Write an Essay for No Less Than Six-Hundred Words Based on the Movie "the End of Poverty"

It becomes our second instinct to strike up vivid images of people’s life whenever we hear the word “poverty”. It is too common a social term that every day we are being bombarded with news about poverty and other world’s issues. So, what do we really know about poverty? I bet it is not only about not having enough money to buy a movie ticket on a Friday night or being unable to afford an extravagant set of clothes labeled Adidas. It is not just about being born and raised in a middle-class family in a peaceful town nor lacking the opportunity to join a prestige school of your local area. Poverty is about those who do not even have access to everyday life’s necessity, such as food, clothes, shelter and so on. It is essentially those who are living in the third world countries, where living standards are lagging so much behind compared to other developed and developing countries. It is those that had a long history of colony and imperialism, of course we do have some exception here, such as Singapore, Hong Kong… But wherever that might be, just looking at the four basic life necessity requirements will give us a vivid example of what poverty is: food, clothing, shelter and education.

Playing around the definition of poverty leads me to talk about the causes of it, which render thousands. The movie “The end of poverty” has given me a great insight into the very first culprit, which dates back five hundred years ago, during “The age of discovery”. Specifically in 1492, Christopher Columbus successfully discovered the American continent in the Western Hemisphere, known as the New World, opening the era of colonialism and imperialism. The Spanish and the Portuguese were known as the first empire states of the world, as they were the first to stretch across different continents, covering vast areas of land. “The empire on which the sun never sets” was used to refer to the Spanish Empire, who had so many colonies at that point of time. Essentially, the discovery of the New World kick-started the game of colonialism, by which European empires embarked on a hunt for new lands. These nations conquered a great number of areas at the time, and never at any point stopped to exploit anything that these colonies had to offer, such as natural resources, cheap labor, slaves… These practices never stopped benefiting the empires and feeding on the poor. People were used as slaves, cheap labors and had to work day and night to fulfill the will of the empires. Natural resources such as gold, silver were much exploited, making the rich even richer. These lands were gradually drained of everything of values. And that marked the era of imperialism. Today, even when the colonialism has ended, it is not rare to see the consequences, relics of an old era. People in Africa and many regions in Latin America are much deprived of food, clothes and access to other basic necessities of life, let alone the chance to access education, the only