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The Forum > Article Comments > Measuring the world’s poor who 'live below the poverty line' > Comments

Measuring the world’s poor who 'live below the poverty line' : Comments

By Ben Coleridge, published 27/5/2011

How measurements of the world’s poor as income deprived fails to miss the cultural, social and political realities of who gets to eat and who doesn’t.

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An Excellent critique of superficial campaigns like the one the author focuses on. The trouble with all such exercises in empathy is that they take the context for granted and immutable, even as the best of all possible worlds. Poverty per se is not the problem, but a human world that produces, exacerbates and fails to address the causes of poverty. The causes are of course historical and complex, but whatever their divers genesis, in the modern world poverty is more or less the obverse and outcome of obscene wealth, and of the abstraction of surpluses as profit. The populations of wealthy countries have recourse to savings and credit (indeed consumers are a secondary mode of wealth production and redistribution; they are thus optimally preserved by welfare as fundamental to the system), and as these diminish, losses are felt in ephemeral ways, which may be designated "compromised lifestyle", long before they're felt as genuine poverty. In poor countries where life is precarious, fluctuations in income is felt directly and immediately as dire poverty. But these poor countries are no longer beholden unto themselves, but are subject to the same rubric as the wealthy, whereby their production is exploited and the surplus is abstracted. They are part of the same global system and their poverty maintains Western lifestyles. What we need is a campaign that somehow highlights that link--that wealthy nations and their people are "responsible" for poverty. Once such awareness is achieved we could then have a different kind of campaign; rather than one that played on the obscenity of extreme poverty, one that played on its direct and culpable obverse: obscene wealth.
Poverty is not the problem in itself; in our global yet still "contained" economy, poverty is the by-product of wealth--its complement and and how it's maintained. The only way to address extreme poverty is to address extreme wealth; in fact to address the insane logic of converting surpluses from sustenance into profit--thus driving both the disparity and its ongoing propagation.
Posted by Squeers, Friday, 27 May 2011 9:55:11 AM
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<< The campaign aimed to help people “better understand the daily challenges faced by those trapped in the cycle of extreme poverty” and to build “a movement of passionate people willing and able to make a meaningful difference to those who need it most.”>>

Thinking we at last had someone concerned about Australian social equity and justice, another Professor Fiona Stanley perhaps, I started to warm to your article. Then we got to the bit about the World Bank and AUD$2 a day for food or its more complex equivalents, shattered my little illusionary moment.

It’s all just another campaign slogan to extract more money from vulnerable, over sensitive people by guilt. (Your target market).

It seems incredible to me that the hypocrisy and double dealing by such as the World Bank is granted absolution from their role in driving the peoples of oppressed nations, into the “cycle of extreme poverty” to which you refer. It matters not how you measure this poverty or embrace the galaxy of factors, they are the peoples of failed states, mostly living under the shadow of one or other form of despotic dictatorships.

If they were a company, a Bank would do what they always do to protect the stakeholders, foreclose and bring in the receivers.

So many in our developed world live with the illusion that somehow, creating greater awareness, to extract a dollar or two to sponsor Aid Organisations, will provide structural reforms, increase food production, education, health and future prospects. When in fact all we do is maintain the status quo. We relieve these dictators of the cost of their own mismanagement, so that they can get on with the business of oppression, buying RPG’s, AK 47’s and light tanks, with any surplus going to their Swiss Bank accounts.

When are you going to develop an understanding of how the world really works, rather than how you ideologically wish it to be
Posted by spindoc, Friday, 27 May 2011 11:15:41 AM
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You obviously failed at marketing.

Normally I could admire such pedantry, but I'm getting pretty sick of people being so negative and picking holes in worthwhile causes. So what if it's not accurate, do you think you'll get more donors via a thesis on the complexity of poverty? I notice no alternitive campaign was offered.

Of course spindoc is right, but maybe if 10% gets through to 1 kid it may be worth it, and what really, aside from invading each country in a war against poverty, are we to do instead?

These things don't need to be either/or. We can prop up an unsustainable and disempowering overseas aid system saving a few starving kiddies while we work on a propper solution.
Posted by Houellebecq, Friday, 27 May 2011 12:17:08 PM
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Although the author's article means well I cannot see the campaign as being useful.

For starters the participants are trying to live in $2 a day in Australia, where the purchasing power for the $2 is quite different to its power in impoverished nations. This may explain why extra money is used for tobacco and CDs, a point which the author finds puzzling.

Another problem is that this seems to an exercise in raising money to help alieviate poverty and, as is now widely known, the old aid model of handing out money, or food, or whatever, to the impoverished, is out of favour. Targeted aid is now the go, but to make that work the aid origanisation has to get down and dirty and understand the culture they are trying to help. This do not involve simply understanding that they are poor.

Don't think the article or the fund raising exercise helps very much.
Posted by Curmudgeon, Friday, 27 May 2011 2:09:15 PM
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Houelle’s, you are right that the author offered no alternative campaign but your real gem was your comment, “what if 10% gets through to 1 kid it may be worth it”?

This seems such a trivial target and I began to wonder why we even need to consider such a low success rate for aid programs?

Being a thinking mans idiot I decided to try to design a program that might increase the penetration of aid, either based upon current aid program formats or even new ones.

Those needing aid are the populations of third world or developing nations, often run by some form of dictatorship. To raise themselves from poverty, they need infrastructure, logistics, banking, legal, education, health and so on. Developed nations take these for granted because without these we would not be developed nations. Even if we in the West were to trade with these nations, the lack of infrastructure is an inhibitor to progress and their “rulers” will end up the primary beneficiary.

Aid programs are mostly designed to bypass this problem by going directly to those in need. This also creates problems because even something for free needs to be “delivered”, which requires infrastructure. In the absence of this we take our infrastructure with the Aid or rent it when we get there. This all costs money and attracts Mr. Ten Percent. The NGO or Aid organization also has operational and administrative costs. The net result is that only a very small portion of what was available makes it. Aid organisations then need a new slogan, a new program and new ways to extract more money. So the circle is complete and we start again with the same problems.

So why can’t we design something that is entirely self sufficient with its own infrastructure within a third world nation. Negotiate “independence” (temporary pseudo sovereignty) for a town or village, fund it through Aid programs and administer it with our expertise and infrastructure? After a few years they propagate this themselves to the next village/town and so on.

Seems like a win/win. Might this work?
Posted by spindoc, Saturday, 28 May 2011 1:53:19 PM
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Seems like a win/win. Might this work?
Spindoc,
of course it would work but bureaucracy won't permit it. We could start counting the poor by starting with small populated countries like Australia. It would come as a real surprise to beer drinkers & pie munchers how many poor people there are here because of the indifference to the feet up on the coffee table sporting enthusiasts.
Posted by individual, Sunday, 29 May 2011 9:58:32 AM
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