Development & Aid, Economy & Trade, Europe, Headlines, Population

PORTUGAL: EU Membership Has Not Spelled Wealth for All

Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Oct 21 2005 (IPS) - Nearly two decades after Portugal joined the wealthy European Union, poverty and social exclusion continue to plague a full 20 percent of the population.

To the contrary of what was expected back in 1986, when Portugal became part of what was then called the European Economic Community, the social gap has widened, and today “the rich are richer and the poor are poorer,” noted João Fernándes, chairman of the executive council of the non-governmental organisation Oikos-Cooperation and Development.

Statistics presented this week by Oikos, which would seem more characteristic of developing nations than of countries of the industrialised North, show that the 100 largest fortunes in Portugal account for 17 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

The NGO also pointed out that the richest one-fifth of Portugal’s 10.2 million people hold 45.9 percent of the national wealth, while one-fifth of the population lives in a state of poverty.

But if the state subsidies received by people deemed “at risk of poverty” are not counted, the proportion of people living below the poverty line rises from 20 to 26 percent, according to Eurostat, the EU statistical office.

Among the most dramatic cases are 120,000 pensioners who were self-employed and now receive a mere 201 dollars a month, more than 272,000 retired agricultural workers who draw pensions of just 243 dollars a month, and 708,000 retired industrial, trade and service sector workers whose pensions amount to only 264 dollars a month.

These statistics on the incomes of more than one million retirees provide an idea of the hardships they face, given that the price of meat or fish of at least mid-level quality stands at around 12 dollars a kg, and monthly utility bills average 80 dollars for electricity, 40 for gas and 35 for water.

But these figures, which would appear to show the darkest depths of social injustice, conceal a sort of hidden bottom: in August of this year, 145,263 people in Portugal received a social insertion income of 74.5 dollars a month.

In 2001, the last year for which official statistics are available, per capita social security expenditure in Portugal was just 56.9 percent of the average expenditure in the remaining 14 EU member states of the time.

In today’s EU, made up of 25 members since the May 1, 2004 enlargement, 72 million of the bloc’s 456 million people are considered “at risk of poverty”, and thus receive social transfer payments that provide an income slightly below 60 percent of the minimum wage of the country where they live.

Meanwhile, infant poverty rates have risen overall in the industrialised world, and among the 15 richest EU members, the highest rates are found in Italy (16.6 percent), Ireland (17.7 percent) and Portugal (15.6 percent).

And among the 25 EU member states, the highest salaries or wages are five times the lowest, on average, while Portugal shows the largest disparity: the highest are 7.4 times the lowest.

During a conference this week organised by the National Commission for Peace and Justice (CNJP), a group affiliated with the Catholic Church, participants agreed that in Portugal, poverty is not only a question of the obvious difficulties in obtaining material goods, but also a problem of exercising citizen rights.

Invited to speak at the gathering, the chairman of the Economic and Social Council of Portugal, Alfredo Bruto da Costa, said “our societies are free and consecrate the exercise of rights, but without the necessary conditions” for them to be respected.

This is especially clear in the case of social citizenship rights, “because without access to staple goods, the poorest of the poor cannot exercise their political rights as citizens,” he added, describing the phenomenon as “a contradiction between proclaimed rights and the conditions for implementing them.”

The social doctrine of the Catholic Church, which upholds the principle of the “universal destination of goods,” has so far failed “to influence the decisions of politicians and governments, with the terrible consequences that we have seen in terms of poverty,” said Bruto da Costa.

Economist Manuela Silva, vice-president of the CNJP, lamented the proliferation of what she called “false truths,” especially with regard to curbing the deficit, which should be “an instrument, rather than an objective, of economic policy.”

Referring to the progress that Portugal has made in recent years, she argued that “it is not acceptable for a country that has already achieved a certain level of income to have such a high poverty level.” She pointed out that not only is Portugal the country with the largest income gap among the 15 richest EU members, but that it has also seen the most marked growth in inequality in the entire bloc.

Silva said the experience and knowledge exist to dismantle the myth of “growth first, distribution later,” but added that among the least-educated, the belief persists that “poverty is just a fact of life, similar to what is said about globalisation – that it is a reality and there is nothing that can be done about it.”

The Catholic Church should “send out a stronger signal in favour of an alternative form of globalisation,” said Isabel Allegro de Magalhães, the head of Graal, a Catholic women’s movement.

That view was backed by Jesuit priest Herminio Rico, who asked the participants: “Do we want to be as rich as the richest countries, or fight poverty in our country and the world?”

Dominican priest Luiz de França lamented that many leaders of the business community and the Catholic Church scorn these kinds of arguments as “outmoded” or “Marxist”.

The most radical proposal was set forth by Catholic priest Francisco Crespo, the president of the National Confederation of Solidarity Institutions, who said the fight against poverty should be directly coordinated by Portuguese Socialist Prime Minister José Sócrates.

But in order for that to happen, the magnitude of poverty in the country would have to be openly recognised.

Chief editor of the Lisbon newspaper Publico, Amílcar Correia, wrote in an editorial that “poverty in Portugal is a serious problem, and the failure to recognise this has recently been shown to be one of the biggest hurdles standing in the way of its eradication.”

Poverty, wrote Correia, “is still seen today with indifference and apathy in Portuguese society, perhaps because it is a persistent phenomenon, or because the poor themselves internalise the sense of fatalism that poverty is just a fact of life, in a country where the welfare state has never gone beyond the incipient stage.”