Lifting out of poverty

According to press reports, a new index reveals that world poverty is shrinking rapidly and that in twenty years' time the poor may no longer be with us:

"Some of the poorest people in the world are becoming significantly less poor, according to a groundbreaking academic study which has taken a new approach to measuring deprivation. The report, by Oxford University's poverty and human development initiative, predicts that countries among the most impoverished in the world could see acute poverty eradicated within 20 years if they continue at present rates."

Yet the definition and measurement of poverty are complex and contested matters, as a commentator indicates:

"OHPI and Martin Ravallion are both right and wrong in my opinion. A single measure of consumption, as used by the World Bank’s under $1.25/day indicators, does not give a true picture of poverty, and so efforts to assess other dimensions of poverty are important. But OHPI’s approach is far too limited (including for the reasons Ravallion describes). Participatory research demonstrates that poor people are extremely concerned about vulnerability to shocks, violence, discrimination, isolation and other negatives – none of which are revealed in the OPHI work. Poverty must also be seen as relative; having much less income that your peers is a factor too (as even Adam Smith recognized). Hence the MPI statistics are all-too-often counter-intuitive. It just isn’t credible that South Africa and the Palestinian Territories are virtually free of poverty; that Ethiopia has much worse poverty than Central African Republic, Burundi and Sierra Leone; that Nicaragua is poorer than Ghana, Philippines, Uzbekistan or Bolivia; or that the former Soviet Union countries are all relatively free of poverty. If indicators don’t tally with the reality as seen with ones own eyes they aren’t credible. OPHI’s papers on Bhutan, for example, make no reference to the marginalization and poverty of the “Nepalis” (those of Madheshi Nepal origin who have lived for generations in Bhutan but who are mostly denied opportunity and citizenship).

"On the other hand, Ravallion’s confidence in income statistics, and the Living Standards Measurement Surveys (LSMS) on which they are based, is misplaced. This approach has methodological flaws, is subject to serious survey errors, produces data that change little in the face of shocks that clearly have a profound impact on the poor, conceal the prevalence of poverty in wealthy countries and produces results that are often unrealistic. For example, tracking the prevailing rates of malnutrition with LSMS poverty data suggests that in about 5 years time the former will overtake the latter – i.e. there will be millions of people who go to bed hungry, even though they aren’t poor."

Progress

In the film Padre Padrone, based on an autobiographical book by Gavino Ledda, who participates in the film, Gavino's father, as he removes his young son from primary school to tend the family flock alone on the mountainside, observes to the young school-mistress, "It is not education that is compulsory, it is poverty."

To modern English eyes it is shocking to realise some way through the film, when the father has to accept a reduced price for the produce from his newly acquired olive grove (which is intended to be the family's passport to a new and much yearned for prosperity, because of new European Community regulations, how recent is the film. A few years later the prized olive trees are killed by a late frost and "this little brain", on which the peasant father proudly relies, leads him to sell almost all the family land and aim at that elusive prosperity and security by investing the money in the bank at ten per cent interest, whilst sending out his children as day-labourers.

The book was completed in 1974 and the film made in 1977, but the near inescapable poverty of rural Sardinian society and the attendant brutality and bestiality seem a world away from our lives. Yet the 'compulsory' primary education was in fact introduced in 1859, and had, it would appear from the film, at least brought about a general and basic level of literacy, and an awareness of a world beyond local horizons, if not a generosity of spirit. Perhaps, as Italian banks and governments now collapse and the international financial technocrats take over, thirty years and more of international tourism have changed the picture.

It is military call-up, and some of those whom he meets there, another manifestation of the grinding administration of the state, rather than any globalising prosperity, that eventually enables Gavino to break free. For those of us so distant from the kind of rural society which the film depicts, and out of which one would indeed be grateful to be 'lifted', it is almost impossible to judge whether the almost complete depression of spirit shown is a universal feature of such a life - although still lingering narrowness and resentments in relatively affluent rural societies might persuade one that it is.

Moule

Bill Gates has sold another 5 million Microsoft shares raising about $137,950,000 to fund further his charitable foundation. According to the Guardian, "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is making $42m available for eight universities to develop a toilet that does not need a sewer connection, water or electricity to operate. The aim is to improve people's health in parts of the world where there are few if any flushable toilets."

Perhaps someone should mention to him Henry Moule's dry earth closet, first patented in 1873 and adopted in private houses, in rural districts, in military camps, in many hospitals, and extensively in the British Raj - and also by Thomas Hardy's family, which was related to him. An early example can be seen in an outhouse at Thomas Hardy's cottage.

Moule, educated at Marlborough College and St John's College Cambridge, spent his life as an Anglican curate and then vicar in Dorset. During the cholera epidemics of 1849 and 1854 his exertions were unwearied. Impressed by the insalubrity of the houses, especially in the summer of 1858 (the Great Stink) he turned his attention to sanitary science, and invented what is called the dry earth system. In partnership with James Bannehr, he took out a patent for the process (No. 1316, dated 28 May 1860). Among his works bearing on the subject were: ‘The Advantages of the Dry Earth System,’ 1868; ‘The Impossibility overcome: or the Inoffensive, Safe, and Economical Disposal of the Refuse of Towns and Villages,’ 1870; ‘The Dry Earth System,’ 1871; ‘Town Refuse, the Remedy for Local Taxation,’ 1872, and ‘National Health and Wealth promoted by the general adoption of the Dry Earth System,’ 1873.

Would anyone like a lift in my direction?

With growing attention being paid to the ever greater concentration of wealth and income in western nations in the hands of a small minority of their populations, we hear less often nowadays that phrase that a rising tide lifts all boats. However, we still often hear of the numbers ‘lifted out of poverty’ in the developing nations.

A recent contributor to debate on the Guardian about the performance of the IMF told us that in the last decade something like 700 million people had been taken out of poverty by global economic growth (2010 having been ‘the second wealthiest year in human history’ and 2011 almost certain to be the record breaker, in terms of measured global GDP). Somewhere someone, probably in Geneva or New York, has numerically defined what constitutes ‘poverty’, and everywhere, from Chad to China, the statistics are diligently collected, to produce – a very round number.

What is it that makes the phrase, ‘lifted out of poverty’, with its very distinctive use of words, so attractive to those who see our present international economic order as the best available and, on the whole, a good thing for humanity?

The wording suggests that poverty is a distinct or absolute state: once people are lifted out of it the job is done; join the club; no more grounds for discontent. It also suggests that the benefit is bestowed on the erstwhile poor by an outside force or agency: it is not their own efforts that have brought them this boon.

Inescapably the phrase brings to the back of the mind the relief helicopter lifting refugees out of the floodwater. All the necessary connotations are there: the technically sophisticated intervention; the charitable intent; the complete helplessness of the victim; the rescue decisively achieved; the condition from which the victim is rescued as something malignly aberrant and unpredictable, quite unconnected to the means of rescue. To question the benefit would be inhuman or uncivilised.

As we, greater beneficiaries of the global economic order, lift these people out of their poverty, we are likely to lift them out of a good many other things besides: their cultures; their homes; their social networks; their relationship to the land. No doubt the poor long to be lifted and probably, at least at the time, would mostly accept the hoist even if they understood what else was part of the process. Yet none of us make good decisions all of the time – which is not to say that we should make the decision for these people, but rather that we should examine critically the world our ways, and still overwhelmingly our benefits, are creating.