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September 15, 2002
How poor are the poor
John Isbister talks about the extent of poverty in the third world and what it means
The third world today covers most of the globe. It embraces countless cultures, religions, traditions, and ways of life. Its achievements are monumental. Yet there is a single characteristic that pervades the third world, distinguishing it from the industrialized countries: widespread poverty. Not everyone in the third world is poor; there are middle-class strata as well as pockets of luxury. There are productive factories and sparkling computer centres. But the favela dwellers, the peasants, the underemployed, and many of the industrial workers of the third world subsist at standards of living that are low to the point of incomprehension for people living in the industrialized world.
Poverty has many dimensions. It can be thought of as an absolute condition or as a relative one. Absolute poverty is a standard of living so pressing that it brings with it life- threatening malnutrition and disease. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimates the number of people in absolute poverty in the world in several different ways.
The most obvious criterion is simply lack of income. Using a poverty line of a dollar a day, the UNDP calculates that about 1.2 billion people, or one-third of the population in the developing world, are poor.
Lack of income is only the beginning of an understanding of poverty, however. Other attributes include low life expectancy, adult illiteracy, underweight children, inadequate housing, child labour, food insecurity, and lack of access to safe water, to health services, and to sanitation. The condition of being poor is complicated, and the dividing line between the poor and the near-poor is inexact. Clearly, however, the prevalence of poverty in the world is massive....
More than 70 per cent of the world’s poor are Asians. Most of the poor — over three-quarters — live in rural areas, according to UNDP estimates. In spite of the fact that they grow crops, they endure monotonous, unbalanced diets, inadequate caloric intake, and malnutrition. They have lower health standards than urban people and have less access to clean water and sanitation facilities. They suffer the diseases of the undernourished. At each age their probability of dying is higher than that among the rest of the population.
Poverty is not restricted to this most desperate stratum of human beings, however. A great deal of the world’s poverty should be thought of in relative terms — that is, poverty is a relationship. One thinks of oneself as poor only if others are rich, and one’s poverty is measured against that richness. The surviving pygmies of the Congo’s rain forest live at a subsistence level and suffer from diseases that have been eliminated elsewhere, but they do not think of themselves as poor. They live in a self contained society, hunting and gathering as their ancestors did for centuries, in harmony with the forest and its spirits....
Poverty in this relative sense is found in every country in the world. In the United States, millions of people live in a poverty that is frightening, scandalous, and unfamiliar to almost all who surround them. Most receive income that is much greater than that of the typical person in Asia or Africa, but this does not mean that their poverty is any less real. The homeless living on the sidewalks in central cities or in temporary shelters, single parents in slum housing, the unemployed who have exhausted their resources, former farmers who ran into debt before losing their patrimonies to foreclosure — these are some of the faces of poverty in one of the world’s richest countries.
What poverty really means is the inability to make choices. A family of four in the United States with $12,000 annual income is completely constrained in its choices and deeply impoverished, but in the world’s low-income countries, a family of four with $12,000 would be privileged.
The third world and poverty are both terms of relationship. The third world is the world dominated, the world excluded from power. The poor are the people on the bottom, the people denied the benefits of the society in which they live.
This is the overwhelming truth about the world we inhabit: the gap between the richness of the developed countries and the poverty of the third world is so huge that it is almost beyond our understanding. How can one imagine living for a whole year on the money one now spends in just one month? It would not be a matter of “belt tightening”; it would be a totally different and devastating life....
One feature shared by all the world’s poor is insecurity. When times are good — when the rains fall, when the market price is high — the family can be fed and a few improvements made to the dwelling. Bad luck may strike at any time, though, and wipe out the chance for survival itself. The consciousness of imminent disaster, a fear of what the future will bring, has been found by social scientists to be pervasive among the world’s poor, and for good reason.
The poverty of the third world is not “traditional”; it is not an ancient way of life. The traditional cultures of the third world are rich and varied, and they are closer to the surface of everyday life than traditions usually are in the industrialized world, where they have been suppressed. The old folkways of the third world have little to do with poverty. The great religions of the third world — Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam — are not apologies for poverty; they are integral worldviews that bind the generations together.
The philosophies and customs that developed over the millennia led to a sense of belonging, not exclusion. Scattered throughout the world are some significant groups of people living in completely traditional ways, much as their ancestors did — for example, in the rain forests of Africa, New Guinea, and some parts of the Philippines. In learning about them we can discern something about the common heritage of the human race.
