Geography

Vol 94 Part 3 Autumn 2009

Geography 2009

Challenging Assumptions: World poverty what can we do about it?

Challenging Assumptions

Introduction: thinking about the poor

Could the question What should we do about world poverty? be part of the problem? Perhaps our way of asking this important question is unhelpful. To talk about problems of the poor implies that the problems are confined to a certain group in society, rather than being related to wider social and economic processes. Thinking only about poverty means that we overlook the many connections between different income groups, and the important issues of wealth distribution that create and maintain poverty. This way of thinking can obscure the structural forces that result in some people having less access to resources than others (i.e. wider social forces such as the economy, the way we value different types of work, and the trade rules that we play by). There are also important issues about how we define who is poor. Powerful people define and measure poverty, thus naming and defining the social position of less powerful people. Arguably, some approaches to alleviating poverty classify people in a manner that actually reduces poorer peoples control over their own lives. Here I challenge one dominant way of speaking about poverty. I will outline some problems with the current way we think and speak about poverty, consider how some academics think about this, and what we can do to challenge it. The aim is not to deny the existence of unnecessary suffering due to a lack of access to basic resources such as food security, durable shelter, and a safe environment, but to consider the problems arising from how we talk about issues, and to propose some alternatives. This sort of thinking is called critical discourse analysis, which may sound daunting, but is a fantastic way to reconsider how we talk about the world. When we think about how we talk about the world, we can also think about what we are leaving out. Once youve got the idea, you can try to apply it to other examples (how we talk about the differences between men and women, or media reporting of events).

World poverty what can we do about it?

Anna Barford
ABSTRACT: In this article I argue that the way poverty is framed in mainstream politics and the media illuminates some aspects of the issue, while obscuring others. This framing may to some extent be responsible for the lack of improvement in the situations in which poor people live worldwide, as efforts to alleviate poverty may not be addressing its real causes. Rethinking how we talk about poverty, one of the most pressing issues of our time, can help us to see what is missing from dominant explanations of poverty. This article gives an insight into the history of the concept of the poor, and presents some critiques of thinking on poverty and of actions to alleviate poverty.

Woman begging at traffic lights, Guadalajara, Mexico. Photo: Anna Barford.

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estates, actions that were once rights became criminalised. The prevailing view was that the poor should look after themselves, and dependency came to be seen negatively (Thomas, 1997). The rich have always been dependent upon the labour of those who are poorer than them: those who farm, cook, clean, and much more. However wealthy people are rarely described as dependent; what is criticised is the dependency of poorer people. In 1902, during a period of heightened interest in social problems and poverty, B. Seebohm Rowntree proposed a poverty line based on the minimum income necessary to achieve physical efficiency, which included living costs for housing rent, food, and other necessities. His work, which was based in York, strongly hinted that if low income caused poverty, then higher income could alleviate it (OConnor, 2001). Despite the social concerns behind the original poverty line, the use of such lines is now criticised by some. But what of the poverty line today? How much income do officially poor people have? According to The World Bank, one of the most prominent organisations that defines poverty for the rest of the world: for the purpose of global aggregation and comparison, the World Bank uses reference lines set at $1 and $2 per day (more precisely $1.08 and $2.15 in 1993 Purchasing Power Parity terms). It has been estimated that in 2001, 1.1 billion people had consumption levels below $1 a day and 2.7 billion lived on less than $2 a day (The World Bank, 2008). Poverty lines are based on various assumptions. Consider the process of measuring poverty between countries. First basic requirements must be identified.

Vol 94 Part 3 Autumn 2009

A brief history of poverty discourse

Critical discourse analysis questions the foundations of the ideas that we use to organise society, and the world. For example, because we have names for groups of countries, such as Europe, Africa, Latin America, we are easily able to discuss such groups as entities. If we did not have names for these regions we would have to list all the countries before making a collective statement about them. These names make it is easy to think of regions. Language can make concepts seem natural, and therefore powerful, to our way of thinking. Is it ridiculous to imagine that Latin America could not exist in our language? If we look five centuries back in history before the time of the conquistadors from the Iberian Peninsula we realise that Latin America has not always existed. No Latin-based languages were spoken there, Latin America did not exist. Nor for that matter did America. Looking to history helps us to understand how our current ideas have been constructed (as geographers we can learn a lot from historians, as well as economists, anthropologists, sociologists and natural scientists). First we will consider the work of the historian Keith Thomas. There is a close connection between the enclosure of land during the early modern period in England and the idea of the pauper. In the mid 1500s (the same time as Spain and Portugal were Latinising parts of America), manorial estates in England became increasingly private. Previously, whole families would have been supported by the manor, could have slept in the barns, and had rights to food from the fields. Following the change to more private

Challenging Assumptions: World poverty what can we do about it?

