If the World were a village of 1,000 people...????

If the world were a village of 1,000 people, it would include:
· 584 Asians
· 124 Africans
· 95 East and West Europeans
· 84 Latin Americans
· 55 Soviets (including for the moment Lithuanians, Latvians,
Estonians and other national groups)
· 52 North Americans
· 6 Australians and New Zealanders
The people of the village have considerable difficulty in communicating:
· 165 people speak Mandarin
· 86 English
· 83 Hindi/Urdu
· 64 Spanish
· 58 Russian
· 37 Arabic
That list accounts for the mother tongues of only half the villagers.
The other half speak (in descending order of frequency) Bengali,
Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, German, French and 200 other
languages.
In this village of 1,000 there are:
· 329 Christians (among them 187 Catholics, 84 Protestants, 31
Orthodox)
· 178 Moslems
· 167 "non-religious"
· l32 Hindus
· 60 Buddhists
· 45 atheists
· 3 Jews
· 86 all other religions
One-third (330) of the 1,000 people in the world village are children
and only 60 are over the age of 65. Half the children are immunized
against preventable infectious diseases such as measles and polio.
Just under half of the married women in the village have access to and
use modern contraceptives.
This year 28 babies will be born. Ten people will die, 3 of them for
lack of food, 1 from cancer, 2 of the deaths are of babies born within
the year. One person of the 1,000 is infected with the HIV virus;
that person most likely has not yet developed a full-blown case of AIDS.
With the 28 births and 10 deaths, the population of the village next
year will be 1,018.
In this 1,000-person community, 200 people receive 75 percent of the
income; another 200 receive only 2 percent of the income.
Only 70 people of the 1,000 own an automobile (although some of the 70
own more than one automobile).
About one-third have access to clean, safe drinking water.
Of the 670 adults in the village, half are illiterate.
The village has six acres of land per person, 6,000 acres in all, of
which
· 700 acres are cropland
· 1,400 acres pasture
· 1,900 acres woodland
· 2,000 acres desert, tundra, pavement and other wasteland
· The woodland is declining rapidly; the wasteland is increasing.
The other land categories are roughly stable.
The village allocates 83 percent of its fertilizer to 40 percent of its
cropland - that owned by the richest and best-fed 270 people. Excess
fertilizer running off this land causes pollution in lakes and wells.
The remaining 60 percent of the land, with its 17 percent of the
fertilizer, produces 28 percent of the food grains and feeds 73 percent
of the people. The average grain yield on that land is one-third the
harvest achieved by the richer villagers.
In the village of 1,000 people, there are:
· 5 soldiers
· 7 teachers
· 1 doctor
· 3 refugees driven from home by war or drought
The village has a total budget each year, public and private, of over $3
million - $3,000 per person if it is distributed evenly (which, we have
already seen, it isn't).
Of the total $3 million:
·
· $181,000 goes to weapons and warfare
· $159,000 for education
· $l32,000 for health care
The village has buried beneath it enough explosive power in nuclear
weapons to blow itself to smithereens many times over. These weapons are
under the control of just 100 of the people. The other 900 people are
watching them with deep anxiety, wondering whether they can learn to get
along together; and if they do, whether they might set off the weapons
anyway through inattention or technical bungling; and, if they ever
decide to dismantle the weapons, where in the world village they would
dispose of the radioactive materials of which the weapons are made.

If the World were a village of 1,000 people...????

Star Moore

AuldSoul

Share this