Chapter 5
Poverty in the Developing World

Developing countries are those with incomes (in terms of gross domestic product, or GDP) that fall between the least developed countries and the industrialized nations. Most countries in the world can be described as "developing": neither hopelessly poor nor hopefully rich. These countries have segments of deep, absolute poverty and instances of great wealth in their populations, but their overall economies fall below even that of a middle-income country such as Russia. At the same time, however, in terms of government and general standards of living, progress can be seen over time. Industry and technology in developing nations shows progress, too—often aided by an abundance of natural resources—but they may be hampered by militarism, violent unrest between classes and ethnic groups, political instability, and persistent poverty. Nevertheless, many developing countries have experienced impressive economic growth because of their increasingly important role in the global market as they open their economies to international trade and learn to leverage their natural resources for greater returns.

LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

The 2006 World Bank report on Latin America, Poverty Reduction and Growth: Virtuous and Vicious Cycles, cites the region's under-$2-a-day poverty rate of 25% as one of the major causes and consequences of its overall low growth rate of 4.2% in 2005. As Figure 5.1 shows, the poverty rate in Latin America was halved from 60% in 1950 to less than 30% in 2000. However, during the same time period income inequality remained more or less the same, making both poverty reduction and economic growth more difficult; as in other countries with a wide income gap—even developed ones—the challenge is to increase the incomes of the lower economic groups at a faster rate than those of the wealthier groups. In reality, economic growth rarely works this way. Latin American income inequality is drastic: the average annual per capita income is $4,000, but the region is home to many millionaires and billionaires. The fourth richest person in the world, Carlos Slim, whose worth was estimated at $23.8 billion in 2005, is Mexican.

In the article "Not Everyone Celebrates Improved Poverty Statistics" (August 23, 2005, http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/develop/quality/2005/0823mexico.htm), Diego Cevallos states that Latin America's poverty numbers can be deceptive. He uses the example of an impoverished woman in Mexico City who makes a living picking through garbage and has seen her monthly income increase from $70 to $85 because she has begun collecting discarded tin cans besides paper. While she theoretically has increased her income enough to lift her out of extreme poverty, in reality she is no better off. This, Cevallos argues, is the case with many Latin Americans who are considered above the official poverty line but in reality are still impoverished. Cevallos explains that any poverty line is necessarily subjective, quoting Joseé del Val, the coordinator of the Mexico Multicultural Nation program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico: "Poverty is a condition, a global social state that is not modified just because someone earns a few more dollars."

Colonization and Inequality in Latin America

Latin American social, political, and economic inequality dates back to the late fifteenth century, when the region was first colonized by explorers from Spain and Portugal (including Christopher Columbus). Besides the region's climate and soil fertility, South America in particular is rich in mineral, precious metal, and oil reserves. European explorers recognized this and began moving to expand their territories by taking control. The indigenous peoples of what are now the Caribbean, Mexico, Central, and South America had lived there in complex civilizations for thousands of years. When the Europeans arrived, however, they brought with them infectious diseases against which the native inhabitants had no natural immunity. By the time the conquest was over, around the 1530s, up to 90% of the indigenous population had died—some in battle against the Europeans and others as a result of the brutal working conditions imposed on them by the conquerors, but most because of diseases such as smallpox, typhoid fever, influenza, and measles. To make up for the loss in potential workers, the colonizers began importing slaves from Africa. The Europeans, Africans, and natives occasionally intermarried. Instead of creating a society of equals, however, intermarriage actually resulted in a group of permanent underclasses; children of mixed unions, as well as descendants of natives, continue to be socially and economically oppressed even into the twenty-first century.

A History of Unequal Land Distribution

As in all countries and regions with a history of colonization and slavery, the distribution of property and income in Latin America is inequitable: overall, descendants of native, African, and mixed-race conquered people and slaves earn less money and have less access to workable land than the descendants of Europeans. Samuel Morley writes in The Income Distribution Problem in Latin America and the Caribbean (UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, 2001) that the Latin American region has averaged the most unequal distribution of income in the world since at least the middle of the twentieth century. According to Morley, in the 1990s the top 5% of Latin Americans earned 25% of total income, while the bottom 30% earned 7.5%. Morley contrasts this with the countries of Southeast Asia, where the wealthiest 5% earned 16% of total income and the poorest 30% earned 12.2%. The main difference, Morley says, between Latin America and other developing and even underdeveloped areas such as Africa (the second most unequal region after Latin America) is that inequality did not decrease even after the economic recovery began in the 1990s following the severe recession of the 1980s (sometimes called the "lost decade" for the entire region).

A major cause of the dramatic inequities in income in Latin America is the region's history of land distribution. The World Bank's Office of Land Policy and Administration reports that Latin America's forty million indigenous peoples have not historically been given land rights because government priority has always leaned toward allowing for the greatest—usually corporate or business-oriented—use of natural resources. In Models for Recognizing Indigenous Land Rights in Latin America (World Bank, October 2004), Roque Roldán Ortiga reports that historically, Latin America's indigenous land rights system was essential for the livelihoods, culture, inheritance patterns, and basic survival of the native people.

In his foreword to Ortiga's report, the World Bank's Alfredo Sfeir-Younis writes that once the conquering Europeans realized that the region was not as rich in gold as they had initially thought, they began dividing up huge pieces of land, sometimes much of entire countries, and distributing it to individuals without regard to traditional land tenure customs. Over the centuries, the two land distribution techniques overlapped, producing a confusing system. As Sfeir-Younis explains, "The lack of coherence in the land tenure and land titling policies in the mid-eighties constituted one of the main sources of poverty—particularly for women—and of unsustainable agricultural practices." The reason is that in much of Latin America a title to a piece of land, even for a small plot in the city, can be used as collateral to gain access to credit. Without land, people have no way to acquire credit, which leaves them with very few financial options. Additionally, land has a symbolic, religious, and social significance for traditional cultures that often is not understood by nontraditional societies. "Thus," writes Sfeir-Younis, "whenever governments or the private sector move people away, or alienate them, from those sacred sites, this process is almost always accompanied by social disruption, instability and conflict."

