DEVELOPMENT-THAILAND: Anti-Poverty Drive ‘Overambitious’ – Critics

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Nov 20 2003 (IPS) - While Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra means business when it comes to alleviating poverty, his plan is running into a wall of opposition from critics who label it ”overambitious” and ”dangerous”.

Since the weekend, when Thaksin unveiled this latest populist policy – that he can rid of Thailand’s poverty in six years – a chorus of sniping has grown from academics, economists, grassroots activists and the press.

The criticism aired during a seminar for Thai farmers in the northern town of Chiang Mai are typical. According to Thursday’s edition of ‘The Nation’ newspaper, one grassroots activist told the seminar that the six-year goal to eradicate poverty was an impossible task, while an academic had questioned the government’s sincerity towards easing the burdens of the poor.

Even the country’s leading grassroots network that champions the causes of the poor is not completely impressed.

”This is going to be a typical top-down approach to solving poverty and it will do little to empower the poor,” Prasittiporn Kan-onsri, an advisor to the Assembly of the Poor, told IPS.

An additional worry is who will benefit from the government’s handouts and how they will be chosen, he adds. ”The government always favours people who belong to Thai Rak Thai or those who always support Thai Rak Thai,” Prasittiporn added, referring to Thaksin’s ruling party, which means Thais Love Thai.

Also under scrutiny is the Thaksin model’s one-shoe-fits-all answer to poverty.

”The profile of the poor in the country will not make it easy for the government,” Parichart Siwaraksa, a social development researcher, said in an interview. ”While the plan may work in one community it may not be the case across the country.”

Thailand has an estimated 8.2 million people of its over 62 million population living in poverty. A U.N. study released this year confirmed that 86 percent of the poverty-stricken live in the rural areas, with two out of three people hailing from the country’s north-east region.

Those who fall among the millions of Thailand’s poor are people who have an income of less than either 800 baht (20 U.S. dollars) or 900 baht (22.60 dollars) per month.

But in working out who will benefit from government largess under the new anti-poverty drive, Thaksin is using a different yardstick. He has eschewed the prevailing wisdom of the poor being those earning less than 800 or 900 baht per month for specific target groups facing economic misery.

Instead, the seven groups identified by the government as targets of its anti-poverty drive are: landless farmers, the homeless, needy students, people heading for bankruptcy, labourers who have been victimised by overseas job scams, low-income earners who lack housing, and those engaged in the underground economy.

For a start, the government will implement its measures – including giving state land to landless farmers – in eight provinces. However only two of them, Nakhon Ratchasima and Udon Thani, are in the north-east poverty belt.

At a seminar on social problems and poverty where Thaksin unveiled his plan, he also underscored how he aims to satisfy this constituency of the underclass. Before the project commences on Jan. 5, those identified in the seven groups are expected to register with local authorities and describe their problems in order to assist the government devise apt solutions.

Thaksin’s knack of feeding this country with populist-policy carrots has been a hallmark of his government, since it was elected to power with an unprecedented majority at the 2001 elections.

The other initiatives of Thaksin, a wealthy business tycoon, include a deferred farm debt repayment scheme for farmers burdened with huge loans and a village fund scheme, where a one million baht (23,250 U.S. dollars) loan was granted to each of the country’s 77,000 villages for income-generating jobs.

Further, the Thaksin administration also paved the way for both the urban and rural poor to enjoy quality health care by introducing a scheme that requires patients to only pay 30 baht (70 U.S. cents) for every hospital visit.

Thaksin’s somewhat unconventional approach to helping the country’s poor – from raising the profile of their problems to offering solutions his government thought fit – initially won him praise from some of his critics.

That was attributed to two reasons: On the one hand, no government before the Thaksin administration had openly recognised the plight of the poor with a view to finding remedies.

On the other, in giving shape to a semblance of a welfare state to help the poor, including direct action from the central government, Thaksin was moving away from the pattern Bangkok had supported for decades – promoting economic growth and then hoping that its benefits will trickle down to the poor.

But as Chang Noi, a columnist for ‘The Nation,’ observed in August, the trickle-down theory has not resulted in an even distribution of wealth in this South-east Asian country.

Thailand has a huge the rich-poor divide, a fact with no parallel among neighbouring countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, he wrote. Consequently, it has made Thailand ”one of the most unequal countries in the world”.

Yet Thaksin’s remedies to help the poor can result in grave consequences, said an economist from a Bangkok-based university. ”Because the government is offering subsidies and gifts to help the people, than trying to eradicate poverty by changing the unequal distribution of wealth,” said the academic who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Furthermore, he adds, the government has failed to reveal how much its populist programmes are actually costing the country. ”They are keeping the expenses off the books, off the national budget, so it will not be scrutinised in parliament.”

In June this year, during the annual budget debate in parliament, the opposition Democrat Party accused the Thaksin administration of accumulating a massive national debt due to its non-budgetary spending for its populist programmes.

But Thaksin dismisses such criticism. ”If I didn’t have the confidence, I wouldn’t have uttered my promise (to alleviate poverty),” he told the local media this week.