Spaces of the PoorWe live in an age of uncertainty—an age that evokes both a sense of hope and one of deep concern. It is a time of hope because, perhaps like never before, we are witness to so many distinct efforts to shape a better and more peaceful world for all. We see governments joining hands to enhance the well-being of citizens and the global community through shared knowledge and technology, common markets, and commitments to environmental protection. We also hear myriad civil society voices standing shoulder-to-shoulder with governments for a more humane society and a secure planet.
But it is also a time when fact sometimes pushes the limits of credulity. In the time that I take to write this line, somewhere in the world we have lost a fellow human to hunger. Ninety percent of the world's hungry people live in South Asia and Africa, and more than 50 percent of them are farmers engaged in producing food for the world. In an age of huge advances in medical technology, as many as 1 in 16 women in Sub-Saharan Africa are at mortal risk during childbirth, and in that region 1 of every 10 newborn children will not live beyond his or her first year. In a year during which the world registered an overall economic growth rate of about 8 percent, the number of unemployed people increased by nearly 2 percent. Just under half of the unemployed are youth. Women's participation in the workforce is 69 percent of that of men. In nonagricultural paid work, only 43 percent of workers are women, and only 25 percent of these are in managerial and legislative positions, in a stark representation of the lack of opportunities that results from gender bias.
Looking beyond our kind, every day more than a hundred other life forms are being forced into extinction. This rate exceeds their natural vulnerability by three to four times the power of ten. Growing desertification is not only irrevocably changing the natural environment, but also resulting in a decrease in the capacity of ecosystems to support the subsistence needs of almost 200 million people worldwide. The threat of unmitigated climate change looms large, challenging the adaptive capacity of human and natural systems. Freshwater supplies of a sixth of the world's population are expected to decline, and increases in droughts and floods are projected to affect local production, especially in subsistence sectors. The number of ecological refugees—people forced to flee their homes for environmental reasons—is on the increase, with the United Nations estimating the figure at 250 million people in Africa alone.
In the face of these testing times, we have as a global community taken many responsive steps. One, of course, is the "promise for 2015"—the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—a commitment undertaken by the countries of the world at the turn of the millennium. It comes in a line of other international agreements aimed at achieving sustainable development and conservation of biodiversity.
We have also seen a host of initiatives from civil society claiming the rights of disenfranchised, from the movement for civil rights and universal franchise to efforts on behalf of environmental protection and regional peace. There have also been numerous instances of more local but equally powerful collective action, like the dairy cooperative movement spearheaded by small farmers in India, the microcredit revolution in Bangladesh, and the protests against privatization of the water supply in Bolivia.
This essay seeks to examine some questions posed by the scale of human poverty against the backdrop of the equally large threat to the ecological foundations on which the poor survive.
A cursory glance at regional histories from across the world reveals that they are inextricably woven with the environmental histories of communities. From the early days of awe and wonder, to an attitude of conquest, to the present age of ever-widening inquiry and research, we have traversed winding paths of environmentalism.
But environmentalism's most difficult challenge yet is a product of our times. Irrespective of their development trajectories, the countries of the world are being forced to reflect on their responses and contributions to a global strategy of mitigation of environmental degradation and climate change. And respond we must, for the consequences are severe, even in contemplation.
Global warming may bring a rise in global temperatures of 2–3 degrees centigrade, and the resilience of many ecosystems will be exceeded in the 21st century owing to an unprecedented combination of climate change and other global change drivers such as land use change, pollution, and overexploitation of resources. Water volumes stored in glaciers and snow cover will decrease and, with them, water availability in regions that are currently home to more than 1 billion people.
Ecological systems that have been the basis of life on the planet are in a state of disrepair. Fragmented by the assaults of myriad human projects, the inherent resilience of these systems to repeated and prolonged stresses continues to be seriously undermined. There are already signs of this degradation in the form of global changes in climate, hydrological patterns, and other critical ecological functions, as well as the desertification of millions of hectares of once-productive land. At a steadily increasing pace, species of plants and animals are vanishing as they lose their natural habitats or fall prey to human enterprise. These are not just individual resources that we are losing for human consumption, but threads that make up the web of life.
The Living Planet Index measures trends in the Earth's biological diversity, tracks wild species, and monitors the health of ecosystems. This index suggests that we are now degrading natural ecosystems at a rate unprecedented in human history. The human ecological footprint—a measure of the area of biologically productive land and water needed to provide ecological resources and services—surpassed the Earth's biocapacity to meet human needs in the 1980s. As of 2003, it exceeded the Earth's biocapacity by about 25 percent. Humanity is no longer living off of nature's interest, but drawing down on its capital.
There is an irony in the pattern of the impact of this ecological collapse. Many people and communities are involved in production deriving from their natural resource base and live in close association with the natural environment on which they depend for their livelihoods and cultural lives. It is these communities that the environmental crisis will immediately and forcefully hit.