Ortiga explains that the conquering Europeans used force, in the form of imposing Christianity and European languages and social norms, on the native people of the region to assimilate them into the dominant culture. "State authorities were particularly keen to abolish the institutions of collective territorial property and communal government of the native peoples of the Americas." Until the twentieth century, the goal was to create a single, overarching culture, eliminating any ethnic or social distinctions. Around the 1930s and 1940s, however, indigenous people began to agitate for recognition of their distinct backgrounds. Native land claims were first officially addressed when the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean all adopted the International Labor Organization's (ILO) Convention 107 in 1957, which recommends methods for protecting and assimilating native peoples while recognizing their individual rights and cultures. Since the 1970s native land rights have become a central issue in Latin American legal and social reform. In 1989 the ILO updated and expanded Convention 107 with Convention 196—the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention—which was adopted by twelve out of twenty Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries.

Income Poverty Statistics

As with other countries, researchers use the $2—a—day standard to measure poverty in LAC countries. However, the countries within the region each have their own standard for measuring poverty, most of which differ significantly from each other. The World Bank explains that LAC countries tend to define poverty using a line higher than $2 a day, but in several countries the line is lower than $2 a day. According to the World Bank, in some LAC countries people are officially classified as poor who would not be considered poor in other countries. Likewise, in LAC countries with lower poverty lines fewer people are considered poor than would be in nations with a higher official poverty line. Furthermore, there is no consistency throughout the region on measuring poverty using income and measuring it using expenditures. This lack of consistency makes it difficult to compare rates of poverty in different LAC countries.

The LAC poverty rate (measured according to the standard of under $2 a day) averaged about 25% in 2005, with individual country rates ranging from 4% in Uruguay to 47% in Nicaragua. (See Figure 5.2.) Falling in the middle is the "Southern Cone" region of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, which averaged 18.8%; Central America and Mexico averaged 29.2%; and the region of the Andean Mountains averaged 31.4%. (See Table 5.1.) The rates measuring against the poverty lines of individual countries yield a somewhat different picture. In Honduras, for example, 72% of the population in 2005 lived below the country's poverty line, while 36% lived on less than $2 a day. In Chile 5% of the population lived on less than $2 a day, but 19% lived below the country's poverty line. By contrast, in Jamaica about 22% of people lived below the country's poverty line, but 43% made less than $2 a day. In El Salvador the numbers were nearly the same, 39% and 41%, respectively. (See Figure 5.2.) Figure 5.3 shows a different aspect of poverty, in that of the fourteen countries cited, only Jamaica had a higher percentage of poverty in its urban areas, as opposed to its rural areas in 2005.

In 2005 and 2006 several Latin American countries began ushering in what was viewed as an era of change. In Bolivia, Latin America's poorest country, the first indigenous Bolivian was sworn in as president in January 2006. In Chile the region's first woman president was elected the same month. Costa Ricans reelected their president, a Nobel Peace Prize-winner, for a second term. Nine more LAC countries were scheduled to hold elections before the end of 2006. Others, such as Argentina and Venezuela, were undergoing political and social transitions that affected their economies and rates of poverty.

ARGENTINA'S ECONOMIC CRISIS

As the most "European" country in South America, Argentina has fewer people living in extreme poverty than other Latin American countries because it has an unusually large middle class. In fact, Argentina does as well as most developed countries in terms of human development indexes. According to "Country Sheet: Argentina" (2006, http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/countries.cfm?cARG), the United Nations Human Development Program reports that Argentines had a life expectancy of 74.5 years and a total school enrollment of 95% in 2003, with a 97.2% literacy rate. The infant mortality rate in 2003 was seventeen per 1,000 live births; the under-five mortality rate was twenty per 1,000. The average per capita GDP in 2003 was $12,106.

Historically, Argentina has been through phases of wealth and stability punctuated by periods of political and economic chaos. The events in the early years of the twenty-first century, however, were extreme in the number and kinds of people who were thrown into poverty, known in the country as the "new poor." Incidences of social problems such as suicide, substance abuse, and domestic violence increased as a result.

In 2001 the economy of Argentina fell into a recession. By November of that year the government, unable to repay its international debts, moved toward freezing citizens' bank accounts throughout the country so that it would have access to enough money to keep it stable through the crisis. The threat of having the accounts frozen threw Argentines into a panic, and they began withdrawing as much of their funds as possible. Because of these fears, bank deposits declined by 35% throughout 2001, according to Jennifer L. Rich in "Argentines, Fearing a Freeze, Withdraw Savings from Banks" (New York Times, December 1, 2001). Two days later, on December 3, the government froze most assets and limited withdrawals to $250 per week. This temporarily prevented a run on the banks, but not for long.

On December 19 four days of sporadic unrest in a few cities—with Argentines surrounding and in some cases storming grocery stores demanding food—erupted into nationwide rioting. Argentina's economy had been in decline for four years, resulting in an unemployment rate of 20% and a 14% drop in per capita income. The threat of a total economic collapse quickly caused widespread anxiety and chaos. In response, the government declared a "state of siege," a thirty-day period during which most of Argentina's constitutional guarantees were suspended. After President Fernando de la Rúa announced the state of siege, poor Argentines marched through the streets to the presidential palace, banging pots and pans in protest.

Within days de la Rúa was forced out of office. Poor, middle- and working-class Argentines who were unemployed resorted to looting and picking through garbage heaps for food. By January 2, 2002, the country was on its fifth president in two weeks, three more having resigned after de la Rúa. The new government immediately devalued the peso by 30% and froze all bank accounts over $3,000 for a full year. With banks still closed, Argentines were not only unable to access their accounts but were also prevented from cashing checks or using debit services and credit cards. They were effectively rendered penniless indefinitely. By the time the crisis began to ease in April 2002, at least twenty-seven people had been killed in food riots and millions of Argentines had been reduced, at least temporarily, to poverty.

