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The state of rural poverty
Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque :
“Poverty is widely understood to be a key factor that increases the propensity for individuals and households to be harmed by climatic shocks and stresses. This review explores recent literature at the nexus of climate change impacts, vulnerability, and poverty. Within this literature, poverty is increasingly recognized as a dynamic and multidimensional condition that is shaped by the interplay of social, economic, political, and environmental processes, individual and community characteristics, and historical circumstances. While climate change is never seen as a sole cause of poverty, research has identified numerous direct and indirect channels through which climatic variability and change may exacerbate poverty, particularly in less developed countries and regions. Recent studies have also investigated the effects of climate change on economic growth and poverty levels, formation of poverty traps, and poverty alleviation efforts. These studies demonstrate that climate change-poverty linkages are complex, multifaceted, and context-specific. Priority issues for future work include greater attention to factors that promote resilience of poor populations, a stronger focus on nonmonetary dimensions of poverty, investigation of the impacts of climate change on relative poverty and inequality, and exploration of the poverty impacts of extreme climate change.”(Wire2014)
Poverty in Bangladesh, being a daunting problem in a resource-poor country like Bangladesh, is primarily a ‘rural phenomenon’. “53 percent of its rural population are classified as poor, comprising about 85 percent of the country’s poor. Achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving poverty to 26.5 percent by 2015 will require a growth rate of at least 4.0 percent in agriculture and 7.0 percent in the non-farm sector. However, economic and institutional realities, the country’s geographical and demographic characteristics, and its vulnerability to natural disasters, make this a very challenging task”(Agriculture in South Asia cited in Mashreque:2014)
Land-base in rural areas is shrinking ‘while the country’s population is growing at the rate of 1.6 percent per year, demographic pressures and increased urbanization has caused cultivated area to decline at a rate of 1 percent per year. “As cropping intensity has approached its limit (about 175 percent now), growth will need to come from intensification of cereal production, diversification into high-value crop and non-crop activities, and value addition in the agro-processing sector, including storage, processing and marketing. This will require reforming the agricultural research and extension systems, and financial and other regulations. Land administration and security issues also need to be addressed”(ibid 2014)
“The cycle of poverty exacerbates the potential negative impacts of climate change. This phenomenon is defined when poor families become trapped in poverty for at least three generations and obtain limited or no access to resources, causing them to be disadvantaged and unable to break the cycle; this cycle is referred to as the poverty trap. In well-off countries, coping with climate change has largely been a matter of adjusting thermostats, dealing with longer, hotter summers, and observing seasonal shifts; for those in poverty, weather-related disasters, unproductive harvests, or even family members falling ill can facilitate crippling economic shocks. Aside from these economic shocks, widespread famine, drought, and potential humanistic shocks can affect an entire nation. High levels of poverty and low levels of human development limit capacity of poor households to manage climate risks. With limited access to formal insurance, low incomes, and meager assets, poor households must cope with climate-related shocks under highly constrained conditions.”(Wikipedia2014)
Rural poverty in particular
As a matter of fact poverty remains a woefully stupendous crisis afflicting different types of low-income households in all-environmental settings. “Impoverization is staggering despite increasing gross national product, capital-intensive industrialization, export production, and market-oriented growth. Discrimination in major sectors of development has downtrodden the mass of peasants, industrial laborers, workers, and other low-income groups.Researchers point out that the gap between income and expenditure of the low-income group – a clear sign of income poverty – creates manifold social problems including violence and corruption. Poor salary structure of the fixed income group causes erosion of ethical values. The members of this group living in metropolitan cities and peri-urban communities have inadequate level of living, with poor health status, poor food, insanitary housing and poor amenities. On the other hand, income of the wage labor, marginal peasants and the landless in rural areas is too meager to make both ends meet.'