Figure 1: Worldmapper map showing absolute poverty (up to $2 per day). Country size shows the percentage of population living on under PPP US$2. The bigger the country, the more poor people live there. Copyright 2006 SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).

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Challenging Assumptions: World poverty what can we do about it?

This could include, for instance, rent, a bag of rice, a loaf of bread, vegetables, fruit and a newspaper. The cost of this daily shopping basket can be calculated for each country and then converted into a comparable unit, usually US dollars. These calculations will never be perfect though. Costs can vary even within countries: for example, renting a house in London can cost twice as much as renting a comparable house in Sheffield. Also, US$1 is harder to earn but buys more in poorer countries than richer ones hence why British travellers can have cheap holidays in India, why many Mexicans work in the USA and send money home, and why many manufactured goods are produced in poorer countries. And then there is the fluctuating exchange rate to contend with. A different measure is therefore used: Purchasing Power Parity US dollars (PPP US$). Theoretically PPP US$1 buys the same daily shopping basket throughout the world, and the value is equivalent to spending US$1.08 in the USA in 1993. By setting a threshold for poverty in PPP US$ and calculating the number of people living in each country earning under that threshold, we can compare poverty between nations. A threshold of PPP US$2 per day would, according to World Bank data, mean that 2.7 billion people were poor in 2001. Figure 1 shows the distribution of these people.

she had neither children nor a husband. This example highlights the very narrow and culturally specific nature of the income measure of poverty, and how it overlooks the value of human relationships. It also reminds us that someone may be defined as poor by someone else, but not by themselves. Defining someone as poor may carry additional negative meaning, often in association with ideas of dependency on society. A distinction is often made between the deserving and undeserving poor, the poverty of the undeserving poor being blamed on their behaviour (Katz, 1990). An example of this is the argument that people having many children causes them to be poor, whereas this could be seen as a response to high child mortality, or due to a different value being placed on children, as in Bangladesh. Katz argues that classifying people as poor serves a purpose: They offer a familiar and easy target for displacing rage, frustration and fear. They demonstrate the link between virtue and success that legitimates capitalist political economy (Katz, 1990, p. 10). Measuring poverty highlights problematic resource distribution between people, still the poor themselves may be blamed by some and feared by others. For some poor even implies failure. Distinguishing causes and effects, and recognising the economic, cultural and moral as different, could detach poverty from some of the negative connotations it carries. The media often depicts poor people as a sealed group, outside the wider socio-economic system within which they are situated. One example of this narrow perspective is the medias treatment of disasters and emergencies, commonly shown with little reference to the underlying causes. Those experiencing a humanitarian crisis are generally represented by the media as helpless, feeble and dependent, rather than heroic in their ability to survive in such difficult situations. Consumers of such media images will tend to pity these unfortunate people, rather than thinking about how the root causes of the crisis could be tackled, giving hope for the future (Hammock and Charny, 1996).

Labelling the poor

Some academics, including anthropologist Vigdis DueBroch, argue against the World Bank categorisation of people as poor. Her argument is that labelling people as poor can be essentialising (it makes you think of only one element of someones life) and generalising (poor people are seen as all being the same because they have this one common attribute). Further, it involves poor people being defined as poor by others. Someone from outside has come to them with their own measures and ideas of what is valuable, has collected information, and later defined them as poor: objects of the war on poverty. The problem here is the one-sided nature of this relationship (Due-Broch, 2008). Here is a story to illustrate the culturally specific nature of definitions of poverty. A United Nations poverty researcher went to Bangladesh to measure poverty levels there. The Bangladeshi women she met asked her, How many children do you have?, to which she answered None. They asked, Do you have a husband?, she said No. The Bangladeshi women, who themselves had husbands and many children, believed that it was not themselves but the woman who had come to measure poverty who was poor, as

