Dear Amok,
I am replying to your letter about the article in our paper “life is so hard”. I am sorry that you didn’t enjoy the Comic relief programme. You might not now that poverty is getting worse and worse each day. Some don’t even have a meal in a day. These people are living in absolute poverty, which is an individual lacking the basic needs to survive. All these people need is shelter, clean water, and food. These people wouldn’t care about cars as there is other ways of transport; they remain in a poverty cycle which there trapped in. I think that’s far more concerning than a car.

However, as you say there is plenty of food in world to feed everyone, it’s not shared equally in the world. When you go on holiday, the area you are in would be posh and you wouldn’t expect to see people starving. The hotels are specifically made for tourists and you wouldn’t see the local resident’s there. The water for your swimming pools is from surrounding areas but has chemicals which makes it clean. You wouldn’t expect to see any poverty in a conservation area as it is private area, poverty would typically be seen in small villages nearby or in a town. This is all because of bad governments, as they have been in debt and corrupt. As a result of colonialism, many LEDC governments had not any experience of running a country.

These people are ill because of lack of food and clean safe drinking water. If the water is contaminated they are obviously going to become ill, with no free health care and no job they can’t afford to be paying for vaccinations or medicines. For example you can measure poverty in different ways like calorie intake which is the amount of calories obtained from food per person. As you said that they should ‘stop having children and plan their families as we do’. I totally disagree as statistics show that life expectancy is low in LEDC’S due to poor medical care and quality of life. Furthermore this means that they have more children so they can work and afford healthcare and safe water. They could go to school, but school charge a fee. If they could go to school and get an education they could easily get out of the poverty cycle. The droughts and floods are worse in Africa as they have very hot weather unlike the UK. These are natural disasters, it’s no one’s fault it’s just environmental problems. We have had droughts and floods but we are prepared and have more aid because we are an MEDC. Washing cars and watering our gardens should be least of the worry. These LEDC countries don’t have enough income to pay for food and clean water, let alone watering gardens and cleaning cars. So I think you should take more thought into this matter.
There are lots of people dying because they are poor and don’t have the basic needs to survive and are living in absolute poverty. There is lots of evidence that poverty exists today. Such as development indicators, this shows if a person is healthy or not. There are many different reasons of why these countries are poor for example, bad governments, and the poverty cycle because they are not earning enough money. Many MEDC countries have exploited these LEDC countries by making them grow crops that they have good weather conditions for and workers get paid very little.

I do agree with the facts that these poor countries have lots of land. However many LEDC are dependent on one product to get an income e.g. Ethiopia- coffee, Ghana – cocoa. The problem arises if the crop fails or if their product is being sold cheaper elsewhere they have no alternative income. Furthermore as you said “Nestle and Nike are helping by setting up factories and giving people a job”. I totally disagree; multi-national