(New Nation .2015) The beleaguered migrant labors rushing in towns for working in industrial, manufacturing sectors and those drawing small amount of money from rendering services in private sector and from various small trades suffer a lot as the most vulnerable. More, aggravation of unemployment situation in villages and towns is worsening poverty situation that creates the crisis of terrorism of the spoiled youth. Distressingly low income group and the unemployed youth / girls having no income source are hard hit for tremendous rise in cost of living as well as for unprecedented inflationary any stress caused by extremely high salaries of the consultants and high level project personnel and corruption of the high-ups in bureaucratic contingents of administration. The situation such as this warrants a systematic policy analysis on the economy, society and poverty situation in Bangladesh. The least developed countries (LDCs) can pin high hopes about the future of anti poverty social movement. “For, the UN is determined to combat a worse poverty situation a threat to human dignity – by declaring International Decade for the Eradication of Poverty (1997-2006). More heartening is the advocacy and campaign for Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to curb poverty situation. Constitutional obligations, various international conference, UN poverty alleviation decade and MDGs mandate governments to promote improvement of the lower income group of population and sustainable development through resilient macro economics and different social indicators as the targets for social welfare programs. The state shaped the policy framework and this turned to the latest dimension of poverty alleviation policy in the name of Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). Of late,the planning and policymaking agencies of Bangladesh have adopted appropriate strategies for economic growth and poverty reduction. The target of social welfare is to be achieved through a comprehensive approach on the social indicators like adult literacy, enrollment, health, and population. It is true that stable growth is absolutely impossible without poverty alleviation. Contemporary policy concerns about the magnitude of poverty emphasize increasing institutional attention to the alleviation of worst form of pauperization. Hardcore poverty (HCP) now posing a formidable threat to stability is the culmination of fuzzy governance and misdirected policy intervention. Policy strategies influenced by exogenous factors like globalization and SAP rather add to structural tension by reinforcing HCP. Challenges of the new millennium are hard facts about structural tension that looms large in HCP. Policy revision with shifting strategies has been given due institutional attention with the advent of the issue of HCP. However, it is not presumptive to comment that peasant economy developed overtime as a sign of stable agricultural development is facing griping cries in the midst of HCP. Some features of crisis syndrome bedeviling peasant economic life are: population explosion, fragmentation and subdivision of holding, river erosion, flood, draught, epidemics, politics of scarcity, indebtedness, bhumi santras (land terrorism), loss of cooperative based integration, dilapidated living conditions, malnutrition, starvation, like access to marketing and adverse effects of external intervention that threaten withdrawal of govt. subsidies.”(ibid) Human development sector is considered of critical importance for poverty alleviation.
Target oriented emphasis of this sector is aimed at increasing income generating activities for the surplus human resources. The micro credit delivery system intends to enhance productive capacities of the poor enabling them to find way out of dependency. This is sort of outreach program now under the threshold of expansion to address the issue of hard core poverty. Another outreach program to ‘put the last first’ is non-formal primary education (NFPE).Nevertheless hard facts about the lives of the ‘last’ but not least are starvation, half meal, malnutrition, disease, epidemics, poor housing and unhygienic living conditions, ill treatment by the security forces and fear of hooliganism. Many a study on human development presents a pen picture about a grim poverty situation touching upon hard facts about the suffering masses remaining at the outer margin of development policies. The dichotomy between development and poverty continues to be a palpable fact of south Asian situational context. Policy institutions both at the micro and macro levels hardly scale up articulation of the ideas of those living at the corner of misfortune. Lofty ideas are within the confines of conventional wisdom suffering from subjectivity and misconception. Policy intervention today is thus devoid of its objective content much less capable of facing the challenges of the new millennium. ‘The dominant paradigm of human development with regard to gender issue and child in particular is completely based on conceptual abstraction sidetracking hard facts about the disadvantaged lots. These lacunae in conceptual scheme demands objective policy analyses based on class analysis of feminism and child development. Forward-looking programs of women development, for illustration, favour high status women. Daughters of well-known social workers and women organizers obtain easy access to the benefits of public policy. They are much less likely to be socially neglected compared to their poor counterparts that cannot afford such benefits. In another example, child development policy barely addresses the street child as the sub-unit. Street child is neglected as untouchables suffering manifold harassment, abuses and hazards. True, socio economic differentials along class lines influence the direction of human development policy in a highly stratified South Asian society. Bangladesh is no exception.”(ibid)
Poor as the most vulnerable
It needs no stressing that the people in developing countries are four times more likely to die in natural disasters than people in developed countries. An increase in the global temperature is likely to potentially result in a sea level rise as much as one meter that may cause inundation of costal areas and high frequency of submersion of vast area under water. The consequences are being faced by the people in different parts of the world regarding health hazards, natural calamities, draught, acid rain, desertification, sea level rise and so many greenhouse effects. There has been a high frequency of ‘natural and man-induced disasters’ in recent years. In fact over population in Asian and African countries has caused environmental degradation. The natural resources are under tremendous pressure subject to wanton exploitation.
