Some countries are rich and some are poor. There are many different factors that can affect a country’s wealth. Natural factors, multinationals, debt and colonialism are some of the main reasons to why countries are rich or poor. Natural factors can affect a country’s wealth by a lot. They are factors that have to do with nature like soil quality and the climate. They can affect a country because if all the farmers have bad soil they cannot farm good food. If they cannot farm good food they cannot sell it. If they cannot sell it they will starve and the people who buy food from the farmers would starve.

This means that the population is always starving and cannot do anything about it. They are stuck in an ever going poverty cycle that is extremely difficult to get out of. Most countries that are filled with deserts and have bad conditions for farming are usually poor countries. An example is Niger. It is 80% desert and the other land is prone to desertification and droughts. This is one reason to why Niger is such a poor country. On the other hand New Zealand has very good conditions for farming which is a reason to why it is rich. Multinationals are one of the reasons to why poor countries are poor and stay poor.

They are companies that move their factories to poorer countries. They do this because in those poor countries they can pay the workers very little because the minimum wage is very low. When they do this their profit is increased by a lot. Here they have to pay us at least $13. 50 but in a poor country like Indonesia they can pay them 10 or 20 cents. By doing this the rich become richer and the poor become poorer. Multinationals also strip the country of their resources to make their products. In doing so they ruin the environment of the country and prevent future jobs i. . if all the cotton is gone from the country no cotton products can be made. Multinationals also pollute poor countries as usually poor countries don’t have limits on pollution. Thailand has a lot of multinationals like Nike and Gap which continue to strip Thailand of everything. That is one reason to why Thailand is poor. Debt is a huge problem to poor countries. The poor countries borrow money from the rich countries to impprove their infrastructure. But since poor countries can be very unstable the loaners put a huge interest rate on the money borrowed.

The poor countries are crippled by the debt they owe and use the money that was meant for improving the infrastructure on repaying the debt. Therefore the country cannot move forward and become richer. For example Ethiopia one of the poorest countries in the world has 4. 289 billion dollars of debt and spends most of its earnings on trying to repay it. Colonialism is a major factor to why countries become poor. Colonialism is where a country becomes a colony of an empire. Empires like the British Empire treat these colonies like they are resource piles.

They strip the colony of all their resources and in some cases workforce (slaves). The colonies become poorer and poorer while the empire gets richer and richer. The head of the empires e. g England, Spain make the colonies produce raw materials. They then manufacture these materials into products and then they sell them. They benefit a lot from this cycle. They buy the materials for a very cheap price and when they manufacture it they gain employment, tax money and technology. All the things needed for development. The colony on the other hand make very little profit .

They get no industry, no employment and they lose resources. You can see that most countries that were colonies before are poor. For example Bangladesh. It was once a resourceful country with rich soils perfect for farming but since the British wanted them to make cotton they had to. After extensive cotton farming Bangladesh’s soils were stripped of all their nutrients and were therefore useless. Today Bangladesh remains a very poor country and colonialism is one the reasons why. All around the world poverty strikes us but at the same time extreme wealth can be seen.

There is such a big difference between the rich and the poor. Someone in the rich world could earn tens of thousands a year while in the poor world people could only earn that in their wildest dreams. We should try to promote free trade and give more to the charities that help the poor countries recover from poverty. Natural factors cannot be changed but all the other factors especially debt and multinationals can be changed if we all stop being greedy and give back to the poor countries what we took from them. By: Lucas . H