According to the World Bank report Argentina—Crisis and Poverty 2003: A Poverty Assessment (Report No. 26127AR, July 24, 2003), poverty rose from 37% in 2001 to 58% at the end of 2002 because of the economic events of that year. Extreme poverty rose from 6% to 28%—a remarkable increase in a country with such a large and highly educated middle class. In fact, of the 825,000 jobs lost between May 2001 and May 2002, 90% were in the private sector, and two-thirds were salaried employees, meaning that most job losses affected the nonpoor. By contrast, the informal sector—which typically employs more poor people—actually grew by 170,000 jobs between 1998 to 2002, which implies that more people were forced into less secure, lower-wage jobs. Besides rising prices and unemployment rates, Argentines experienced an overall decrease in income between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, mostly during the crisis period. For the bottom 10% of Argentines, income fell 49%; for the top 10%, income declined 37%. Because of the large size of already-poor families in Argentina before the economic crisis, the poverty rate for children up to age fourteen rose from 45% in 1998 to 70% in 2002.

BOLIVIA'S POLITICAL UPHEAVAL

Bolivia, in central South America, is a country that has experienced nearly 200 political coups since it won independence from Spain in 1825. Although the country is rich in natural resources—including silver, tin, rubber, and natural gas—a history of human rights abuses (especially against indigenous Indians), involvement in the drug trade with its coca crops (used to produce cocaine), and a series of military dictatorships that mismanaged the economy left Bolivia the poorest country in the Latin American region, with two-thirds of its estimated nine million citizens living in poverty in 2005. According to the U.S. State Department in Background Note: Bolivia (April 14, 2005, http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/35751.htm), hyperinflation (inflation that increases quickly at extreme rates) in Bolivia had reached an annual rate of 24,000% by 1985.

The economy was temporarily stabilized during the mid-1980s under the presidency of Paz Estenssoro. Estenssoro implemented an intensive restructuring program that turned the economy around between 1985 and 1989, but not without serious social unrest because the "shock therapy" left tens of thousands of government workers unemployed. Two more presidents were democratically elected. In 1993 Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada became president and began a program of "capitalization"—privatizing government services such as communications, utilities, and railroads, which proved very unpopular with the public. Violent protests were common under the Lozada administration. The next president, Hugo Banzer, continued with privatization, but less successfully. Economic growth and job creation slowed. Banzer also began a campaign to destroy Bolivia's illegal coca crops, on which most rural indigenous farmers depended for their livelihoods. In 2002 Sánchez de Lozada returned to office, but his administration was unpopular. In February 2003 a protest turned violent and thirty people were killed. More deadly violence erupted in September during protests against privatization of the natural gas industry. Sánchez de Lozada resigned in October, partly because of pressure from an Indian union leader named Evo Morales, who had led the movement to nationalize the gas industry and return most of the profits to the Bolivian people.

Two more presidents entered and exited office before the election of December 2005, when Morales became Bolivia's first indigenous Indian president, elected with 54% of the vote—an unusually high percentage in a country that rarely sees a majority vote. A former coca leaf farmer, Morales ran on a platform of antiprivatization as well as social and government reform. Morales's pro-socialist leanings are perceived as a threat by many, including the United States, which has aggressively campaigned against Bolivia's coca growing by physically eradicating crops and objects to Morales's close ties with the socialist regimes of Cuba and Venezuela.

The unsettled political situation has been detrimental to human development in the country. As of 2003 the UNDP Human Poverty Index ranked Bolivia 113th out of 177 countries. Annual gross domestic product per capita was $892 in 2003, an amount with purchasing power equal to $2,587 in the United States. The World Health Organization (2006, http://www.who.int/countries/bol/en/) reports that life expectancy in 2004 was sixty-five years, and healthy life expectancy (the years a newborn could expect to live in full health) was 54.4 years in 2002. UNICEF estimated that 18,000 deaths occurred among children under five years old in 2004, which equaled a rate of sixty-nine per 1,000 (http://www.unicef. org/infobycountry/bolivia.html). According to the nonprofit organization Food for the Hungry, Bolivia, chronic malnutrition is a contributing factor in 28% of child deaths; overall, 40% of children aged three to thirty-five months suffered from chronic malnutrition in 2004. UNICEF also noted that approximately 2,500 unaccompanied children were living on the streets of Bolivian cities in 2004.

Poverty in Bolivia is more prevalent among indigenous people than among the population overall. According to the World Bank's Indigenous Peoples, Poverty, and Human Development in Latin America, 1994–2004 (March 2006), in 2002 (the most recent data available) the poverty rate for indigenous people in Bolivia was 74%; for nonindigenous people it was 53%. The rates of extreme poverty were 52% for indigenous people and 27% for nonindigenous. For the indigenous rural population the extreme poverty rate was 72%; for nonindigenous rural dwellers it was 52%. Indigenous Indians in Bolivia averaged between 5.9 years of formal schooling (3.5 for those living in rural areas); nonindigenous Bolivians averaged 9.6.

THE CENTRAL ASIAN REPUBLICS

The Central Asian republics—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—were all republics of the Soviet Union until they achieved independence in 1991. (See Figure 5.4.) Officially, they are now a part of the Commonwealth of Independent States, which is dominated by Russia and includes all the former Soviet states of the Eurasia region. However, the Central Asian republics, while having a twentieth-century history rooted in the Soviet bloc and still politically tied to Russia, are fundamentally different ethnically, religiously, and economically. In one sense, the Central Asian republics are transition economies: they all had planned economies during the Soviet era and have since the 1990s gradually opened to the international market. However, their general adherence to authoritarianism and their high rates of extreme poverty make them far less developed than other former Soviet countries. The Central Asian republics have abundant natural resources and growing economies, but their human development indicators are in general seriously lacking because overall poverty has increased and human security has decreased since independence. As Figure 5.5 shows, these countries have experienced a decline in life expectancy at birth in the years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. According to some international observers, nearly all the Central Asian republics are in danger of igniting an explosive political situation, putting the human needs even more at risk of not being met.

Kazakhstan

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) reports in Human Development Report: Kazakhstan 2004 (2004, http://hdr.undp.org/docs/reports/national/KAZ_Kazakhstan/Kazakhstan_2004_en.pdf) that Kazakhstan saw a dramatic decline in its human development indicators immediately after independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, dropping in rank from fifty-fourth to ninety-third on the UN's Human Development Index (HDI) of 177 countries. Between 1996 and 2002, though, Kazakhstan rose on the HDI to seventy-eighth place, due largely to its steady economic growth that averaged 10.4% annually from 2000 to 2004, and as of 2005 it ranked eightieth. However, as with other developing regions, a growing economy has not necessarily translated to a decrease in poverty or an increase in the standard of living for ordinary people, especially for those living in rural areas.

