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The Prospects for Poverty
Helen Alford
“Make Poverty History” has been a massive campaign
this year in the UK, aimed at influencing the G8 meeting in Scotland.
This is also the year of the first major stocktaking of progress towards
the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) since the year 2000. Poverty,
especially in Africa, has thus been higher on the agenda of major policy
makers this year than usual. Similarly, it could probably be argued
quite effectively that the fundamental motive behind the development of
Catholic social thought has been to confront the question of poverty.
So, with so much interest in poverty, both at the level of moral
thinking and of current affairs, what are its prospects?
We need to begin at the beginning by asking: “what is poverty?” Defining
it is not only difficult but also highly political (as one US
congressman’s complaint demonstrates, when he attacked a researcher who
had been tasked with a study of poverty when she began by discussing its
definition: “you weren’t supposed to be defining poverty, just measuring
it!”). Usually the term poverty refers to a lack of means at the
disposal of individuals or groups for meeting their basic needs. The
problem with this definition concerns what counts as a basic need, and
whether the lack is defined in absolute or relative terms. Sen has made
a contribution here with his concept of “capabilities”, giving us a
different way of thinking about poverty. In synthesis, Sen argues that
it is not so much a certain level of income or money or access to
commodities that is important, rather what is important are the
capabilities that one needs in order to participate in the economic
process of society. The kinds of capabilities themselves may change, as
may the way they are developed, but there is always a need for a minimum
set of capabilities in order for people to participate in economic life.
With this said, however, poverty usually continues to be measured in
terms of the ability to acquire a certain “basket” of goods or as a
proportion of average income. International agencies dealing with whole
countries that are poor also use other related definitions, such as
living on less than 1 or less than 2 dollars per day. We should not
forget, however, the great amount of work that has been done on trying
to understand and define poverty, a multifaceted issue which really
needs an interdisciplinary approach. Bronislaw Geremek in his study
“Poverty: A History”, points out that “poverty appears as a distinct way
of life made up of the interaction of disparate factors – social,
cultural, economic, political, psychological, physiological and
ecological” and that of these factors “its degrading effect [is] the
most significant”.
[1]
Sadly, using these definitions and the data drawn together for
stocktaking on the MDGs, the prospects for poverty don’t look bad at
all. The first of the MDGs, “Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger” has
two targets associated with it: halve, between 1990 and 2015, the
proportion of people living in extreme poverty, and, halve, between 1990
and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger. Thanks to
rapid economic growth in China and East Asia, major strides forward are
being made with regard to reducing poverty (even if we can be concerned
about some of the side effects of this growth and about labour
conditions), but in sub-Saharan Africa, both the proportion of people in
extreme poverty (from 41% in 1981 to 46% in 2001) and the absolute
number of people in this condition have increased (by more than 140
million). Similarly, the amount that people in extreme poverty have been
earning has changed little; in sub-Saharan Africa, it has decreased
slightly. With regard to the second target, things are no better. Thanks
again mostly to growth in Eastern and South-Eastern Asia, the proportion
of the world’s population that is malnourished fell from 20% in
1990-1992 to 17% in 2000-2002 (or by about 815 million people), but in
sub-Saharan Africa, although the proportion of undernourished people
fell, the absolute numbers increased. Overall, at the end of the decade
1990-1992 / 2000-2002, there were only 9 million fewer undernourished
people than at the beginning. More worrying still is the fact that the
number fell by 27 million in the first part of the decade, but rose by
18 million in the second part. Thus although there is a slight overall
improvement over the ten years, the trend is negative. At this rate,
these targets will be unachievable by 2015. On the positive side,
however, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN estimates
that it would take a public investment of only $24 billion, with some
additional private investment, in order to confront this problem Such an
investment, estimates the FAO, would set off improvements that would
boost GDP by $120 billion per year, thanks to healthier people producing
more and producing for longer as their life expectancy improves. An
investment of $24 billion at the international level is not a great deal
and should be possible to achieve. Furthermore, there are some good
examples of some 30 countries in various developing regions around the
world that show that with a combination of better than average
agricultural growth and a “twin-track” strategy of improving social
safety nets while attacking the root causes of hunger, significant
improvements in nutrition are possible. The only thing that is really
lacking is the will to bring this about. It is not surprising to learn,
if we did not know it already, that St Thomas identifies the virtue of
the will to be that of justice. What we are dealing with here is a lack
of social justice.
Within modern Catholic social thought, the fundamental concern regarding
poverty has been with human development and participation in the common
good. John Paul II in chapter 4 of Centesimus annus notes that in
the past, the land we worked on constituted the “primary factor of
wealth” whereas now that factor is more to be located in collaborative
human work itself (the fact that it is collaborative connects human
development with participation in the common good).[2]
The way to help the poor, therefore, is to allow them access to the
processes of human development made possible by collaborative work.
Access to these channels is possible in the context of the collaborative
human work situation that we find in modern organisations like
businesses, so John Paul emphasises in particular the importance of “initiative
and entrepreneurial skill” through which these organisations are
created.[3]
One of the most
important statements of current thinking on human development is in the
encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (SRS).
Here human development is referring both to populations as a whole (as
when we talk about “underdeveloped” countries) and to the personal
level. The key points in the chapter on “authentic human development”
are two: the necessity of economic goods for human development (and
therefore their great importance), and, at the same time, the need to
have the right relation with these goods, otherwise development “turns
against those whom it is meant to serve”.[4]
Accumulation of goods does not equal development or directly lead to
human happiness, though it is usually an important part of achieving
both. The relation we have with these goods is equally important.
“Having” a lot of things can either help us develop or can frustrate our
development, depending on that relationship. John Paul can thus talk
about two kinds of problem here: the first, which is obvious, concerns
the miseries of underdevelopment, and the second:
... a form of superdevelopment, equally
inadmissible, because like the former it is contrary to human happiness.
This superdevelopment, which consists in an excessive availability of
every kind of material good ... for the benefit certain social groups,
easily makes people slaves of “possession” and of immediate
gratification...
All of us experience firsthand the sad effects of this ... a radical
dissatisfaction, because one quickly learns ... that the more one
possesses, the more one wants, while deeper aspirations remain
unsatisfied and perhaps even stifled.[5]
Human development on this account, therefore,
involves ordering economic activity and material goods to the spiritual
and transcendental vocation of the human person, so that the former
really can contribute to integral development of the human person. If we
can confront poverty in a way that promotes true human development, then
we can genuinely hope that its prospects may not be so good as they
might seem.
[1]
Bronislaw Geremek, Poverty: A History, trans.
Agnieszka Kolakowska,
Oxford, Blackwell, 1994, pp. 3-4.
[2]
Centesismus Annus, n. 31, The translation is taken from that
of the Catholic Truth Society, London, 1991.
[4]
Sollicitudo Rei Socialis,
n. 28. The
translation is taken from that of the Catholic Truth Society,
London, 1988.
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