PHA-Exchange> Food for a genuine pro-poor thought

[Claudio]

Human Rights Reader 135

 

"BREAD AND HEALTH FOR ALL BEFORE CAKE AND CIRCUS FOR ANYONE" 

This is the moral absolute that should govern government policy above any cost consideration.  (W. Beveridge)

 

1. An unlikely alliance of rock stars, politicians, and grassroots activists has put the issue of combating poverty at the forefront of global policy making. 

 

2. Poverty is the result of many unmitigated risks. Its eradication in poor countries is squarely dependent on the way these countries are accommodated within the global power structure. 

 

3. The poor are thus poor for structural reasons, not for want of aid (i.e., 'patronage aid' that gives satellite dishes to the poor and does not get rice to the hungry (or fiber optic cables that do not deliver safe drinking water). That is why we say that development agencies should primarily focus on poverty reduction rather than on sophisticated technologies. 

 

4. The reduction of 200 million in the global total number of people living on less than U$1/day since 1980 is less than the reduction achieved in China alone over the same period.  And, in today's world, 1.4 billion workers earn less than U$2/day --just as many as 10 years earlier.  Of the 500 million extreme working poor (those that earn less than U$1/day), only 15 million succeeded in rising above that poverty line in 2004. (ILO, 2005). 

 

5. The global distribution of income is substantially more unequal than is the income distribution in the most unequal of countries in the world.  

 

6. We need to move beyond merely proclaiming grand principles such as saying we support the fight against poverty and are for human rights (HR).  

 

7. The problem of deteriorating social services cannot be solved by simply asking the poor to shoulder the costs of these services (health care included); doing so, will only make them poorer. 

 

8. The pro-poor-economic-growth-paradigm now being promoted by rock stars and politicians in the North is a dead-end proposition (New Economics Foundation). There is a pro-rich bias in pro-poor economic growth. To avoid ambiguity, instead of 'pro-poor growth', we have to use an unequivocal term such as 'income poverty reduction'. In other words, the poor should have a greater than average share in the additional income generated by growth in absolute terms. 

 

9. As part of the human rights-based approach to development, we simply have to aim more specifically at increasing the income of poor households and treat growth or the lack of it as a by-product, i.e., pro-poor distributional effects should be integrated into the design of economic policies as a whole.  

 

10. What has really hampered progress in combating poverty as a key HR violation is the fact that we are chained to the mind-set of orthodox economics --and orthodox economics has not, will not and cannot work for this. 

 

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn 

 

Mostly adapted from D+C, Vol.32, No. 10, October 2005,  D+C, Vol.32, No.12, December 2005,  D+C, Vol.33, No.1, January 2006,  D+C, Vol.33, No.2, February 2006,  F+D, Vol.42, No.3 , September 2005, and D. Woodward and A. Simms, Growth Isn't Working, New Economics Foundation, London, January 2006.  
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