The moral seriousness of the existence of global poverty is hard to dispute. According to recent UN figures, 1.2 billion people have to survive on less than $1 per day (UNDP 2000: 8). Furthermore, 790 million people are in hunger and cannot readily obtain food (ibid.). The same report records that ‘More than a billion people in developing countries lack access to safe water, and more than 2.4 billion people lack adequate sanitation’(UNDP 2000: 4). Some political leaders have recognized the moral urgency of this situation. The United Nations Millennium Development Goals, for example, include as their first goal a commitment to ‘Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger’where this requires commitments to ‘Reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day’and to ‘Reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger’(www. un. org/millenniumgoals/index. html). These were agreed on by the UN, IMF, and World Bank at the United Nations Millennium Summit, held in September 2000.1 Also, importantly, these meetings were followed by discussions of what practical policies should be adopted to achieve these goals, most notably at the International Conference on Financing for Development held in Monterrey in Mexico on March 18–22, 2002.2

People may condemn the existing global poverty for a number of different reasons. Some, for example, may think that we ought to alleviate global poverty out of a duty of charity or philanthropy. They might think that it would be callous and selfish not to help the needy. My aim in this chapter is to motivate some