Morocco, the Civilization Series ….. by Aziz Rabbah

In today's world, inequality is no longer just a natural difference between societies, but has become a sharp gap between abundance and deprivation. A world that produces enough to feed everyone, yet leaves millions facing hunger and homelessness. Between skyscrapers and homeless camps, and between luxury markets and slums, the image of an economic system emerges that raises deep questions about justice, humanity, and the very meaning of progress.

In some poor areas of Haiti, hunger is no longer just a lack of food, but turns into a harsh human downfall, where some people are forced to what is locally known as «Galette de Terre», which are discs of clay mixed with a little salt and vegetable fat, then dried under the sun. It is not food, but the last thing left when everything collapses.

Despite that, Haiti has resources and potentials including minerals such as copper, gold, bauxite, and iron, and significant agricultural potentials like coffee, mango, sugarcane, and cocoa, in addition to promising marine and tourism wealth, but these remain underutilized or weakly exploited.

This is not an isolated case, but a picture of an unbalanced world. Today, more than 735 million people live with chronic hunger, and more than 700 million live below the extreme poverty line, in a world that produces enough to feed everyone, but the real crisis lies in justice and distribution.

On the other hand, about 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted annually, which is nearly a third of global production, while huge amounts of edible food are thrown away, at a time when entire peoples are left facing hunger helplessly.

More painfully, wealth is accumulating at an unprecedented rate, where the richest 1% of the world's population owns more than 45% of global wealth, while the gap widens enormously between those who own everything and those who do not even have the minimum conditions for a decent life.

At the same time, trillions of dollars are spent globally on luxury and excessive consumption: luxury goods, upscale travel, watches and jewelry, and lavish lifestyles, while millions of people suffer from hunger and fragility, as if humans are outside economic calculations.

Even within rich and advanced countries, a harsh paradox appears: hundreds of thousands, even millions of people, live outdoors or in fragile housing, in cities that amaze the world with skyscrapers, technology, and luxury, while homeless camps extend in the streets behind the shiny facades of prosperity.

Cases of death related to hunger, malnutrition, or poverty are also recorded even in advanced countries, in a scene that reveals that the crisis is not in the lack of resources, but in the imbalance of their distribution and management.

More dangerously, this poverty is no longer confined to food, but has become multidimensional poverty: poverty in education, health, housing, opportunities, and even poverty of dignity, in a world where disparities are expanding at an unprecedented rate.

Phenomena such as illegal migration, homelessness, violence, drugs, and even some forms of extremism cannot be understood apart from the blocked horizons facing large segments of youth who have lost confidence in the future.

Thus, inhuman liberalism manifests in its harshest contradictions: a world that intensely creates wealth… but leaves a large part of humanity outside dignity.

This is not a scarcity crisis, but a crisis of an economic system that reproduces inequality: it accumulates wealth at the top, produces poverty at the bottom, and turns suffering into a “normal” scene in a world that claims progress.

Today, the economy needs a real revolution, where the human being is the center. A revolution that restores balance between wealth creation and its fair distribution, between economic growth and human dignity, and between market freedom and the state's responsibility to protect vulnerable groups.

In this context, the experiences of countries that have advanced economically and succeeded in creating wealth and increasing the number of the wealthy can be utilized, but at the same time managed to reduce poverty through strong public policies based on education, health, housing, social protection, and linking economic growth with social justice instead of leaving it hostage to the logic of the market alone, where the greedy cause inflation and monopoly.

The most dangerous challenge facing countries is not poverty alone, but living with it as if it were normal within a rich world. Therefore, the real challenge remains to restore the human being as the primary and ultimate goal within any economic model, before any number, indicator, or profit.