The World Bank's Dimensions of Poverty in Kazakhstan, vol. 2: Profile of Living Standards in Kazakhstan in 2002 (November 9, 2004) reports that the total poverty rate in 2002 was 15% (about one in six people), down from 18% in 2001. Sixty-four percent of the poor lived in rural regions and 15% in large cities. As in Russia, poverty in Kazakhstan tends to be shallow, meaning that the greatest number of the poor are concentrated near the poverty line. The UNDP's Millennium Development Goals in Kazakhstan, 2005 reports a large gap between urban and rural households in the availability of in-house utilities. While 81% of urban households had piped water in 2004, only 8.3% of rural households did, with just 0.8% of rural houses having a hot water supply, versus 56.1% of urban houses. Although nearly 100% of both rural and urban households had electricity, just 1.9% of rural homes had central heating, contrasted with 68.6% of urban homes. Sanitation was also lacking in rural households: only 4.3% had improved sewage systems, while 73.7% of urban households did. This situation in particular seems to be worsening over time. In 1999, 73.9% of urban and 10.4% of rural houses had access to a sewage system. Given that the public expenditure on health has been decreasing since 1995, this is a partial explanation for these worsening conditions. (See Figure 5.6.)

According to the UN's report MDG1: Eliminate Extreme Poverty and Hunger (2005, http://www.undp.kz/library_of_publications/files/1568-75446.pdf), Kazakhstan has already achieved the first MDG of halving extreme poverty by 2015, reducing its total poverty incidence from 39% of the population in 1998 to 16.1% in 2004. In rural regions, however, the poverty rate averaged 24.8%, almost three times the rate of 9.2% in urban regions. This huge gap indicates uneven development and growth throughout the country. The average annual per capita GDP was $7,363 as of 2005.

EDUCATION AND LITERACY

Kazakhstan has already exceeded the MDG of universal primary school education: 84% of children are enrolled in primary school, and the adult literacy rate is 99.5%, according to the UNDP report The Great Generation of Kazakhstan: Insight into the Future (2005, http://www.undp.kz/library_of_publications/files/5811-13639.pdf). However, the country has a high inequality ratio because of the great differences between rural and urban areas, especially in secondary education. According to the UNDP report MGD2: Achieve Universal Primary Education (2005, http://www.undp.kz/library_of_ publications/files/1569-52013.pdf), 47% of school-age children live in rural areas. Hundreds of Kazakhstan's rural communities have no schools, and even in the areas where schools are present children may have to travel long distances to attend them. As a result, rural children find it increasingly difficult to attain the skills they will need to succeed. Furthermore, the smaller of Kazakhstan's one hundred or more ethnic groups have problems in school because Kazakh and Russian are the dominant languages used in schools. The quality of teacher training is also an issue in Kazakhstan, with 18% of urban teachers and 42% of rural teachers rating as unqualified. Overall government spending on education has increased, from 3.1% of GDP in 2001 to 3.8% in 2004. The increase has not been uniform across oblasts, or provinces, however. In some regions, spending has decreased, including in the heavily impoverished Mangystau oblast, where education spending dropped from 2.6% to 2.2% from 2001 to 2004.

HEALTH AND MORTALITY

Life expectancy in Kazakhstan is fairly low: fifty-six years for men and sixty-seven years for women in 2004, according to the World Health Organization (2006, http://www.who.int/countries/kaz/en/). Healthy life expectancy at birth in 2002 was 52.6 years for men and 59.3 years for women. Under-five child mortality in 2002 was eighty-three per 1,000 live births for males and sixty-two for females. Different agencies within the country report different numbers for maternal mortality, and there are to date no official statistics. The Kazakhstan Ministry of Health reports that there were 75.8 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1990, while the Agency for Statistics reports fifty-five. Both groups report a decrease between 1990 and 2004, to 36.9 deaths per 100,000, although the number is still considered unreasonably high, particularly in light of the fact that nearly 100% of births in Kazakhstan are attended by health professionals. This indicates an issue with the quality of obstetric care.

One of the biggest health challenges confronting Kazakhstan since the dissolution of the Soviet Union is drug use. Because of its location on the drug trafficking route between the major drug producers of Southwest Asia to major drug-consuming regions such as Russia and Eastern Europe, Kazakhstan has become a major link on the route. According to the Silk Road Studies Program and the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute's "Country Factsheet, Eurasian Narcotics: Kazakhstan 2003" (2004), Kazakhstan's customs union with Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine permits the passage of closed containers without inspection across borders, making it especially attractive to smugglers. Kazakhstan, however, does not just provide a passage through which illicit drugs can easily pass. The country is also becoming a bigger producer of heroin and cannabis for use within its own borders. As in all countries with a high rate of intravenous drug use, HIV infection is on the rise in Kazakhstan. The Silk Road Studies fact sheet reports that as many as 3% of the country's citizens are believed to be intravenous drug users, and about 23,000 people are believed to be HIV-positive, with 84% of those infected being intravenous drug users. Suicide is a major cause of death among the HIV-positive population of Kazakhstan.

Kyrgyzstan

Kyrgyzstan is a small, almost entirely mountainous, landlocked country of about five million people. Historically, the people of the region were nomadic, but when it was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1924, Kyrgyzstan was converted to an agricultural-manufacturing lifestyle and economy. By the time the Central Asian republics were granted independence in 1991, Kyrgyzstan's manufacturing sector relied almost entirely on the Soviet Union's military-industrial complex. With its collapse, Kyrgyzstan's manufacturing sector also fell apart, which left its economy in ruins.

POVERTY AND HEALTH INDICATORS

By 1999 the rural poverty rate was 60%, according to Kyrgyzstan's National Poverty Reduction Strategy, 2003–2005 (April 2004, http://poverty2.forumone.com/files/Kyrgyz_PRSP.pdf), and the urban rate was 42.4%. In 2001 the numbers had declined to 51% for rural dwellers but had risen to 47.6% for those in urban areas. As in much of the rest of the world, poverty in Kyrgyzstan is heavily concentrated in rural regions. While 65.3% of the total Kyrgyzstani population lives in rural areas, 70% of the poor are rural dwellers. The overall rate of extreme poverty in 2001 was 13.5%. For those in rural regions the extreme poverty rate dropped between 2000 and 2001, from 20.5% to 15.6%, as did the urban regions rate, from 12.7 to 9.6%.