These ecosystem people tend to have more limited coping capacities and are more dependent on climate-sensitive resources such as local water and food supplies. At lower latitudes, even moderate temperature increases are projected to have negative impacts on crop productivity, and increased droughts and floods will compromise agriculture, especially in subsistence sectors. A study on the political economy of hunger among tribal groups in two states of India finds 99 percent of the population living in chronic hunger. About 55 percent of the people identify the decline in the availability of minor forest produce, owing to deforestation and degradation of forests, as the most important factor weakening their food security (Centre for Environment and Food Security 2005).
Although the immediate effects of ecosystem change will be on the poorest, eventually the impact will be much broader, with the declines in food and water supplies likely to spawn acute contestations and violence in rural and urban areas alike.
Much of our understanding of poverty on national and regional scales comes from poverty assessments that have traditionally referred to material or monetary measures of well-being. Over the past century, however, a more multidimensional understanding has emerged that recognizes the social and psychological nature of the burden of poverty. This wider perception is reflected in Amartya Sen's description of poverty as a lack of capabilities that enable a person to live a life she or he values, covering the domains of health, education, income, human rights, and empowerment. Participatory poverty assessments have borne out some dimensions of this definition. Apart from material deprivation, being poor is a matter of sickness and chronic pain, loss of familial and social roles, lack of access to information and institutions, and a lack of self-confidence.
There is clear overlap between areas of acute poverty and rural landscapes in the developing world. The context of poverty here cannot be seen apart from the crises of agricultural systems in the region. More than two-thirds of the rural population lives on small farms of less than two hectares in area. A recent report on the future of small farms—characterized not only by area, but also by low technology, the use of family labor, and a subsistence orientation—talks of the challenges to small farmers (Hazell et al. 2007).
Their livelihoods are worsening as a consequence of declines or degradation in land or water resources, aggravated by competing claims on these resources by multiple stakeholders—farmers, pastoralists, and industries. Together, shrinking farm sizes, insecure tenure, deforestation and erosion, declining soil fertility, and degradation of water and land form the crisis in the farming system that is also apparent in the livestock economy. About 600 million of the poorest people in the developing world are livestock keepers, but livestock-based systems are coming under pressure. Sedentary farmers on arable land are rapidly marginalizing pastoral populations throughout Africa and Central Asia. The International Livestock Research Institute's (ILRI) recent report Mapping Poverty and Livestock in the Developing World projects that 50 years from now, the areas presently within the livestock- and rangeland-based production system and without any cropping potential will face a risk of overgrazing and rangeland degradation, high food insecurity, drought, and limited access to local and other markets (ILRI 2002).
The farming sector, along with associated services and industries, accounts for almost 60–75 percent of rural work. A study by the International Labour Organization (ILO) reports that the share of wage employment in agriculture, especially the number of wage-dependent smallholders in agriculture, is continuing to increase across the globe and accounts for some 40 percent of the world's agricultural workforce (ILO 2003). Of the 450 million workers in agricultural wage employment, 20–30 percent are women. Indigenous people and migrants form a significant part of this workforce.
Among the starkest reflections of the sociocultural discrimination of our times is poverty's embrace of about half the world's population by virtue of their gender. Women everywhere are among the poorest within their communities. They are disempowered on dual fronts—over the factors of production and in their reproductive lives. The binds of patriarchy in its varying forms still constrain many of their entitlements.
Throughout the 1990s in the developing world, women's role in agriculture rose, remained stable, or dropped slightly, whereas men's role clearly declined (Speildoch 2007). Women are the main producers of about 60–80 percent of the food in the developing world, especially staple crops such as rice, wheat, and maize. With increasing market concentration, women continue to have more difficulty than their male counterparts in getting good land, credit, training, and access to markets. The marginalization of women in research and policy related to food and agriculture is extraordinary. It is an obscurity that contributes to the unintelligibility of poverty.
Low health status is considered one of the principal non-income characteristics of poverty. For those who lack material and other productive assets, a capacity for labor and a healthy body are the core components of their livelihood, and even their survival strategy. Poor people, however, are most susceptible to illness and premature death from dietary causes, and their children are prone to low birth weight and generally lack access to medical care.
A study from the Indian state of Gujarat finds two factors with robust associations with poverty creation—health and debt. Affordable and accessible health services, together with cheaper consumer credit, can help enormously in preventing households' needless decline in material status. Further, there is evidence to suggest that these factors may also matter in other parts of the developing world (Asfaw 2003).
Lack of skills, including literacy and primary education, has been another factor that perpetuates the cycle of poverty. A study in 15 major states of India spanning three decades (Datt and Ravallion 2002) finds that rural and human resource development appear to have strong synergies with an expanding nonfarm economy in reducing poverty. Among the conditions found to matter significantly to prospects for pro-poor growth, the role played by initial literacy is particularly notable.
