The United Nations Development Program—while insisting on attributing to Russia’s military operation in Ukraine the global inflation surge, which started in 2021 due to Federal Reserve policy, and was accelerated by NATO sanctions—nonetheless reported that inflation threw 71 million people into extreme poverty during the past three months. The UNDP’s administrator Achim Steiner reported July 6 that this totaled more people than fell into poverty in the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020.
Due to China’s decades-long campaign to eliminate both extreme levels of poverty—less than $3.20/day/person and less than $1.90/day/person—world poverty as defined by the UN had declined to less than 800 million people by 2020. But the severe consequences of border closings, production shut-downs and other disruptions, as COVID-19 spread for two years virtually unchecked outside some Asian countries, raised the numbers in poverty back into the range of 900 million. The runaway inflation, and now interest rate increases raising the dollar’s exchange value, have now spread poverty even more rapidly. According to the UN’s Steiner, the worst-hit nations are in Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the western Balkans.