According to the UN Human Development Program's "Country Sheet: Kyrgyzstan" (2006, http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/countries.cfm?c=KGZ), Kyrgyzstan's literacy rate and primary school enrollment are high: 98.7% of adults were literate in 2002, and 82% of children were enrolled in primary, secondary, and tertiary schools. According to the World Health Organization (2006, http://www.who.int/countries/kgz/en/), in 2004 life expectancy was fifty-nine years for men and sixty-seven for women. The healthy life expectancy at birth was 52.2 years for men and 58.4 years for women in 2002. In 2004 the under-five child mortality was seventy-two per 1,000 live births for boys and sixty-three per 1,000 for girls. The average per capita GDP in 2005 was $1,751. In 2003 Kyrgyzstan ranked 109 out of 177 countries on the UN's Human Development Index.

Like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan has a growing presence in the international drug trade and, consequently, an increasing number of intravenous drug users and HIV cases. In fact, according to the British nongovernmental organization One World UK (2006, http://uk.oneworld. net/guides/kyrgyzstan/development), unofficial sources estimate that there may be as many as 6,000 cases of HIV, most unreported, in the country. Additionally, Kyrgyzstan has high rates of deaths from circulatory and respiratory diseases, and incidences of tuberculosis, syphilis, and malaria have increased since the 1990s.

Tajikistan

After independence in 1991, Tajikistan fell into a civil war that lasted from 1992 to 1994. The conflict seriously deteriorated conditions throughout the country, which has not entirely recovered as of 2006. The World Bank reports in Republic of Tajikistan Poverty Assessment Update (January 6, 2005, http://www.untj.org/files/reports/Tajikistan%20Poverty%20Assessment%20Update.pdf) that Tajikistan is the poorest of the former Soviet republics, indeed, one of the poorest countries in the world, with 64% of its population living on less than $2.15 a day in 2003. This is down substantially from 81% in 1999. The rate of extreme poverty (less than $1.08 a day) in 2003 was 18%, down from 36% in 1999. In 2002 the average gross national income per capita was less than $200, despite economic growth averaging 8% since 2000. Tajikistan does not have a national poverty line, so all calculations are based on the international lines (adjusted to $1.08 and $2.15 per day based on 2000 purchasing power parity).

The UNDP's Investing in Sustainable Development: Millennium Development Goals Needs Assessment (May 2005, http://www.undp.tj/home/MDG_NA_Full_Eng.pdf) for Tajikistan reports that steady economic growth and increased income and consumption have not really improved living standards for most Tajiks, even though extreme poverty has decreased by as much as fifty-five percentage points in some provincial regions since 1999.

HUNGER AND FOOD INSECURITY

Food insecurity and malnutrition are key poverty-related problems for Tajiks: the UNDP Millennium Development Goals report states that 83% of the population suffered from nutrition-related poverty in 2003. Families reported cutting down on food consumption and relying on food given as gifts to get by. Unbalanced diets that cause a number of nutritional deficiencies are the norm in Tajikistan, especially an over-dependence on bread as a primary source of nutrition. Children are the demographic group most affected by nutritional deficiencies. Of children aged six-months to fifty-nine months old, 36% are chronically malnourished, and 5% have acute malnutrition. Poor maternal nutrition results in 15% of Tajik babies being born malnourished.

The most common nutritional problems, other than simply a lack of food, in Tajikistan are deficiencies of iodine, folic acid, vitamin A, and iron. Iodine and folic acid deficiencies cause mental retardation and enlarged thyroids; in 2003, 89% of Tajik children had low levels of iodine, and 58% were deficient in folic acid. About 10% to 15% of Tajiks of all ages were believed to have enlarged thyroids. Vitamin A deficiency can cause blindness and increases susceptibility to infectious diseases. In Tajikistan approximately 52% of children aged six-months to fifty-nine months were Vitamin A deficient in 2003. Iron deficiency—the most common nutritional deficiency in the world, affecting 66% to 80% of the world's population—is experienced most often by children and pregnant women. In fact, anemia (very low levels of iron in the blood) is a factor in up to 20% of all maternal deaths. In Tajikistan 37% of preschool children, 40% of women, and 48% of pregnant women were believed to be anemic in 2003.

Overall malnutrition and food insecurity increased in Tajikistan between 2003 and 2004, according to a March 2005 press release from the UNDP's donors agency. Twenty-seven percent of rural Tajik households were either chronically food insecure or at risk of food insecurity. Hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition were not limited to Tajikistan's poorest households. Even steadily employed householders reported a lack of adequate food. Low income was not, however, the only reason for such widespread food insecurity. The UNDP press release cites a Tajik survey that found a 17% drop in the country's cereal production from 2003 to 2004.

EDUCATION AND LITERACY

All the former Soviet republics have generally high rates of primary school enrollment and literacy because of the former Soviet Union's compulsory education system. In Tajikistan the pre-Soviet literacy rate was 4% for men and 0.1% for women. Even after the Soviets introduced their program of state-run schools into the country, the subject of education was not always welcomed by the native population; Islamic leaders vocally opposed public education, and antieducation violence resulted in school burnings and the murders of teachers. By the 1980s Tajik education was well below that of other Soviet republics, with only 55% of adults having completed secondary schooling. Nevertheless, in "Country Sheet: Tajikistan" (2006, http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/countries.cfm?c=TJK) the UNDP reports that the literacy rate in Tajikistan was 99.5% in 2003, and the primary school enrollment was 94% in 2002–03. Even though factors such as poverty and hunger make it increasingly difficult for children to attend school, an estimated 88% of enrolled children attend school.

