Politics / Poverty

Coronavirus has closed factories and workshops across the world, spelling disaster for millions of people who subsist on poverty wages. Tansy Hoskins reimagines a garment industry where workers are better protected.

Lorraine Mallinder gets inside the proto-petro-state of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Skipping meals to talk to the media, aiming to get arrested – and still making it to your hockey game. These are just some of the tasks found on the to-do lists of campaigners in Canada who are putting everything on the line to fight for a liveable, just future. Lucy EJ Woods went to meet them.

Images from the migrant route through Mexico, where desperate people risk a journey fraught with danger to try to make it to the US. Text and photos: Pablo Allison.

An epic struggle has been playing out between islanders defending their land, rivers and livelihoods and the Malaysian government’s vision of ‘development’. Veronique Mistiaen spoke with Peter Kallang, the campaigner in the thick of it.

For more than half a century, economists and policymakers have focused fanatically on growth as the only feasible way to end global poverty and improve people’s lives. But in an era of planet-wide ecological breakdown, that comfortable conventional wisdom is crashing to an end. Jason Hickel lays it on the line.

Dinyar Godrej ponders what a global minimum wage might look like.

The globalized garment industry is as ruthless as they come, creaming off huge profits while paying workers a pittance. Trade unionist Anannya Bhattacharjee from the Asia Floor Wage Alliance is pressing the case for a living wage. She explains to Dinyar Godrej that the changes needed are surprisingly small – yet vehemently resisted.

Vanessa Martina Silva considers the track record of Brazil’s flagship Bolsa Família, the world’s largest conditional cash transfer scheme.

Tax havens in the Global North enable the systematic looting of the Global South. John Christensen explains how their activities impoverish the world.

Poverty between – and within – nations doesn’t just exist. It is created and needs constant maintenance. Warning: extremely violent content. Words: Dinyar Godrej.

Why is hunger growing in a country known as an agricultural powerhouse? Amy Booth reports from Buenos Aires.

Links for campaigning and more reading on poverty.

Poverty is not down to chance or bad choices. It’s hard wired into a deeply unequal economic system. But it doesn’t have to be that way, says Dinyar Godrej.

The world has never been better. From global poverty to inequality between nations, all the indicators are showing progress. This is a comforting narrative – popularized by the likes of Bill Gates and Steven Pinker. But is it true? Jason Hickel examines the rise of this so-called ‘New Optimism’, with its ‘battle cry for the status quo’.

Anne-Marie Broudehoux punctures the bombastic narrative of civic pride and prosperity that accompanies sporting mega-events to reveal how they actually remake the city upon the backs of the poor.

Violeta Santos Moura reports from Poland, where air pollution claims some 45,000 lives annually. The country’s reliance on coal is the main culprit but it’s an issue bound up in national pride and political manipulation.

Norwegian activists are challenging ‘white-saviour’ attitudes that over-simplify poverty writes Tom Lawson.

The impacts of racism can be seen in almost all aspects of everyday life. Black and indigenous people are more likely to be jailed or unemployed – that’s if they make it past childhood.

In August hundreds died in a landslide in Sierra Leone. Dumbuya Mustapha reports on the arguing over who was responsible that has followed – and the efforts to hold the government responsible to ensure the tragedy is not repeated.