Poverty is also the deprivation of a voice. Many people in developing countries, directly dependent on natural resources, have little say in how those resources are used but suffer the consequences when decisions are corrupt and resource use is destructive. The breakdown of many social institutions that functioned as safety nets and strengthened collective articulation has also contributed to poor people's lack of representation in key decisionmaking processes. The attenuation of these institutional spaces quickly translates into economic hurdles. For example, rural peoples' livelihoods are often in direct conflict with extractive industries such as large-scale fishing, logging, or mining, but rural people have little say in resolving these conflicts. Access to decisionmakers—government bureaucrats, lawmakers, or the courts—is typically for the powerful, not the poor, who remain on the periphery of governance processes.
It is possible to see that three interrelated dimensions of poverty—a lack of income and productive assets, a lack of access to essential economic and social services, and a lack of power, participation, and respect—keep the poor trapped in poverty. These dimensions seem to reinforce one another, rendering the poor further vulnerable to violence, crime, and economic catastrophes (Narayan et al. 2000; Narayan and Petesch 2002). And most important, poverty seems to promote a high discount rate for the future, with a planning horizon that must be focused on everyday subsistence.
In the face of heightened vulnerability, poor people seem to face increasing challenges, including new production technologies that require higher capital inputs, changes to marketing chains that restrict buying power to a few, declines in commodity prices, inadequate institutional arrangements for engaging with markets, and vulnerability to environmental degradation and climate change. In a fast-changing world, the narrowing of the role of the state in the provision of basic subsistence further forces the poor to migrate out of their subsistence contexts.
Most poverty analysts agree that growth in per capita income is essential to reducing poverty and that persistent growth failures are accompanied by persistent failures to reduce poverty. But is the rate of poverty reduction commensurate with the rate of economic growth? We have too often been asked to consider "trickle-down" inevitable, but in many cases the trickle is scant, if it arrives at all. The UK's Department for International Development finds that when conditions are highly unequal, a national economic growth rate of 6 percent might be required to achieve a 1 percent improvement in the incomes of the poorest (DFID 1999).
So when is growth pro-poor? According to an ILO report, when increases in output are concentrated in the economic sectors in which most of the poor work, and when this growth generates more income for people living in poverty, growth is pro-poor (ILO 2003). Making a strong case for the conservation of natural resources to alleviate poverty, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report argues that enabling all countries to achieve the MDGs requires identifying high-priority public investments to empower poor people (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005).
Gomanee et al. (2003) and Mosley et al. (2004) find that higher government expenditures on education, agriculture, housing, and amenities (like water, sanitation, and social security) all have a significant impact on poverty. Fan, Hazell, and Thorat (1999) find that among these categories, spending on agricultural research and development (R&D) and rural roads has by far the largest impacts on both growth and poverty reduction in India. Some argue, however, that inadequate extension services have prevented research results from reaching the poor and that extensive road networks help industry more than they do poor people. Interestingly, the same authors, in a similar analysis of Chinese provinces, find that spending on rural education has the largest impact on poverty (Fan, Zhang, and Zhang 2002).
What matters most perhaps is the character of economic growth. It is clear, however, that the sociocultural-political context of growth also has a large influence on outcomes. Economic growth is essentially embedded in the prevailing trends of the political economy. The belief that exploitation of natural resources can be a strategy to lift the incomes of poor people is a good illustration of this. Natural resources provide a safety net for the poorest and are vital to their health. Whether they really provide a long-term economic route out of poverty, however, is less clear (Angelsen and Wunder 2003). Indeed, the very subsistence nature of these activities, such as small-scale fishing, grazing, and nontimber forest produce harvesting and processing, is what allows the poor to undertake them. Although the technology is inexpensive, the low density of the resource often means that profit margins are also very low. One solution is to raise the returns from such activities. Adding value, however, might encourage the nonpoor to engage in these activities and reduce opportunities for the poor. For example, the commercialization of nontimber forest produce can lead to a breakdown of communal property arrangements in favor of private property arrangements that exclude the poor (Neumann and Hirsch 2000).
As with natural resources, so with the promise of free markets. Free markets offer some clear benefits, such as access to food when crops fail and often increased consumer choices, but they also raise significant problems related to deregulating trade. For many countries, trade liberalization has failed to contribute to poverty reduction essentially because free markets are based on the premise of educated and empowered actors interacting in a more or less level playing field. Given historic inequalities and systematic marginalization in certain societies, however, trade liberalization further dispossesses the poor. It is essential that governments intervene and enable local institutions to mediate transactions with the market to ensure a fair return for the poor.