HEALTH AND MORTALITY

According to the World Health Organization (2006, http://www.who.int/countries/tjk/en/), life expectancy in Tajikistan was sixty-three years in 2004, sixty-two years for males and sixty-four years for females. Healthy life expectancy at birth was 53.1 years for males and 56.4 years for females in 2002. Under-five child mortality was 120 deaths per 1,000 live births for males and 115 per 1,000 live births for females in 2004. Data on infant mortality vary by source. Existing birth and death records are not considered reliable in Tajikistan. However, in January 2005 IRINnews.org reported that infant mortality rates appear to be going up in the northern provinces of the country. The article cites estimates for 2003 from both the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). According to UNICEF, the infant mortality rate was ninety-two deaths per 1,000 live births, but USAID's rate was 112.1 deaths per 1,000. Tajikistan's health ministry chief believed the numbers could actually be three or four times higher.

As in the other Central Asian republics, HIV/AIDS cases are on the rise in Tajikistan because of the country's geographical location on the trafficking route and because of an increase in intravenous drug use and prostitution. In fact, if the number of HIV cases continues to increase at its 2005 rate, experts say the number could double every thirteen months ("Tajikistan: Donors Call on Country to Strengthen Battle against HIV/AIDS," February 23, 2006, http://www.aegis.com/news/IRIN/2006/IR060259.html). Besides its role in the drug trade, Tajikistan has many citizens who temporarily migrate abroad—mostly to Russia—for work. Increasingly, these migrant workers become infected abroad and bring the disease back to Tajikistan, where they spread HIV.

Turkmenistan

Turkmenistan is considered the most closed society in the former Soviet bloc. In July 2004 the last international radio outlet to broadcast in the country—Russia's Mayak radio station—was cut off by Turkmenistan's authoritarian government, leaving the Turkmen people with no access to outside information. According to an article from the Power and Interest News Report (PINR; "The Erosion of Political Institutions in Turkmenistan," December 30, 2004, http://www.pinr.com/report.php?ac\=view_report&reportid=250&language_id=1), as of 2006 Turkmenistan and North Korea were the only countries in the world to retain their Stalinist regimes, meaning that they were ruled by dictators who control every aspect of their societies. The PINR lists many problems with the Turkmen government:

documented human rights violations, forced resettlement of ethnic minorities, rigid press censorship, high unemployment, a drug epidemic among the youth, widespread corruption, a declining educational system …, vast symbolic building projects (including an ice palace in the desert), isolation of the country from the rest of the world, collapsing public health (including reported cases of plague), and a political system in which no opposition to the government is tolerated.

Although exact figures are difficult to obtain because Turkmenistan does not have an established poverty line and what calculations the government does keep are not widely available, poverty is believed to be high and human development indicators low despite the potential for national wealth because of the country's huge oil and natural gas reserves. Turkmen president Saparmurat Niyazov has ruled Turkmenistan since independence in 1991, but in 1999 he declared himself "president for life" and adopted the title "Turkmenbashi," which means "father of all Turkmen."

According to Bernd Rechel and Martin McKee's report Human Rights and Health in Turkmenistan (April 2005, http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/ecohost/projects/turkmenistan%20files/Turkmen%20report.pdf), Turkmenistan has evolved to become the most oppressive of all the former Soviet republics. The Turkmen government controls all media and communications and refuses to report health data to the World Health Organization or development information to the United Nations. In March 2003 the Turkmen government imposed a ban on the issuance of exit visas to its citizens, preventing them from leaving the country. Threats of trade sanctions from the United States caused the Turkmen regime to abandon the exit visa ban in January 2004, although the government maintains a blacklist of people not allowed to travel.

Because of this atmosphere, the United Nations has been unable to research and publish a human development report on Turkmenistan since the 1990s. As of early 2006 the country was on uneasy terms with the World Bank because it refused to report its international debt, so all statistics related to poverty are speculative and based on data that are in most cases ten years old. Rechel and McKee, however, deduce from the information available in the World Bank's 1998 Living Standards Measurement Survey that urban unemployment in Turkmenistan was approximately 50% in 2003, and rural unemployment about 70%. In 1998 an estimated 44% of Turkmen lived below the international poverty line of $2 per day. Rechel and McKee note that "there is anecdotal evidence that the economic situation has deteriorated considerably since then."

Like all other statistics about the country, information on the health and education status of the Turkmen people is of dubious accuracy; the last time the country reported health data to the World Health Organization was in 1998. In February 2006 EURASIANET.org reported in "Turkmenistan Vulnerable to Public Health Catastrophe" (http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/recaps/articles/eav020606.shtml) that health care in Turkmenistan since independence has been deliberately targeted by President Niyazov, who has officially denied the existence of contagious diseases such as AIDS in the country, leaving citizens with no real options for medical aid. When they are able to see a doctor, extortion is not uncommon because the medical system is essentially a black market: for example, a parent taking her child in for a doctor visit might be forced to undergo testing herself so that the doctor makes more money. In 2004 Niyazov dismissed 15,000 health care professionals and replaced them with untrained military conscripts (people who have been drafted into the military involuntarily) to cut down on government spending. In 2005 he announced that all hospitals outside the capital city of Ashgabat would be closed indefinitely. In 2002 the World Health Organization (2006, http://www.who.int/countries/tkm/en/) estimated that the mortality rate was 51.6 years for men and 57.2 years for women. The child mortality rate for those under five years old had risen from ninety-seven per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 103 per 1,000 in 2004, as reported by UNICEF; an estimated 11,000 Turkmen children under five years old died in 2004 (http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/Turkmenistan_statistics.html).

In late 2005 the Turkmen government began cutting benefits to about 100,000 of the country's 400,000 people, mostly the elderly, who receive government pensions. Other government benefits have been cut by 20%, according to IRINnews.org ("Turkmenistan: Pension Cuts Begin to Bite," February 6, 2006, http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=51553&SelectRegion=Asia&Select Country=TURKMENISTAN). This move was expected to push thousands of older people into almost instant poverty. IRINnews.org notes that unemployment in Turkmenistan is believed to be as high as 80%.

Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan is the most populous of the Central Asian republics, with 25.8 million people—36.7% in urban areas and 63.3% in rural, according to the UNDP's "Country Sheet: Uzbekistan" (2006, http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/countries.cfm?c=UZB). Poverty in Uzbekistan is not generally as dire as in some of the other Central Asian republics. The country is the fourth-largest producer of cotton in the world and the seventh-largest producer of gold; in addition, it has large reserves of gas and oil. However, rising unemployment, a government crackdown on civil liberties, and economic policies that many observers consider disastrous have put Uzbekistan on the brink of total disarray.

