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Combating Poverty:
New Battle Gear for an Ancient War
By Lansana Gberie
(A review of Combating Poverty: Structural Change, Social Policy
and Politics: A Report by United Nations Research Institute for
Social Development, UNRISD, August 2010).
Since antiquity the problem of poverty has engaged the
consciences of statesmen and thinkers, but few have dared to
draw the obvious context – and fuel – for it: inequality. In the
happier days of the Roman Empire almost 2000 years ago the
estimable Trajan, one of the great Caesars, introduced the
Alimenta, which was an ambitious welfare program to help the
poor, especially orphans and destitute children, throughout the
Italian part of the Empire. Food and education were subsidized.
This was the earliest record of a welfare program on such a
scale, and it won wide plaudits for Trajan. The great English
historian of Rome, Edward Gibbon, surveying this era and
particularly admiring of Trajan, wrote that if someone were to
“fix the period in the history of the world, during which the
condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he
would, without hesitation” name the 80 years of the Roman era
which included, and was rather dominated, by Trajan’s rule. This
was the period of the great Roman peace.
Tellingly, the fact that slavery was widespread in Rome did not
attenuate that glorious picture for Gibbon, writing over 250
years ago. None of the great religious leaders, Jesus Christ and
Prophet Mohamed, ever considered for one moment that poverty and
equality would forever be abolished. Christ, otherwise such a
luminous moral authority, in fact is quoted as saying that the
poor “shall always be with us.” And the Prophet Mohamed, who is
justly credited for institutionalising charity for the poor and
the needy, left slavery intact, though he clearly was in a
position to have abolished it in his domain, which was vast, and
increasing (it should be noted that he, however, freed some of
his own slaves and called for better treatment of slaves, surely
an endorsement, rather than a repudiation, of the system).
Indeed, the emphasis on a better and eternal after-life which
these transcendental religions preached suggested that temporary
worldly hardships – poverty, oppression, persecution – ought to
be endured in good humour, if not embraced.
These reflections point to two important considerations that
must be stated at the outset. The first is that it is futile to
look for inspiration to combat poverty and inequality from
anywhere other than secular institutions of the modern state.
The second is that combating poverty and inequality should be
seen as an integral part of the universal struggle for human
rights – a very important result of the most important political
event in the history of the modern world: the French Revolution,
with its emphasis on liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Combating Poverty and Inequality: Structural Change, Social
Policy and Politics, a new report by the Geneva-based United
Nations Research Institute for Social Development, makes these
points in another way: in about 350 pages, its authors argue
with great cogency and detail, that most previous efforts at
tackling global poverty – the framework provided by Poverty
Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), the so-called pro-poor
targeted programmes, and the Millennium Development Goals, not
to mention the many ill-conceived development assistance
programmes and aid commissions on Africa – have failed largely
because many have de-emphasised the active interventionist role
of the state in pursuing policies of equality and other social
programmes that can only be successfully pursued by the state.
The notion of ‘trickle down effects’, integral to the so-called
Washington consensus, had really no chance of making a dent in
global poverty partly because it didn’t even think that
inequality is a problem in itself.
The lead author of this report is Yusuf Bangura, a leading
African scholar whose previous engagement with the political and
economic meltdown in Nigeria and Sierra Leone thoroughly
prepares him for broader sweeps across the world’s vast poor
regions.
The report posits that the recent food crises and the fiscal
problems in several rich countries have “called into question
the possibility of achieving the Millennium Development Goals of
halving poverty and hunger by 2015” though some parts of the
globe – in particular Asia (led by China) – experienced rather
sharp falls in poverty. In sub-Saharan Africa, little progress
has been made. Overall, there are still one billion people mired
in extreme poverty globally.
The report blames this failure not on the food crisis, which is
largely transient, but on the prevalent approach to tackling
global poverty “which often ignores its root causes, and
consequently do not follow through the causal sequence.” In
countries that have successfully reduced poverty – which the
report describes as “increasing the well-being of the majority
of their population” – “long term processes of structural
transformation, not poverty reduction per se, were central to
public policy objectives.”
This is the report’s original – and important – contribution to
the debate on poverty: the idea that the state must play an
active role in fashioning social policies that would reduce
inequality, create employment opportunities, and remove inherent
disabilities, like discriminatory cultural practices that, for
example, limits educational opportunities for women. The report
emphasises three key approaches: the creation of jobs that are
adequately remunerated and accessible to all, regardless of
income or class status, gender, ethnicity or location; the
fashioning of comprehensive social policies that are grounded in
universal rights and that are supportive of structural change,
social cohesion and democratic politics; and the protection of
civic rights, activism and political arrangements that ensure
states are responsive to the needs of citizens and the poor have
influence in how policies are made.
All of this may sound uncontroversial and eminently sensible,
but in fact the report’s key anchor – the advocacy of an
activist role by the state in directing economic and structural
social changes – goes against certain orthodoxies. The report,
in other words, is bound to have powerful enemies. This will be
a shame, for at least two reasons.
First, the report is thoroughly grounded in empirical research:
it is drawn from several dozen case studies, and, as far as this
writer can see, the authors make no ideological affectation. It
is always harmful to substitute doctrine, however
well-intentioned, for knowledge. Dickens, for admittedly
unedifying reasons, seems to have gotten it about right in A
Christmas Carol (1843), when he has the ghost of Christmas
Present show the miserly Scrooge two very desperate children
with the immortal words: “This boy is Ignorance. This girl is
Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all
beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is
Doom, unless the writing be erased.” The ignorance of the
powerful can compound want, leading to doom for the poor and
weak.
Second, nothing in the report suggests that the authors are in a
fighting mood: in fact, the diffidence is striking. There are
echoes less of Marx than of Keynes, who at the height of the
Great Depression in 1930 wrote in the Economic Possibilities for
Our Grandchildren that with the spectacular advance in science
and technology, there was bound to be enough economic growth to
end the perennial problem of not having enough to eat and to
meet other basic needs, not in his lifetime but in the lifetime
of “our grandchildren” (in Europe.) And of Jeffrey Sachs, who
has written, in The End of Poverty (2005), that “the wealth of
the rich, the power of today’s vast storehouses of knowledge,
and the declining fraction of the world that needs help to
escape from poverty all make the end of poverty a realistic
possibility by the year 2025,” that is, in our lifetime. Sach’s
notes in particular poverty in Africa, emphasizing that talk of
structural adjustment or austerity in spending simply won’t do.
Echoing the Tony Blair’s Africa Commission, Sach’s writes that
much needed above all is greater investments in basic
infrastructure, in transportation, in education, in health, an
opening up of markets in the West, and more favourable trade
policies towards the continent.
Despite its bulk – perhaps because of it – the report has a few
catchy mantras which best summarise its key points, so let’s
list them down by way of conclusion: “Employment represents a
crucial channel through which income derived from growth can be
widely shared;” “Social Policy, at its best, is transformative,
and cannot be separated from efforts to create
employment-centered growth and structural change”; “Poverty and
inequality must be considered as interconnected parts of the
same problem”; “Countries that have successfully reduced poverty
had purposeful, growth-oriented and welfare-enhancing political
systems; they also built and maintained competent
bureaucracies”; “the protection of civic rights, and political
parties that effectively engage the poor are all important for
poverty reduction”; and “most countries that have been
successful in exploiting the benefits of globalization have
adopted heterodox policies that reflected their national
conditions, rather than fully embracing market conforming
prescriptions.”
The last point is bound raise the most heckles in some quarters,
but it is perhaps profoundly the most important...
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