UN Chronicle | Eradicating Extreme Poverty and Hunger: How We Define Poverty

Eradicating Extreme Poverty and Hunger
How We Define Poverty
By Ramon Osiris Blanco

Article

To talk about poverty and define it empirically seem like an easy task from the privileged point of view of the cultured and educated, or by means of moderate or highly acquired capacity that makes it possible to distinguish the parameters that identify it.

By 2003, there will be over two billion poor people in the world fighting for survival. My colleagues and Dominican acquaintances, through their own experiences, agree on the definition of poverty as the total absence of opportunities, accompanied by high levels of undernourishment, hunger, illiteracy, lack of education, physical and mental ailments, emotional and social instability, unhappiness, sorrow and hopelessness for the future. Poverty is also characterized by a chronic shortage of economic, social and political participation, relegating individuals to exclusion as social beings, preventing access to the benefits of economic and social development and thereby limiting their cultural development.

The United Nations has established that poverty and excluded people exist in all regions of the world; therefore, there is a diversity of reasons why people cannot satisfy their basic needs. It also concluded that two conditions—social and individual—limit the possibility of access to resources, knowledge and benefits, to fulfil human needs.

The social condition is tied intrinsically to the political and economic realm, as it is the administrators of power who regulate the distribution of resources and services, establishing parameters that generate inequalities that are sometimes manifested in land distribution, infrastructure, capital, markets, credit, education and information, or consulting services or other fields that might establish differences in human development.

In the individual condition, inequality translates to limitations in access to services such as education, health, recreation, potable water and public hygiene. Rural areas where 77 per cent of poor people in developing countries live are the most adversely affected. The United Nations has established that the region of Latin America and the Caribbean is the most urbanized of the developing world, a result of the great migration that occurred in the last twenty years. Three fourths of the population live in cities, where 40 per cent of the total population is poor, with limited access to potable water, polluted air, bad sanitation and serious health problems.

When analyzing the roots of conflicts, we found that economic limitation was always present in most cases of armed conflicts and civil wars since wealth is unevenly distributed in these areas. In such places, it is common to find totalitarian systems, which protect the economic privileges of the ruling minority to the detriment of the majority, through political repression, militarization, discrimination and human rights violations. In another aspect, when a macroeconomic crisis occurs, the poor are the most affected. As a result, comparative studies drawn between countries show that inflation is one of the biggest concerns in the world.

Because of this, modern economists try to determine how the levels of well-being are related to economic indicators: gross national product, employment and salaries. However, when economic bonanzas are accompanied by an increase in poverty, as often happens in developing countries, it has been because the economic growth has been based on an uneven distribution of opportunities and employment between the cities and rural areas, as well as between their respective inhabitants. The uneven distribution of employment is clearly evident when the poor have no access to good jobs with good wages and working conditions, stability, safety, security and other benefits. On the contrary, they are drawn to jobs with low wages and no opportunity for promotion, poor working conditions and often arbitrary discipline.

Poverty reduction in Latin America is miniscule if we compare it with population growth. Even when diminishing rates of poverty reached 36.7 per cent and extreme poverty 15.1 per cent, it is no less true that we are speaking of 179 million poor people and 78 million who are deprived, which exceeds the figures in 1986 by 40 million unprivileged people and 20 million extremely deprived. Finally, we believe it is important to emphasize that the declaration on "the right to nutrition" (approved by consensus by the Commission on Human Rights and ratified during the 2002 substantive meeting of the UN Economic and Social Council) asserts that hunger constitutes a violation of human dignity and requires urgent measures at the national, regional and international levels to eliminate it, including mobilizing and utilizing financial and technical resources, including relief of external debt for developing countries, to strengthen national activities by implementing policies for safe and sustainable development. A joint world effort is necessary for fairer distribution of wealth, to achieve human progress and happiness.

Biography

Ramon O. Blanco is an Ambassador at the Permanent Mission of the Dominican Republic to the United Nations. An Agricultural Engineer, specializing in the field of extension and rural development, he researches and writes about progressive public policy issues. His views are his own and do not reflect the position of the Government of the Dominican Republic.

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