PHA-Exchange> Food for a ½ healthy and ½ sick thought

[claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn]

Human Rights Reader 78

WE HAVE DECLARED WAR ON POVERTY AND POVERTY HAS WON. (President Lyndon 
Johnson, 1964)

Have  you ever noticed that when we have a problem with something, we declare 
war on it? The war on illiteracy, the war on AIDS, the war on drugs, the war 
on human rights violations (?). We don’t actually do anything about it, 
but 
we’ve declared war on it.  (George Carlin, comedian)

1. It has been said that the world cannot remain ½ healthy and ½ sick and 
still maintain its economic, moral and spiritual equilibrium. (World Health 
Assembly President , T. Scheel, 1951) 
This can be extrapolated to a world ½ respecting and ½ violating human rights 
(HR). Such a situation has high political cost so it behooves us to 
aggressively advocate to regain the above equilibrium.

2. Staying in the realm of the ½s, we also live under ½ democracy and ½ 
oligarchy --and, in HR work, it is our job to keep it from becoming all 
oligarchy lest we become pawns in the rich nation’s/corporations’/ 
individuals’ chess game. 

3. HR work will win the endorsement of the ruling class only after long 
struggles. Democracy does not work without citizen activism. Trickle down 
politics does not work much better than trickle down economics.  HR happen 
because we do not leave things to other people. What’s good and right does not 
come naturally; we have to stand up and fight for it --as if the cause 
depended on us, because it does!  So go for it; never mind the odds. (Bill 
Moyers) 

4. Politicians and decision-makers do need intellectuals (HR activists?) to 
give them ideas and to reinforce (or actively oppose) their agendas. No 
political leadership can function without adequate intellectual support 
(and/or opposition) --no matter how spurious. And our ideas about the role of 
HR do have power --as long as we do not freeze them as dogma. So, no 
government must be automatically categorized as impossible to win over. HR-
based alliances can and must be forged in our daily work. Only if this does 
not work, should HR work embark in de-legitimizing raw power.

5. Neo-liberalism fans the illusion that anyone, anywhere can become a fully 
fledged capitalist. Actually, in the free-market-economy, citizens become 
customers
 and in reality, for essential services (and thus for the 
fulfillment of most rights) prices function as the gatekeeper of access. So, 
what is the meaning of competition if/when those whose rights are being 
violated cannot win at all
?  But the system trumpets its successes and only 
whispers its failures, so we get to hear little about the latter. The bottom 
line is that, under Globalization, there is no fair treatment or competition-
on-an-equal-footing both nationally and internationally.
[Come to think of it: Is there such a thing as Globalization with equity
?].

6. Keep in mind that, over the past decade, 54 countries out of 194 have 
become poorer (
and that inflation is one of the cruelest and most regressive 
of all taxes). (See the IMF’s F+D reference below, p. 32). This is why this 
Reader keeps trumpeting that without poverty reduction strategies, millions of 
dollars spent on ‘development’ will do little lasting good.

7. Poverty reduction IS the main goal to achieve; not as an afterthought; not 
as a matter of secondary importance, but as a litmus test of the 
sustainability of our political choices. It is this test we have to pass. 
(Hilde Johnson, Minister of International Development, Norway) 

8. For poverty reduction to happen, we know, growth is necessary, but not 
sufficient. In many countries though, persistent poverty is the result of 
persistent inequalities that prevent the poor from participating in the 
necessary growth to begin with. Pro-poor growth policies, therefore, have 
nothing to do with economic trickle-down hopes. They are policies biased in 
favor of the poor --policies that enable them to benefit proportionately more 
than the rich. So, it is these policies that need to be the basis of pro-poor 
growth --and they entail the removal of existing institutional and politically-
induced biases against the poor. In short, growth is pro-poor when: a) it is 
labor absorbing, b) policies specifically mitigate inequalities, and c) 
policies specifically facilitate income and employment generation for the 
poor, especially for women and marginalized or minority groups. 

9. So, to pass the litmus test above, a massive mobilization is needed
at-an-
unprecedented-speed. The political choice to embark in this mobilization, both 
in the North and in the South, is the ‘joker in the pack of cards’ though. 
There are still manifold opportunities for powerful actors to evade their 
international obligation towards HR principles! With the lose way in which 
things are still set up, even otherwise powerful multilateral agencies remain 
toothless without the possibility of imposing sanctions on violators.

10. Having understood this, let’s be sure we do not miss an important point: 
For us, as HR activists --and from a HR perspective-- EVEN ACHIEVING THE 
POVERTY-REDUCTION MDG BY 2015 IS ONLY A HOLLOW VICTORY: hundreds of millions 
will still live in poverty, die preventable deaths, and suffer preventable 
suffering.

11. Even with the prospects of only a hollow victory, it seems to me many 
world leaders have fallen in an ‘irrelevance trap’ best characterized by a 
caricature in which I see the theater director coming out on stage and 
shouting: “Fire!”, but the audience not budging, because they believe it is 
part of the play: That is how I see politicians reacting to warnings that the 
MDGs will be missed.

12. Currently, governments are more concerned with inviting-in international 
consultants and with receiving international economic cooperation than about 
meeting the HR of their own people using locally feasible measures and 
resources. The resulting technical assistance sought by development projects 
has ultimately meant diverting attention from the real issues, the HR issues 
included.

13. Therefore, any convincing HR agenda must explicitly address the issues of 
poverty, gender and equity. It cannot be assumed that HR are inherently gender 
sensitive and will promote gender equality lest the HR framework explicitly 
focuses on gender issues from a rights perspective. But most governments are 
not politically committed to engage in gender equality beyond the benchmarks 
demanded by donors! For instance, most of the PRSPs submitted so far do not 
meet women rights’ standards; they contain nothing more than a collection of 
stereotyped measures of old-style-promotion-of-women-in-the-health-and-
education-sectors. 

14. Additionally, it is deemed that the HR agenda must examine its 
contradictions with ongoing structural adjustment programs (SAPs). 
At the national level, this means that the agenda is to transcend SAPs to 
replace them with a HR-based program that is to directly impact on government 
budgets, their spending priorities and on the funding allocated to pro-poor 
programs. 
Moreover, at the international level, since in practice poor counties are 
(almost by definition) indebted, balancing their debt servicing capacity has 
to be done against their de-facto actual allocating needed funds to finance 
these pro-poor programs and NOT against their export earnings as has been the 
case so far.

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn 
______________
Mostly taken from F+D, the IMF magazine, 40:4, Dec. 2003; D+C, the German 
development magazine 31:2 and 31:3, Feb. and March 2004; and the South Letter, 
the South Centre’s magazine, issue 39, 2003.



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