According to "Country Sheet: Uzbekistan," in 2003 Uzbekistan ranked 111 out of 177 countries on the Human Development Index, ahead of Kyrgyzstan's 109 and Tajikistan's 122, but behind Kazakhstan's 80 and Turkmenistan's 97. As in all the other Central Asian republics, life expectancy decreased in Uzbekistan between 1990 and 2003, from 69.17 to 66.68 years. The UNDP's Central Asia Human Development Report: Bringing Down Barriers—Regional Cooperation for Human Development and Human Security (2005, http://hdr.undp.org/docs/reports/regional/CIS_Europe_CIS/Central_Asia_2005_en.pdf) states that in 2003, 47% of Uzbekistan's population lived below the international poverty line of $2.15 per day, compared to a high of 74% in Tajikistan and a low of 21% in Kazakhstan. Yet, Uzbekistan's annual economic growth lagged behind that of all the other Central Asian republics, at around 7.5%.

As in all the Central Asian republics, HIV and AIDS pose a risk not just to the physical health but also to the economy of Uzbekistan. In "A Silent Killer Threatens Central Asia" (December 28, 2004, http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/civilsociety/articles/pp122804.shtml), Antoine Blua states that the projected long-term loss in economic growth in Uzbekistan because of HIV and AIDS infection could total 21% by 2015. However, unlike the rest of Central Asia, the cause of the burgeoning epidemic in Uzbekistan is not so much intravenous drug use as a huge increase in prostitution since independence in 1991. According to Gulnoza Saidazimova in the article "HIV Infections Build in Uzbekistan as Prostitution Rises" (December 29, 2004, http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/civilsociety/articles/pp122904.shtml), Uzbekistan's large population, high unemployment—especially among women—and role as a major transit stop for truck drivers throughout the republics has caused an increasing number of women to turn to prostitution to earn a living. With an average monthly income in the country at just $15, condoms to prevent HIV and antiretroviral drugs to treat it are too expensive for prostitutes to afford.

Of further concern to the international community is the potential for widespread unrest in the region if Uzbekistan should become even more unstable. A government crackdown on civil liberties began after armed protesters stormed a prison in the city of Andijon in May 2005 to free twenty-three men accused of membership in an extreme Islamic group. Government troops were sent to stop the insurgency, but eyewitness accounts say they fired indiscriminately into crowds of people, killing as many as 1,000 Uzbek citizens; since then, the International Crisis Group has called leadership in Uzbekistan one of the most repressive regimes in the world. With political refugees from Uzbekistan fleeing to other Central Asian republics, especially the already-fragile Kyrgyzstan, the entire region could, according to some observers, fall into total disarray. The United States and the European Union both condemned the May 2005 government massacre and have since cut off nearly all ties to Uzbekistan. After the events of May 2005, Uzbek leaders halted the activities of at least 60% of nongovernmental organizations in the country. With aid groups forced to close facilities and leave the country, the Uzbek people have become even more vulnerable to the effects of poverty.

According to the International Crisis Group's Policy Briefing "Uzbekistan: In for the Long Haul" (February 16, 2006, http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=3952&l=1), the ruling party's economic policies have been disastrous for the Uzbek people. Although the country is the world's second biggest exporter of cotton (which is used mostly to produce blue jeans for the U.S. and European markets), the rural farmers—mostly women and children—who grow and cultivate it are essentially slave labor, with all the revenues going to the small but powerful upper class. Unrest has continued since the Andijon uprising despite the government's increase in the minimum wage to $9 a month. A growing number of Uzbeks are leaving the country for Russia and Kazakhstan to work as illegal, and therefore unprotected, temporary laborers.

NORTH KOREA

The peninsula on which both North and South Korea are located was under Japanese rule until the end of World War II in 1945. At that point the United States began occupying the southern half and the Soviet Union took over the northern half. The two countries' inability to agree on unification led to the formation of two separate governments in the north and south. War broke out between them in 1950 and ended in 1953, with a permanent demilitarized zone separating the two countries; this area has been called the most dangerous place on earth. From the end of the war until his death in 1994, Kim Il-Sung, who called himself (and demanded that all North Koreans call him) "Great Leader," ruled North Korea. Following his death, leadership went to his son Kim Jong-Il, who is known as "Dear Leader." Between their two periods of leadership, the father and son created a cult of personality and amassed military strength that enriched them and the country's upper class and left North Korea's ordinary citizens in such severe poverty that in the late 1990s as many as three million died of starvation (estimates vary; the North Korean government claims 600,000 died, while some nongovernmental organizations and human rights watchdog groups say one million). Human rights abuses abound in the country as well. In fact, North Korea is known for having one of the worst records in the world for the treatment of its own citizens.

It is also one of the most secretive societies in the world. Even photographs from inside the country are rare. Because everything is so tightly controlled by the authorities, valid statistics are generally nonexistent, although some nongovernmental organizations do manage to obtain data, and the government of South Korea keeps statistics as well. According to the South Korean Ministry of Unification (2006, http://www.unikorea.go.kr/en/index.jsp), the average annual income in North Korea was $818 in 2003. Because poverty numbers and other human development information provided by the government of North Korea are known to be inaccurate, the country is not ranked by the UNDP Human Development Index. In the early 1990s authorities were believed to be inflating the numbers to receive more foreign aid. By the late 1990s they were downplaying the severity of the problem. As of December 2005 the government was denying the presence of starvation in the country and planning to expel all nongovernmental aid organizations (Jehangir Pocha, "Cult of Ideology: North Korea Struggles to Save Face by Resisting Crucial Foreign Aid," December 5, 2005, http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2420/).