Contemporary contradiction
Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 1 is to halve extreme poverty and hunger worldwide by 2015. Thus, rather than considering entrenched differences in wealth and income, the focus is on a specific group, the poor, who are identified as the problem that

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needs to be solved. As Samir Amin suggests of MDG 1: This is nothing but an empty incantation as long as the policies that generate poverty are not analyzed and denounced and alternatives proposed (Amin, 2006, p. 3). Amin notes that achieving the MDGs is assumed to be perfectly compatible with economic liberalism, so the MDGs do not propose any major alterations to the existing world economic system. There are many aspects to global rules that allow the continued accumulation of wealth among some, which contributes to the poverty of others. For example, natural resources such as oil, metal ores and food are often owned by companies, rather than the local populace. Thus owners of companies benefit from the sales of such resources, because they own the means of production, while people who live near the sites of resource extraction, and/or work for the companies concerned, benefit little, if at all. Another example is the agricultural protectionism used by people in rich countries against poor countries: annually, US$ 350 billion is spent on subsidising farmers in rich countries so that their products will sell better than those from poor countries (Pogge, 2008). These are just two examples of how people in economically powerful positions are connected to the lives of the poor. They remind us that when thinking about poverty it is illuminating to question the relationships which create and maintain it.

Acknowledgements
Many of the ideas and arguments expressed here were discussed and developed at the 2008 Bergen Summer Research School on Global Development Challenges. I thank my teachers (Vigdis Due-Broch, Alice OConnor and Jean Comaroff) and classmates for the stimulating learning environment. Do you have any ideas about how we could think differently about poverty and inequalities? What should be done to address these issues? Please email your answers to me: Anna.Barford@sheffield.ac.uk

Challenging Assumptions: World poverty what can we do about it?

References
Amin, S. (2006) The Millennium Development Goals: A critique from the south, Monthly Review, 57, pp. 1-9. Due-Broch, V. (2008) Global reconfigurations of poverty and the public. Lecture given at the Bergen Summer Research School. University of Bergen, Norway. Hammock, J.C. and Charny, J.R. (1996) Emergency response as morality play: the media, the relief agencies, and the need for capacity building, in Rotberg, R.I. and Weiss, T.G. (eds) From Massacres to Genocides: The media, public policy and humanitarian crises. Cambridge, MA: World Peace Foundation. Katz, M. (1990) Undeserving Poor. London: Pantheon Books. OConnor, A. (2001) Poverty Knowledge: Social science, social policy, and the poor in twentieth-century U.S. history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pogge, T. (2008) Global justice and global development challenges. Bergen Summer Research School. University of Bergen, Norway. The World Bank PovertyNet www.worldbank.org/poverty (last accessed 14 August 2008) Thomas, K. (1997) Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Conclusion
In conclusion, my personal response to the question What can we do about poverty? is as follows: instead of thinking about the poor as a problem to be solved, we need to think about the connections between people, including ourselves: we are involved in the processes that create poverty. It is not necessary to go abroad as a volunteer to help people in poor countries (anyway, poverty is also an issue within the UK). Instead, it could be helpful to think about how our own governments are involved in making rules that keep some people poor and others rich. When talking about poverty, we need to be careful not to speak about the poor as if they were disconnected from the rest of society, but consider the issue in terms of inequalities, thus recognising that we are all involved. By changing the terms of discussion to include history, international connections, inequality and mutual responsibility, the questions that we are able to ask about how and why poverty exists will change. Perhaps by thinking about poverty in different ways we can generate new types of questions about how to overcome social injustices.

Suggested further reading

The poverty discourse discussed above is not the only one. It can be compared with the different perspectives on inequalities offered in the following: United Nations Millennium Development Goals: www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ The World Development Movement: www.wdm.org.uk/about/ Noam Chomskys short video on Rethinking Capitalism available at www.adbusters.org/blogs/ blackspot/noam_chomsky_rethinking_capitalism. html

Anna Barford is a third year PhD student in the Department of Geography, University of Sheffield (email Anna.Barford@sheffield.ac.uk).

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