The policy communities should avoid stoic indifference to the damages already taking place. Unplanned urbanization with growing urban jungles and industries is polluting and suffocating air. The deluge of urbanization is beginning to adversely affect the countryside. Development under rural modernization experiment has by now shown many a contraindication. There has been wanton destruction of forest trees in costal belts that serve to absorb carbon and the scorching heat of sun. So think of green beckoning to prevent global warming. Environment economists advocate ‘carbon-neutral economic production system’. This is the need of the hour. All the same they think to maintain ecological balance and bio-diversity in the Sundarbans. Production of environment friendly renewable energy technologies is under active consideration. There is a plan to ‘bring 20 per cent of total land under afforestation programmes by 2015 to attain self-sufficiency in forest resources’. Aded to it is the danger of using fuels and energy especially fossil fuel
We are now familiar with a lot of slogans like cleaning air, clear suffocation, greening country, save river, protect bio-diversity -thanks to the campaign for ecology friendly sustainable development all over the world. The government guns for long term plan for river recovery, checking pollution, massive afforestation and promoting renewable energy.
So far as Bangladesh is concerned , as an environment scientist forecast, ‘with one meter sea-level change, area of high salinity intrusion will increase from existing area of 13 per cent of Bangladesh land area to 31 per cent. The entire south and southwestern part of the Ganges-Padma-Lower and Meghna river system will be affected by high salinity penetration. This will reduce the crop-yield substantially in the affected areas.
“Poverty is widely understood to be a key factor that increases the propensity for individuals and households to be harmed by climatic shocks and stresses. This review explores recent literature at the nexus of climate change impacts, vulnerability, and poverty. Within this literature, poverty is increasingly recognized as a dynamic and multidimensional condition that is shaped by the interplay of social, economic, political, and environmental processes, individual and community characteristics, and historical circumstances. While climate change is never seen as a sole cause of poverty, research has identified numerous direct and indirect channels through which climatic variability and change may exacerbate poverty, particularly in less developed countries and regions. Recent studies have also investigated the effects of climate change on economic growth and poverty levels, formation of poverty traps, and poverty alleviation efforts. These studies demonstrate that climate change-poverty linkages are complex, multifaceted, and context-specific. Priority issues for future work include greater attention to factors that promote resilience of poor populations, a stronger focus on nonmonetary dimensions of poverty, investigation of the impacts of climate change on relative poverty and inequality, and exploration of the poverty impacts of extreme climate change.”(Wire2014)
Poverty in Bangladesh, being a daunting problem in a resource-poor country like Bangladesh, is primarily a ‘rural phenomenon’. “53 percent of its rural population are classified as poor, comprising about 85 percent of the country’s poor. Achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving poverty to 26.5 percent by 2015 will require a growth rate of at least 4.0 percent in agriculture and 7.0 percent in the non-farm sector. However, economic and institutional realities, the country’s geographical and demographic characteristics, and its vulnerability to natural disasters, make this a very challenging task”(Agriculture in South Asia cited in Mashreque:2014)
Land-base in rural areas is shrinking ‘while the country’s population is growing at the rate of 1.6 percent per year, demographic pressures and increased urbanization has caused cultivated area to decline at a rate of 1 percent per year. “As cropping intensity has approached its limit (about 175 percent now), growth will need to come from intensification of cereal production, diversification into high-value crop and non-crop activities, and value addition in the agro-processing sector, including storage, processing and marketing. This will require reforming the agricultural research and extension systems, and financial and other regulations. Land administration and security issues also need to be addressed”(ibid 2014)
“The cycle of poverty exacerbates the potential negative impacts of climate change. This phenomenon is defined when poor families become trapped in poverty for at least three generations and obtain limited or no access to resources, causing them to be disadvantaged and unable to break the cycle; this cycle is referred to as the poverty trap. In well-off countries, coping with climate change has largely been a matter of adjusting thermostats, dealing with longer, hotter summers, and observing seasonal shifts; for those in poverty, weather-related disasters, unproductive harvests, or even family members falling ill can facilitate crippling economic shocks. Aside from these economic shocks, widespread famine, drought, and potential humanistic shocks can affect an entire nation. High levels of poverty and low levels of human development limit capacity of poor households to manage climate risks. With limited access to formal insurance, low incomes, and meager assets, poor households must cope with climate-related shocks under highly constrained conditions.”(Wikipedia2014)
