PHA-Exch> Food to eradicate a thought of mass destruction

[Claudio Schuftan]

Human Rights Reader 181

* *

*IN THE DEVELOPMENT DEBATE, THE PERCEPTION OF POOR PEOPLE AS PEOPLE IN NEED
RATHER THAN AS PEOPLE WITH LEGITIMATE RIGHTS PUTS THEM TOTALLY OUT OF STEP
WITH THE RIGHTS-BASED FRAMEWORK.*



Together with Dennis Kucinich,

the US presidential candidate,

we see poverty as a weapon of mass destruction.



1. Is poverty reduction per-se an independent, stand-alone goal in the human
rights-based framework? The answer to this question is a resounding no!
Consider, for instance, that poverty is going down in much of Asia, but
inequality is on the rise...



2. Poverty reduction actions must thus also importantly invest* in
'organizational capital' so that the latter can be used as a spring board to
forcefully demand the respect of all human rights (HR). Poverty reduction
and the promotion of HR are not the same, but *two mutually reinforcing
principles­.­*

*: Essential in this investment is to train and deploy voluntary extension
cadres who can and do address the wide range of social and political
constraints that poor people struggle with --including HR violations and
general legal matters.



3. Ultimately, at the global level, poverty reduction will depend on the
replicability of many small successful structural and institutional changes
made in many small places. Small is OK.

[But you have surely noticed that donors (and some NGOs) get stuck in the
pilot phase of too many a 'successful' (though selective) development
project; these, more often than not, do not set up scalable changes of the
type needed and do not really give the poor access to the tools and
opportunities they need to work their own way out of poverty and out of the
human rights violations they are subjected to structurally; the structural
causes of poverty can simply no longer be considered as
givens-about-which-we-can-do-little when scaling-up or replicating
successful local interventions].



4. One of the biggest challenges we face in HR work is that policy makers
are generally unfamiliar with (or flatly write-off) the approach to poverty
reduction that, at the same time, is geared at alleviating HR violations;
sector-specific-thinking predominates and
integrated-socio-political-approaches are regarded with distrust.



5. The policy makers position towards HR is influenced by their political,
social and economic interests --which leads them to misuse their political
power in a way that they use public-resources-under-their-control to pursue
their own priorities. Once chosen, the latter development priorities often
become part of the established pattern of violations of HR.


[No wonder people are rightly beginning to perceive sector-specific
policies, as well as laws and the judiciary in general, in good part, as
instruments of power politics].



6. Policy makers are surely faced with many options with respect to choosing
development strategies; many of them move these policies closer to their
personal-and-class-objectives so that the actions that go with them have a
better chance of being selected.

Consider, for instance:

·        On average, the poor receive a less-than-proportionate share of
social spending benefits, e.g., outlays are higher on higher education and
on hospitals than on primary education and primary health care.

·        More often than not, social spending in poor countries benefits
those at the middle of the income ladder more than those at the bottom. As a
result, social spending has had a limited effect in reducing poverty and in
shrinking the large gap between rich and poor.

·        Poorer regions and rural areas keep falling further behind and
ethnic minorities are not participating in economic growth.

     [Actually, more than ¾ of the global inequality in living standards is
due

     to causes within countries!].



7. So, since the HR-based approach requires cross-subsidies (or
redistributions) of various types, mostly from richer groups to poorer
groups, the political dynamics and the broader social and political
influences that affect these policy makers are determining in the choice of
strategies they make --and this, without active claim-holder demands, is
holding back the chances of any real progress being made in the HR front.



8. If anything is to change, it is thus a must for claim holders to change
this political dynamics by exerting social and political pressure on policy
makers for the strategies to be selected to unequivocally move towards
addressing poverty *and* the HR violations that go with it.



9. Ergo, restructuring social spending --most of which, as we said, bypasses
the poor-- will be a key political challenge. This is really one of the big
challenges for HR activists who should avoid the problem of the drunk who
lost his keys and searched only around the lamppost, because that's where
the light is.

[If we continue to-round-up-the-usual-suspects we indeed won't make much
progress. We need to look outside our comfort zones].



10. Even if a good part of the HR problems are at the local level, HR
activists must also help prepare the communities they work-with to push
governments to come-up with solutions to the problems of national wealth
distribution and decentralized social services delivery by:

·        strengthening social cohesion so that societies stay strong and
mobilized as their economies grow, and

·        keeping the government on its toes so that it reinvests the
economic-returns-that-accompany-growth-and-debt-reduction in alleviating
poverty and in respecting, protecting and fulfilling HR.

All these are every bit as much the obligation of HR activists as is their
role as trainers and consciousness raisers.



Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

cschuftan at phmovement.org

[All Readers can be found in www.humaninfo.org/aviva under No.69]

Mostly adapted from D+C, 33:12, December 2006, D+C, 34:4, April, 2007, D+C,
34:6, June 2007, F+D, 44:1, March 2007, and F+D, 44:2, June 2007.
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