The contrast could not be more startling. It reveals two very different worlds – one is bullish, thrusting, positive and immensely comfortable. The other is anxious, uncertain, disempowered and vulnerable in the extreme.

These contrasting worlds are graphically highlighted in two recent international reports – the World Wealth Report 2022 and the Global Hunger Index 2022 . 

The first report tracks the fortunes of the world’s wealthiest people. That’s the rich (US$ 1 – 5 million), the very rich (US$5 – 30 million) and the extremely rich (US$30+ million).  According to the report’s authors, the past few years have witnessed "tremendous wealth accumulation" which has led to an increase in the world’s population of high-net-worth individuals by 7.8% and of global wealth by 8%. 

At the very top of the wealth ladder, billionaires have seen their wealth "soar".  Forbes’ annual billionaires list now includes 2,755 billionaires, who collectively grew their wealth from $8 trillion in 2020 to $13.1 trillion in 2021. 

This growth has been simultaneously paralleled by an equally significant growth in inequality.  According to the World Inequality Report 2022 the bottom 50% of people have just 2% of world wealth. The middle 40% have 22% while the top 10% and 1% have 76% and 38% of the world’s wealth respectively. And the gap continues to widen

Based on a broad spectrum of research, Oxfam has reported that the world’s 2,153 billionaires now have more wealth than 4.6 billion people. The richest 252 men have more wealth than all 1 billion women and girls in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, combined. 

At the other end of the world, as analysed in the latest Global Hunger Index, world hunger levels are now reaching "catastrophic" proportions, with some 44 countries suffering with "serious or alarming" levels. The Index reports that south Asia has the world’s highest levels of child stunting (low body weight to height) and child wasting (malnourished or emaciated), while broad areas of sub-Saharan Africa once again have the highest levels of undernourishment and child mortality rates.

The progress made in tackling hunger in recent decades has largely come to a halt, with an estimated 828 million classified as undernourished in a world that has never had more food and wealth. In addition, 2.3 billion people (almost 30% of total population) are experiencing moderate to severe food insecurity. This amounts to 350 million more than before the Covid-19 pandemic.

And, as is all too often the case, women are more heavily impacted than men. 

The situation can be largely understood not by the lazy and convenient ‘explanation’ of ‘overpopulation’, but by the lethal cocktail of persistent and acute poverty, local and regional conflict, climate change, and the pandemic which hurt the poorest hardest. 

On top of this, the war in Ukraine and its immediate knock-on effects on global prices and supplies of food, fertiliser and fuel has created this current catastrophe. 

This cocktail is expected to lead to increasing humanitarian disasters as climate change and its impact deepen.

When faced with such evidence and argument, most of us ask the key question: 'what has any of this got to do with me?  I’m not one of those billionaires or a world leader or a corporate executive, there is little or nothing I can do about such issues.’ 

When exploring these and related topics in teaching, I tend to get two dominant responses.

One is of irritation tinged with defensiveness, and even a little anger. It’s as if even raising these discomforting issues is inappropriate. Some even argue that because the issues have "nothing to do with them", they are irrelevant, even in an educational setting.

The other response is to insist on individual, and sometimes even collective, distance from the topic. 

Much the same response occurs across society at large.

The irritation and defensiveness I can understand – they represent the need to distance oneself from world inequality or hunger and to imply that they are essentially someone else’s problem, not a part of my ‘doing’. They are a key pillar of the view that ‘I/we are not a part of that world’.

But our responses suggest much more – the need to avoid admitting, accepting, or even acting on issues such as hunger, poverty, or inequality. It is a default response to avoid complex, difficult, and very uncomfortable questions about our place and role let alone our duty in the world.   

Meanwhile, both worlds described in these reports co-exist, apparently disconnected from each other, but in reality intrinsically connected. 

Where do Malta and the Maltese fit in that equation? It's not an easy question to answer.