Presumably there are people who are being exploited in the world. But to claim in general poverty is a result of exploitation seems very questionable.
Start with basics. People live in the woods, with nothing. Some start building a hut from sticks, others don't. The ones living in huts suddenly are richer than the ones who don't, even though they haven't taken anything away from the ones who don't have huts.
And of the ones who don't have huts demand some of the huts from the people who built them, who is doing the exploiting?
People in huts eventually band together into villages, villages start to trade goods with one another. Eventually the largest village is able to coerce (either using the threat of force via superior military or through infiltration, bribery subversion etc) the smaller villages into giving it the best deals.
The largest village gets very rich while extracting all the resources and goods from the smaller villages around it. The largest village is able to ram through treaties, trade pacts etc that favor it's interests, it is able to interfere in politics of surrounding villages and sometimes provides backing to despots or outright overthrow leadership of smaller villages that might be doing something the largest village does not agree with.
What you say is true, but when people usually talk about inequality, they're talking about inequality in a specific country. In your example that would be inequality inside a single village rather than between the villages.
Also, with similarly bad faith you could say that when the first group was building their huts, the second group was sharpening their sticks. Once the huts were completed they used their sharpened sticks to coerce the richer people (those with huts) to give them huts too.
We'll, I guess all notions can seem silly from some perspective. Children climbing up chimneys or adults wearing diapers to meet chicken plucking quotas can seen silly from a certain perspective, but usually not a first person one.
Start with basics. People live in the woods, with nothing. Some start building a hut from sticks, others don't. The ones living in huts suddenly are richer than the ones who don't, even though they haven't taken anything away from the ones who don't have huts.
And of the ones who don't have huts demand some of the huts from the people who built them, who is doing the exploiting?