Death Camps, Famine, and the Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons

For his article "A Gulag with Nukes: Inside North Korea" (July 17, 2005, http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/north_korea_2686.jsp), Jasper Becker interviewed refugees from North Korea who had firsthand knowledge of the inner workings of the country, from slave labor camps to the palaces of Kim Jong-Il. Becker refers to these refugees as "escapees from the last slave society left in the world." David Hawk of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea concurs. In The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps—Prisoners' Testimonies and Satellite Photographs (2003, http://hrnk.org/HiddenGulag.pdf), Hawk estimates that 150,000 to 200,000 North Koreans are held in penal colonies throughout the country. The prisoners are people who may or may not have committed crimes but are perceived as criminals by authorities. Relatives of the prisoners are abducted and imprisoned as well. Detainment for alleged criminals is frequently lifelong, and there is no legal recourse. In fact, the accused are never actually arrested or charged with anything. They are simply snatched off the street and taken to interrogation facilities, where they may be tortured into confessing. Family mem-bers—usually parents, children, and grandparents—are kept in separate camps for "reeducation"; eventually, they may be released. This notion of "guilt by association" dates back to 1972, when Kim Il-Sung proclaimed that the blood lines of prisoners should be wiped out for three generations.

Prisoners detained in the camps are fed a starvation diet, meaning they are given the least possible amount of food to keep them alive and allow them to perform brutally difficult labor at least twelve hours a day, seven days a week. According to Sung Hun Han's article "Poverty Line in North Korea" (2005, http://www.bepress.com/peps/vol11/iss1/3/), adult prisoners are given the same amount of food that is allotted in the government's grain rationing program to two- to four-year-old children. The below-subsistence diet causes long-term physical deformities, and the dangerous working environment results in high numbers of amputations and disabilities. Additionally, feeding prisoners the absolute bare minimum creates an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion among them, making them fight each other for extra scraps of food and the clothing of those who have died. They are also known to turn each other in to the guards for indiscretions. Punishment is either confinement in a boxlike structure whose size makes both standing and lying down impossible, causing circulation to be cut off and slow death, or prisoners are killed by hanging or by a firing squad in front of other prisoners.

According to the Korea Institute for National Unification's annual White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, 2004, North Korea operates a rations system, under which all citizens receive food, clothing, medical care, housing, education, and pensions directly from the government. The thinking behind the system is that it will instill gratitude in the people, yet, because of the small amount of goods they receive, they are being kept from becoming lazy and frivolous. The grain distribution system had collapsed by the 1990s, with citizens receiving less than one-third the amount they needed to survive. In late 1996 grain rations were stopped altogether, leaving people to acquire their own food, mostly from the black market. Those who lacked the resources to buy food off the black market faced starvation. In fact, from 1996 to 1999 millions did starve to death in one of the largest famines in modern history. Exact figures are unknown because of the North Korean government's strict control of all information entering and leaving the country, but as many as three million people are believed to have starved to death, mostly children.

In 2004 the government loosened its control of food supplies slightly by allowing some markets to operate privately and expand their selection of goods. Some farms were also privatized. However, in October 2005 authorities reversed these policies and again prevented the sale of grain in markets. The decision to expel all aid organizations from the country by the end of 2005 because they were creating an atmosphere of "dependency" and because the harvest was allegedly expected to improve alarmed international agencies, who warned that another famine could be imminent without emergency food aid. With tensions escalating over North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons, the United States announced in May 2005 that it would suspend all food aid to the country, although U.S. officials denied they were using food as a political tool. At issue for the United States and other countries, as well as for aid organizations such as the United Nations World Food Program, is the limited amount of monitoring allowed by North Korea. Questions of whether aid actually reaches the country's neediest people or is intercepted and distributed to military officers has long been a point of contention for those who provide relief. Regardless, the North Korean government will not allow agencies to monitor or report on the progress of their programs within the country.

In Hunger and Human Rights: The Politics of Famine in North Korea (2005), Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea contend that the famine of the mid- to late-1990s was not simply a matter of bad weather patterns devastating crops, as the North Korean government has insisted. Instead, Haggard and Noland believe—along with many other researchers—that the famine was a preventable tragedy that was caused by the failed agricultural and social services system. In essence, the disaster is widely considered to have been a man-made famine. Certainly, North Korea has experienced extreme weather for more than ten years. Aidan Foster-Carter reports in "North Korea's Kim-Made Famine" (May 23, 2001, http://www.atimes.com/koreas/CE23Dg02.html) that the country has been in a cycle of drought and flood since 1994. However, Foster-Carter explains that a program of ill-advised agricultural techniques, combined with the system of collective farming, have proven disastrous to the country.

North Korea is 80% mountainous. To advance it ideology of complete independence, leaders cut the country off from trade and instead cleared land for farming higher and higher into the mountains. This "terracing" had two consequences: severe deforestation left the valleys vulnerable to landslides, and tenuously arable land was made even less fertile with the overuse of harsh chemical fertilizers. Furthermore, a government-imposed commitment to raise corn and rice, to the exclusion of most other crops, had left much of the population malnourished long before the events of the 1990s brought the situation to its crisis. So when the unusually heavy rains began in 1995, the terraced farms were washed away down the mountains, onto the fields in the valleys, destroying all the crops. This pattern is ongoing.

Haggard and Noland report that during and since the famine the North Korean government has blocked humanitarian relief efforts. When it has allowed aid to filter in, it has diverted its own funding away from feeding its people and instead focused on increasing its militarization program. The roots of the food crisis are, however, in the division of Korea into north and south. Historically, the northern region was devoted to industry and the southern to agriculture. When the peninsula was officially broken up into the two countries after the Korean War, the North developed policies devoted to strict self-reliance, which isolated it from its main source of food in South Korea. The Soviet Union and China stepped in as trading partners to some degree, but the collapse of the former and the economic transformation of the latter further alienated North Korea and left it with even less foreign economic support.

Many observers believe that behind the decade-long food crisis and the general state of poverty in North Korea is the country's pursuit of a nuclear program and the overall attention to increasing military might at all costs. North Korea has sought a nuclear program since the Korean War, when the United States threatened to use nuclear weapons against the North as part of its support of the South (Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, "North Korea's Nuclear Program, 2005," May-June 2005, http://www.thebulletin.org/article_nn.php?art_ofnmj05 norris). The continued U.S. military presence in South Korea, as well as North Korea's allegiance to the Soviet Union throughout the cold war, further spurred the North's nuclear ambitions. It is not known for certain whether or not North Korea has nuclear weapons or enriched uranium, as both North Korean and U.S. leaders claim. However, according to Norris and Kristensen, North Korean leaders may see the sale of weapons and/ or components to rogue governments as one way to deal with its people's ongoing impoverishment.