A second critical area of government action, especially in the context of natural resources, is enforcement of a strong legal framework for the pattern and rate of extraction of resources to be commoditized. In the absence of this framework, the spiraling demands of the market end up merchandising invaluable resources at comparatively negligible prices for short-term gains. This process translates into the erosion of subsistence support for the poor and attacks the foundations of myriad forms of life. There is an immediate need to recognize the value of these resources, curtail extraction, and pay commensurate prices for replenishment. Strengthened processes of land use planning could identify areas for preservation, conservation, and exploitation.
In the face of these complex challenges, we need to respond to the threat to our living environment while nurturing conditions for equitable growth. I believe the catalyzing force lies in communities' and governments' choice of conservation and acceptance of the responsibility of an Earth citizenship.
I borrow this question from research that seeks to reinforce the need for policy to understand poverty better (Krishna 2006). In its angst, this question represents the concerns of all of us who believe in and have known the power of people speaking as one. So, in spite of considerable global action and strong efforts by local organizations, why is it that the MDG report reveals that between 1990 and 2004, the share of national consumption by the poorest fifth of the population in developing regions declined from 4.6 to 3.9 percent (United Nations 2007)?
Is it, in Chambers's (1988) words, that "we do not have the apparatus—of meaning and significance—to understand poverty as local people see it"? Is it a lack of discernment that causes much of policy to treat the poor as a homogenous population? Even as we battle to respond to conditions of acute poverty, there are contexts of deprivation that push more people into similar conditions. To succeed, responses must address both groups with different specific strategies.
Government must play a pivotal role on both counts. First, it has responsibility for collective wellbeing—from food security to access to health, education, and basic social security. In an age when markets are increasingly claiming spaces that governments occupied, this need must remain the focus of the state. In the realms of health, education, and employment, we have seen that the dictates of the market are not concerned with issues of equity or altruism. The purposes of markets and governments are necessarily distinct. Although markets offer the promise of growth and are able to deliver it to a few, they are not concerned with those remaining. And in many countries, the people remaining, who do not have the access or bargaining power to benefit from growth, make up the majority. Second, the vision of sustainable development is, in theory, incompatible with that of exponential growth based on increasing consumption. It remains the domain of government then to ensure the security of the poor in matters of subsistence and to tackle the forces of further impoverishment.
Democratic decentralization and environmental protection are perhaps among the most critical commitments that can take on the forces that propagate and sustain chronic poverty. The experiences of an increasing number of villages and communities in many countries suggest that efforts to reduce poverty are more successful when they simultaneously promote democratic governance and ecosystem stewardship.
Democratic governance must be manifested by deliberative processes of self-governance and by local community institutions adequately invested with rights of management. Although local institutions offer the promise of self-regulation of collective behavior regarding access to and appropriation of resources, it remains true that these institutions are vulnerable to cooption by the powerful. Upholding social justice and safeguarding the rights of the traditionally marginalized are tasks clearly in the domain of democratic governments. But experiments in decentralization, especially in developing countries, have found the challenges of structural change and unpreparedness for governance working against them.
The task then is to build the governance capacities of local governments, including planning and resource management skills that can help these bodies wisely allocate resources to various priorities and stakeholders. This effort must take place in conjunction with an analysis of a range of technologies, both old and new, that can contribute to economic growth and poverty reduction. Such an analysis can inform decisionmaking processes and help ensure adequate delivery systems that render technologies intelligible and accessible. Although providing opportunities for communities to participate in developing technologies could ensure that the benefits address people's needs, it is also necessary to create democratic systems to hold scientific and technological pursuits accountable to the people.
Responsible citizenship and a strong, committed government are the needs of the hour. A complementary endeavor is to create spaces where common people, scientists, executive bodies, and legislators can exchange views on the policies that mold their lives. These spaces can hold out hope for a future where a more egalitarian and humane society will shape its character with reverence for nature.
Together, as individuals, communities, and governments, we need a sense of allegiance to the planet that transcends immediate individual spheres of concern. It must be a groundswell of realization at all levels that the progressive decimation of natural resources and violation of other life forms portend only acute deprivation and distress for the poorest among us and for humankind at large.
We must seek a future where notions of human well-being are not reduced to purchasing power or mindless consumerism. We must seek a shift in attitude, moving beyond the belief that greater well-being necessarily entails more consumption and recognizing that the power to consume more does not entail the right to do so. It is appropriate to recall the words of Gandhi, who cautioned us that the Earth would meet our collective need, but there would not be enough for everyone's greed. As a society, we must seek for ourselves a future that is ecologically sustainable, economically sound, and socially just—a future where the latent potential of civil society is emancipated and where human dignity, spirit, and endeavor find expression.
Amrita Patel is chairman of the Foundation for Ecological Security and chairman of the National Dairy Development Board, India.
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- Spaces of the PoorAmrita Patel
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