The last statistic I read put it at 20 million deaths per year of poverty. This included lack of food, clean water, vaccines, and a few other resources. As a species we produce much more food than we need to survive, and yet throw massive amounts of it away. We do the same with many other resources that could have gone towards devices to clean water and create vaccines. Many areas of medical research are lacking funding, we could easily be putting more resources there to save even more lives.
The people dying because of poverty are typically from countries termed "underdeveloped" or "third world". The people within these countries do not have access to many resources, not just the essentials for modern life. One of these resources is access to the means of production. This happens in a few different ways. On an individual level location plays a part., you can't produce much when there are no tools near where you live. Police and other government officials play another, even if there are means of production in your area you need their permission first. Since the police often go along with what the capitalist themselves decide, their role is to be an extension of the power of the capitalist over the means of production.
The most common route taken to help alleviate poverty in locations with little means of production is to simply loan or give the resources to build them. More specifically, they give the resources to specific people so that they can then become the ruling class within the local area. Since capitalists cannot exist without control of others they then allow specific others to use the newly built means of production to create resources that area can sell and eventually build up it's means of production with through capital accumulation.
There is one main flaw in this system, we already have too much capital accumulation. There are so many means of production that we don't use anything close to all the resources, and are destroying the environment in producing them, that is one of the largest problems in a for-profit instead of for-need economy. Climate change is destroying our crops, we are running out of rare earth metals in many locations, we are destroying massive amounts of rain forest, and so much more is happening, and so we just create more resources we don't need? Helping ease poverty is one of the most important goals of humanity, but it shouldn't be done at the expense of humanities future. It would take a great effort to shift the people or means of production over such a great distance, but we would be doing the same with resources either way. The solution is not more capitalism, that is the problem.
What do you all think should be done?