DEVELOPMENT-SPAIN: More than 1.5 Million Living in Severe Poverty

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Alicia Fraerman

MADRID, May 18 2001 (IPS) - Between 1.5 and 1.7 million people are living in “severe poverty” in Spain, a country of 40 million, according to the Catholic charity group Caritas.

The secretary general of Caritas Spain, Silverio Agea, and the group’s research director Victor Renes presented a report containing recommended measures aimed at eradicating poverty in this European country, which would require 5.5 billion dollars in public spending.

Caritas’ research department submitted its “National Plan for Social Inclusion” to the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs on Thursday. The ministry is to study and approve the document by May 25, when it is scheduled to be discussed by the Council of Ministers.

If adopted by the government, the plan will be implemented from now to 2003 with state investment equivalent to 0.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Caritas, however, wants the spending to be increased to 1.5 percent of GDP.

Caritas’ plan is part of Spain’s response to the commitment assumed by the governments meeting last year in the European Council in Lisbon, where they agreed to make public sector efforts against social exclusion a priority.

Spain’s Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs is in charge of finetuning a “National Plan for Inclusion”, on which the government invited several social players, like Caritas, to collaborate.

In its report, Caritas Spain stated that “the possibilities for making an accurate diagnosis are seriously conditioned by major limitations regarding statistical information.”

The organisation blamed those limitations on a decision adopted by the government in the 1980s, which eliminated the “basic survey of family budgets,” a measure that led to “an irreparable rupture in the statistical history of inequality and poverty in Spain.”

Thus, it added, “it is not possible to directly depict the social situation over the past decade.”

For that reason, Caritas compiled data from a number of sources, including the non-governmental European Union Households Panel and Spain’s Foessa Foundation, in order to estimate the number of poor in Spain.

The latest government survey on the economically active population indicates that there are at least 524,600 families in which every adult member is unemployed, and that of the total 2.26 million unemployed, 448,000 are under 24 and 1.4 million are between the ages of 25 and 55.

The highest rates of unemployment are found in the southwestern autonomous communities of Extremadura and Andalucia.

Previous studies by Caritas Spain observed that severe poverty had grown in the 1990s, after a significant drop in the 1980s.

The studies, posted on the Caritas Spain web site (http:/www.caritas.es), found that poverty, especially in its most extreme expression, was concentrated in the cities, and that the poor in rural areas “are older and amply protected by the pension system.”

According to Caritas Spain, the highest poverty rates are found in provinces along the Portuguese border like Avila, Badajoz, Caceres, Orense, Salamanca and Zamora, in the regions of Extremadura, Andalucia and the Canary Islands, in some parts of the region of Levante, and in Spain’s enclaves in North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla).

The regions with the lowest poverty rates are Madrid, Navarra, Rioja and the Basque country.

Caritas noted that poverty was increasingly becoming a phenomenon affecting the young, and that 44.1 percent of Spain’s poor were under 25, while 53.2 percent of those living in severe poverty were children.

The report also states that “although they make up a minority of the poor, impoverished gypsies and immigrants (Africans, South Americans and East Europeans) find themselves in a very problematic situation of poverty and are enormously disadvantaged.

“These ethnic minorities, who may or may not figure in the censuses, account for an important part of the severe poverty in the country.

“The poor carry the main burden of most of the social ills and shortcomings that exist in our country,” especially unemployment, illiteracy, drug addiction, crime, “and marginalisation in general,” stated Caritas.

“If measures are not taken to reinforce efforts against social exclusion, the actions could be left incomplete and inefficient,” Agea said at Thursday’s presentation of the report to the government.

The organisation recommended that four policies be declared policy-making and budget priorities and pillars on which the plan would be built.

The first would entail passage of a law guaranteeing a minimum income for each family, in order to ensure that the basic needs of the poorest strata of society are met.

The second is an employment policy, for which Caritas Spain proposed an integrated programme targetting the disenfranchised, taking into account the high unemployment in Spain, which exists alongside the scarcity of labour in sectors like services and farming.

The third pillar is a housing policy that would entail the implementation of a programme addressing the needs of those people and social groups that are currently in a precarious situation.

And lastly, Caritas recommended a plan for social assistance, including the strengthening of primary social services and their coordination with policies on funding, employment and housing, in order to tailor the process of social and labour insertion to the needs and circumstances of each individual, family or community.

On those basic pillars, measures focusing on education, support for keeping families together, health and the specific conditions of particular social groups like gypsies and immigrants must be designed and put into effect, Caritas added.

The Caritas officials highlighted the major gap between Spain’s level of social spending and that of the European Union as a whole. While average investment for eradicating social exclusion in the European Union stands at four percent of GDP, the Spanish government currently plans to spend just 0.2 percent.