income: it's about aspiration. It's not just about giving people a couple of extra pounds a week, welcome though that is.
Poverty is about people lacking the tools they need to get on in life. And solving it is about tackling educational failure, antisocial behaviour, debt problems and addiction, and of course it's about work.
Poverty is a very complicated issue, but feeding a child isn't.
Poverty is not the simple result of bad geography, bad culture, bad history. It's the result of us: of the ways that people choose to organize their societies.
I grew up poor in India, and there were days when we struggled to find food and other basic necessities. Our mother worked odds and ends jobs to keep the family together and educate us.