The National Planning Commission (NPC) made public its recent review report on Nepal’s performance on its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Prepared by its former vice-chairman, the report claimed that the national poverty plummeted to 25% in 2009. During 1996-2004, it had reduced from 42 to 31%. Remarkable progress was made during 2005-2009 with a decline of one percent annually. The Nepal Living Standard Survey 2003/04 claimed that poverty reduction in 2004 was due to remittance inflow. [break]
The report attributed to three main factors for poverty reduction: government spending on anti-poverty programs, social-security programs, and spending of NGOs in anti-poverty enterprises.
Simultaneously, the World Food Programme states that the rate of chronic malnourishment of under-five children in Nepal is estimated at 48% - the worst level in Asia – and is comparable to Congo (44%), Sudan (48%), Uganda (45%), and Somalia (42%). In the Global Hunger Index, Nepal scored 20.6 and was labeled Alarming Condition. In mid and far western regions, chronic malnutrition rate is as high as 68-70%. A simple disease like diarrhea became an epidemic in those regions. The death count was 235 in Jajarkot last summer.
Reactions to the report are mixed. Some academics called the report baseless. No progress is made, and it is an armchair “statistical swindle.” How can one claim poverty reduction without census or survey? Who has the authority to claim so?
Second, the reliability of the data used in the report, hence, is questionable. As Devendra Raj Panday said in the 10th anniversary edition of his monumental “Nepal’s Failed Development” recently, socio-economic data vary, depending on the source one uses. “Statistical confusion” is paramount in Nepal. The data from reputed multilateral institutions also don’t match each other in the same socio-economic timeframes. The report falls in this category.
Some alternative arguments also have state it that poverty has declined. But, conversely, poverty in numbers has soared in the same period. The quality of poverty has increased. Statistics says that the poor became poorer and the richer became richer during the same period. The Gini coefficient soared to 47.3 in 2005 from 35.4 in 1994/95. Share of income by the richest 20% soared to 54% from 39.67% in 1994/95. The Kuznets ratio also showed the ratio between the shares of income by the richest 20% to the poorest 40% soared to 3.76 in 2004/05 from 2.82 in 1994/95.
Lastly, the criterion of poverty measurement of less than US$1 a day is also false because Nepal is suffering from double digit inflation for two years, and the same money can’t purchase goods and services as it did two years ago.
Has poverty really gone down? Nepalis were bystanders in the suboptimal performance of the fiscal instrument during 2005-2009. With no elected local bodies, most target-based programs were not implemented, and those implemented did not achieve the targets. In addition, only 30% of development expenditures were spent during 2005-2009. The state-run anti-poverty Poverty Alleviation Fund has been unable to implement a single project successfully to date. Also, the performance records for anti-poverty programs of NGOs are worse than government-sponsored programs. In this, the basic foundation of the report – poverty reduction attributed to government spending in target-based and social security programs and I/NGOs deliverables – is evidently baseless.
The report is not objective and value-free. Who published the report? Why and in what a political condition was it published? What are the power relationships between the writer and the publisher? The objectivity and the neutrality of the report rest on the answers to the aforementioned questions. How is the phrase “poverty alleviation” used in national policymaking and development practices? Exploring how different configurations of word frames are employed, and how to justify a particular kind of development intervention and the legitimatization of political authority are other criteria.
In developmental policymaking, buzzwords play important roles for social engineering as high sounding solutions in socio-economic development. Development orthodoxies are captured in a seductive mix of such words, and “poverty alleviation” takes a prominent place. The phrase gives today’s development policies a sense of purposefulness and optimism. “Political entrepreneurs” and “policy entrepreneurs” create ambivalence in their enterprises with such buzzwords.
“Poverty alleviation” appeared first in consolidated fashion in development literature in the late 1990s after the Britton Woods’ Structural Adjustment Program turned into Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) in 2000. The Thatcher-Reagan neo-liberal policy widened the gap in income distribution, thus global inequality engulfed the earth and immense spatial and vertical disparity emerged. PRSP became pandemic. Even Nepal’s Tenth Plan document was called PRSP – a typical example of moral debasement in policymaking in poor societies.