Rural poverty in particular
As a matter of fact poverty remains a woefully stupendous crisis afflicting different types of low-income households in all-environmental settings. “Impoverization is staggering despite increasing gross national product, capital-intensive industrialization, export production, and market-oriented growth. Discrimination in major sectors of development has downtrodden the mass of peasants, industrial laborers, workers, and other low-income groups.Researchers point out that the gap between income and expenditure of the low-income group – a clear sign of income poverty – creates manifold social problems including violence and corruption. Poor salary structure of the fixed income group causes erosion of ethical values. The members of this group living in metropolitan cities and peri-urban communities have inadequate level of living, with poor health status, poor food, insanitary housing and poor amenities. On the other hand, income of the wage labor, marginal peasants and the landless in rural areas is too meager to make both ends meet.'(New Nation .2015) The beleaguered migrant labors rushing in towns for working in industrial, manufacturing sectors and those drawing small amount of money from rendering services in private sector and from various small trades suffer a lot as the most vulnerable. More, aggravation of unemployment situation in villages and towns is worsening poverty situation that creates the crisis of terrorism of the spoiled youth. Distressingly low income group and the unemployed youth / girls having no income source are hard hit for tremendous rise in cost of living as well as for unprecedented inflationary any stress caused by extremely high salaries of the consultants and high level project personnel and corruption of the high-ups in bureaucratic contingents of administration. The situation such as this warrants a systematic policy analysis on the economy, society and poverty situation in Bangladesh. The least developed countries (LDCs) can pin high hopes about the future of anti poverty social movement. “For, the UN is determined to combat a worse poverty situation a threat to human dignity – by declaring International Decade for the Eradication of Poverty (1997-2006). More heartening is the advocacy and campaign for Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to curb poverty situation. Constitutional obligations, various international conference, UN poverty alleviation decade and MDGs mandate governments to promote improvement of the lower income group of population and sustainable development through resilient macro economics and different social indicators as the targets for social welfare programs. The state shaped the policy framework and this turned to the latest dimension of poverty alleviation policy in the name of Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). Of late,the planning and policymaking agencies of Bangladesh have adopted appropriate strategies for economic growth and poverty reduction. The target of social welfare is to be achieved through a comprehensive approach on the social indicators like adult literacy, enrollment, health, and population. It is true that stable growth is absolutely impossible without poverty alleviation. Contemporary policy concerns about the magnitude of poverty emphasize increasing institutional attention to the alleviation of worst form of pauperization. Hardcore poverty (HCP) now posing a formidable threat to stability is the culmination of fuzzy governance and misdirected policy intervention. Policy strategies influenced by exogenous factors like globalization and SAP rather add to structural tension by reinforcing HCP. Challenges of the new millennium are hard facts about structural tension that looms large in HCP. Policy revision with shifting strategies has been given due institutional attention with the advent of the issue of HCP. However, it is not presumptive to comment that peasant economy developed overtime as a sign of stable agricultural development is facing griping cries in the midst of HCP. Some features of crisis syndrome bedeviling peasant economic life are: population explosion, fragmentation and subdivision of holding, river erosion, flood, draught, epidemics, politics of scarcity, indebtedness, bhumi santras (land terrorism), loss of cooperative based integration, dilapidated living conditions, malnutrition, starvation, like access to marketing and adverse effects of external intervention that threaten withdrawal of govt. subsidies.”(ibid) Human development sector is considered of critical importance for poverty alleviation.