The way that these traditional people live is not, however, typical of the widespread poverty that mars the face of the globe. The endless urban slums are not traditional; they are recent. The population explosion that magnifies the number of poor and threatens the survival of the globe is a phenomenon of the last century, not of time immemorial. The poor labourers in the tobacco, cocoa, banana, cotton, rubber, and sugar fields are not obeying traditional cultural imperatives; they are producing export crops for sale in the prosperous markets of the United States and Europe.
Traditional cultures generally had low standards of living in comparison with life today in the rich countries. Life in traditional societies may even have been, in the words of philosopher Thomas Hobbes, “nasty, brutish and short”. People living in traditional societies were not, however, poor in comparison with the people around them with whom they had contact. In contrast, today’s poor in the third world are centrally connected to a changing world — their cities, their farms, their mines, their slums all grow and change rapidly, all responding to the dynamic demands of a growing world economy.
The process that transformed the world, that gave us jet airplanes, computer technology, and California suburbs, transformed the third world also, creating the new phenomenon of massive urban and rural poverty.
Poverty is never shared equally, even in the poorest countries. Every society has some rich, some middle income, and some poor, and the relative size of the income gap between the rich and the poor varies greatly among countries. One should not think that because India, for example, had an average income of $450 in 1999 that all Indians received that income. The majority of Indians had less than $450 a year, and a substantial number of Indians had very much less. Correspondingly, middle class and wealthy Indians commanded a great deal more of the country’s economic resources.
The distribution of income among different groups has been surveyed in a number of the world’s poor countries, although it must be conceded that the data are suspect....Nevertheless, the latest available data appear to confirm what has sometimes been called the Kuznets curve: as countries’ average incomes rise from the very poorest levels, income distribution first becomes more unequal, then more equal. Put differently, it appears that when economic growth takes place in poor countries, it does not usually improve the status of the poorest; rather, it raises the rewards of upper-income groups and leaves the poor further behind. Only after a certain level of economic development has occurred can the poor share in its fruits.
Even this generalization, modest though it is, is marked by exceptions. The UNDP ranks countries according to a human development index based on health conditions, literacy, and access to goods and services. It has found that a high ranking on this index is not necessarily associated with high average incomes. Some countries with strong performance in human development are Costa Rica, Korea, Tanzania, Cuba, and Argentina. Other countries, however, including some with quite strong economies, have done much less for their people, among them are Angola, Guatemala, and Pakistan.
Poverty is not shared equally by the sexes. Women have access to less health care than men. They receive less schooling; consequently, their illiteracy rates are higher. They perform work that is more tedious and of lower status than men’s work, and they receive less compensation. They usually work longer hours because, in addition to their work outside the home, they are almost always solely responsible for all the work inside the home...
The poor are undernourished and malnourished — with less caloric intake and less protein and vitamin intake than they need. As a consequence, many of their children do not achieve full physical and mental development. In a survey for the period 1992-98, the World Bank found that between one-quarter and one- half of children under the age of five in the poorest countries of the third world were malnourished. The proportion for China was 16 per cent, but the proportion for Bangladesh was 56 per cent.
The poor are susceptible to disease and premature mortality at much higher rates than are the people of richer countries. Death rates have risen in recent years in much of Africa because of the AIDS epidemic. Most of the rest of the third world, however, has seen dramatic improvements in health and longevity over the last fifty years, as the benefits of public health and sanitation measures have been extended throughout the world. Yet large differences still exist between developed and developing countries.
Surveys in Latin America and Africa have shown that fully 90 per cent of the people studied were infested with some form of parasite. In Peru, for example, 113 out of 122 men sampled in the armed forces had parasitic infections. Ninety per cent of people in an area of East Africa were found to have beef tapeworms. The prevalence of tropical diseases such as hookworm, bilharzia, filariasis, and schistosomiasis is almost universal in some areas. These diseases are typically associated with pain and loss of strength, and sometimes with early mortality.
These are the bare facts about living standards in the third world — low average incomes, substantial numbers of people living in the direst and most life-threatening poverty, and an incredible gap between the poor countries and the economically developed countries. It would not be correct to call this situation a crisis, because it persists from year to year. It is a tragedy.
Excerpted with permission from
Promises not kept: the betrayal of social change in the third world
By John Isbister
Kumarian Press, 1294 Blue Hills Avenue, Bloomfield CT 06002, USA. Tel: 800-289-2664. Fax: +1-860-243-2867. Email: kpbooks@aol.com
Website: www.kpbooks.com
ISBN 1-56549-119-X
265pp. US$23.95
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