Agriculture and poverty are interrelated everywhere. Agriculture is the backbone of Nepal’s economy – something every college-going student knows. Why is it then that the World Bank is finally “convinced,” after 26 years, that agriculture holds the key to Nepal’s economic development? The answer is simple. The country’s ruling elite, including politicians, policymakers and their international counterparts, industrialists and the media think that the poor are the actual hindrance to economic growth and socio-economic development in Nepal. Agriculture and poverty as a “down market” subject makes them believe that the only path to economic growth is by ignoring the poor, vulnerable and marginalized – nearly 18 million people who are dependent on peasantry and subsistence farming. Poverty actually grows where the benefits of economic development are reaped by a handful of rich traders, a few assembling industrialists and powerful elites. But then, the emphasis is to ensure that only the rich should become richer, either by sops coming from taxpayers’ money or by defaulting banks or by evading duties and taxes. The Planning Commission’s algebra of poverty reduction ratio are opposite of the ground realities. When agricultural input prices in Nepal are the highest in South Asia, how can Nepali farmers raise productivity without subsidies? But the former NPC vice chairman brought down the poverty ratio from 31 to 25% in his review report, pleasing the ruling elites and their domestic and foreign allies.
The discourse of “poverty alleviation” has some functions, though. It is a politically attractive slogan both in dictatorial and democratic regimes. Politicians and policymakers in both systems use “poverty alleviation” as a manipulative trick to maintain their status quo. The slogan creates a feeling of complexity between the public manufacturing of illusions and its consumers. Politicians give the impression to the mass that they really worry about the problems of the poor and vulnerable. They create an illusion that they are really sorry for their misery, suffering and crying children. People fall behind the illusion that the government really worries about their problems. This way, tricky politicians continuously maintain their vote bank.
Poverty reduction also has an economically attractive appeal in global economic cooperation. In the name of poverty alleviation, governments, politicians, development planners and development entrepreneurs make attractive appeals to bilateral and multilateral donors and international agents of “financing for development” and they ask for larger financial baskets. With the help of such toxic buzzwords as “poverty reduction,” they attract international aid and grants.
“Poverty reduction” is also a megalomaniac expression, and an important device to prevent popular uprisings in poor countries, such as Nepal. Policymakers, politicians, and development agencies use poverty alleviation as a manipulation to resist alternative political formation as a form of popular uprising and create hurdles to structural changes in the governance system. Poverty pertains to lacking productive means, not daily calorie intakes. In the case of Nepal, land is the main source of production. Thus, the propaganda that “Poverty has reduced” only helps preventing radical changes in the politics of land reform in Nepal.
Poverty reduction is also a fundraising device. I/NGOs and so-called civil society organizations raise funds in the name of the sufferings and miseries of the poor. They put the poverty of the people as their fundraising basket and display attractive slogans: “Fighting Poverty Together,” and so on. Actually, they are pining for their own poverty reduction. They are for their own survival rather than concerned with the pains of the actual poor and vulnerable. I/NGOs receive more money than the government, and spend on target-based anti-poverty programs. However, no tangible effects are seen in poverty alleviation except in their glossy reports.
Poverty alleviation, in fact, is more on personal careers and less of a policy to combat poverty. Students obtain their degrees on social sciences specializing in poverty. They enter the job market and start their careers in “poverty alleviation.” They graduate to “experts” from “trainees” in poverty alleviation. In the process, each one earns a good salary, owns a house, has a car, bank balance, health insurance, and ensures quality education for the children. In short, they ameliorate their own poverty.
Additionally, poverty alleviation is an international intellectual division of labor. Its theories, concepts and constructs are manufactured in the West and these are put in motion on a hit-or-miss trial basis. Nepalis supply information as primary data generators on poverty reduction theories. As said above, the great irony is found in the title of Nepal’s Tenth Plan itself: “Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper.”
Poverty alleviation was intended to help the poor, and provide development and materialize the state’s welfare concept to deliver to the needy. The intention of the pioneers of poverty alleviation was indeed pure, noble and humanitarian. Yet, poverty alleviation discourses raise important theoretical and practical questions, including “conceptualizing poverty” and the “idea of action” in combating it.
And the very discourses have produces opposite results. The very phrase “poverty alleviation” is problematic: it is exploitative because it aims at maintaining old structural rigidity and rather supports to sustain the exploitation and oppression of the poor.
Therefore, it is time to write the obituary of Poverty Alleviation in Nepal – and elsewhere, too.
Bhim Bhurtel is the Executive Director of Nepal South Asia Centre, a Kathmandu-based development think tank primarily engaged in democracy and development in Nepal and South Asia.