Target oriented emphasis of this sector is aimed at increasing income generating activities for the surplus human resources. The micro credit delivery system intends to enhance productive capacities of the poor enabling them to find way out of dependency. This is sort of outreach program now under the threshold of expansion to address the issue of hard core poverty. Another outreach program to ‘put the last first’ is non-formal primary education (NFPE).Nevertheless hard facts about the lives of the ‘last’ but not least are starvation, half meal, malnutrition, disease, epidemics, poor housing and unhygienic living conditions, ill treatment by the security forces and fear of hooliganism. Many a study on human development presents a pen picture about a grim poverty situation touching upon hard facts about the suffering masses remaining at the outer margin of development policies. The dichotomy between development and poverty continues to be a palpable fact of south Asian situational context. Policy institutions both at the micro and macro levels hardly scale up articulation of the ideas of those living at the corner of misfortune. Lofty ideas are within the confines of conventional wisdom suffering from subjectivity and misconception. Policy intervention today is thus devoid of its objective content much less capable of facing the challenges of the new millennium. ‘The dominant paradigm of human development with regard to gender issue and child in particular is completely based on conceptual abstraction sidetracking hard facts about the disadvantaged lots. These lacunae in conceptual scheme demands objective policy analyses based on class analysis of feminism and child development. Forward-looking programs of women development, for illustration, favour high status women. Daughters of well-known social workers and women organizers obtain easy access to the benefits of public policy. They are much less likely to be socially neglected compared to their poor counterparts that cannot afford such benefits. In another example, child development policy barely addresses the street child as the sub-unit. Street child is neglected as untouchables suffering manifold harassment, abuses and hazards. True, socio economic differentials along class lines influence the direction of human development policy in a highly stratified South Asian society. Bangladesh is no exception.”(ibid)
Poor as the most vulnerable
It needs no stressing that the people in developing countries are four times more likely to die in natural disasters than people in developed countries. An increase in the global temperature is likely to potentially result in a sea level rise as much as one meter that may cause inundation of costal areas and high frequency of submersion of vast area under water. The consequences are being faced by the people in different parts of the world regarding health hazards, natural calamities, draught, acid rain, desertification, sea level rise and so many greenhouse effects. There has been a high frequency of ‘natural and man-induced disasters’ in recent years. In fact over population in Asian and African countries has caused environmental degradation. The natural resources are under tremendous pressure subject to wanton exploitation.
The policy communities should avoid stoic indifference to the damages already taking place. Unplanned urbanization with growing urban jungles and industries is polluting and suffocating air. The deluge of urbanization is beginning to adversely affect the countryside. Development under rural modernization experiment has by now shown many a contraindication. There has been wanton destruction of forest trees in costal belts that serve to absorb carbon and the scorching heat of sun. So think of green beckoning to prevent global warming. Environment economists advocate ‘carbon-neutral economic production system’. This is the need of the hour. All the same they think to maintain ecological balance and bio-diversity in the Sundarbans. Production of environment friendly renewable energy technologies is under active consideration. There is a plan to ‘bring 20 per cent of total land under afforestation programmes by 2015 to attain self-sufficiency in forest resources’. Aded to it is the danger of using fuels and energy especially fossil fuel
We are now familiar with a lot of slogans like cleaning air, clear suffocation, greening country, save river, protect bio-diversity -thanks to the campaign for ecology friendly sustainable development all over the world. The government guns for long term plan for river recovery, checking pollution, massive afforestation and promoting renewable energy.
So far as Bangladesh is concerned , as an environment scientist forecast, ‘with one meter sea-level change, area of high salinity intrusion will increase from existing area of 13 per cent of Bangladesh land area to 31 per cent. The entire south and southwestern part of the Ganges-Padma-Lower and Meghna river system will be affected by high salinity penetration. This will reduce the crop-yield substantially in the affected areas.
(Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque, Department of Public Administration, Chittagong University)
