The project The Poverty Line is a pictorial website created by a Chinese husband and wife team that tries to graphically capture the purchasing power of people living on the poverty line by looking at what food items they can buy based on the poverty line in their respective countries. While the project gives you a window into the different, though limited, food items poor people can purchase, it doesn’t tell you much else about poverty.
It doesn’t tell you, for instance, that most of the time people living in poverty can’t actually buy all of the items in the quantities displayed. Poor people actually live under the poverty line. Moreover, since the focus is on food, it doesn’t show you the other deprivations that poor people endure, like lack of shelter, access to medical care, clean water and sanitation. Nor does it show you the indignities, humiliation, shame and abuse of human rights that people living in extreme poverty suffer on a daily basis.
So in the end it all looks pretty, their hearts are in the right place, but this tells you virtually nothing about what it means to be poor.
If you really want to learn about poverty and what you can do to fight poverty you are better off visiting sites like ONE or The Life You Can Save.
Related articles
- Shopping on the poverty line (bbc.co.uk)
- Of Big Cities, Philadelphia Worst For People In Deep Poverty (roysrants.wordpress.com)