Credit: WFP/Arete/Siegfried Modola

By Olivier De Schutter and Luis Felipe López-Calva
WASHINGTON DC, Mar 8 2024 (IPS)

Poverty is multidimensional. If we think of classical thinkers, Adam Smith referred to the basis of self-respect and the importance of being able to “appear in public without shame,” while John Rawls wrote about “primary goods,” which included rights and liberties as well as income and wealth.

Amartya Sen, advancing in formalization, brought the notion of “functionings” as the “beings and doings” effectively available to people in their capability set, so they can “pursue the life plans they have reasons to value.”

It is mainstream today to argue that poverty is multidimensional, moving beyond just access to goods and services. But exploring which dimensions are “appropriate” in each context has been a fundamental pursuit of development analysts and practitioners in recent decades.

It has been almost 30 years since Sabina Alkire devoted her work to the understanding, classification, and measurement of the many dimensions of poverty, particularly those that are “hidden” in our concepts and indicators.

Indeed, there are some dimensions associated with experiencing the condition of poverty that cannot be so easily observed and have not been properly measured yet are very important when it comes to policy effectiveness.

Those dimensions include aspects related to emotions that trigger behavioural responses: feelings of isolation, discrimination, effects on the sense of dignity and self-respect, and disempowerment. We have come a long way in our thinking about poverty, but our actions to tackle it and to understand the complex interactions between dimensions remains underdeveloped.

At the World Bank, the project on “Voices of the Poor,” started almost 30 years ago, strove to think differently about poverty. It drew on the views of 60,000 people living in poverty across 60 countries to better understand the challenges they faced, helping expand our understanding of poverty to include not only income and consumption but also lack of access to education and health, powerlessness, voicelessness, vulnerability, and fear.

Later, in 2012, the Social Observatory project used a broader view of poverty dimensions to make anti-poverty projects more adaptive—and ultimately more effective. Since 2018, the World Bank’s multidimensional poverty measure has gone beyond monetary deprivation to include other dimensions such as access to education, health, nutritional, and basic infrastructure services.

And in 2023, the World Bank began publishing the multidimensional poverty index—an effort by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the United Nations Development Programme—which is especially pertinent for low-income countries.

More recently, researchers from the University of Oxford and the global anti-poverty movement ATD Fourth World uncovered a set of “hidden dimensions of poverty” through a three-year participatory research project in six countries (Bangladesh, Bolivia, France, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, and the United States) that sought to further refine our understanding of poverty.

The teams identified nine dimensions of poverty that were common across all countries, despite the vastly different circumstances in each, using the “merging of knowledge” methodology. This approach brings together people in poverty (with their knowledge of the reality of poverty), academics (with their scientific knowledge), and practitioners (with their action-based knowledge).

The identified dimensions included a lack of decent work or income, of course, but also feelings of powerlessness, lacking control, and experiencing “povertyism” (negative attitudes and behaviours toward people living in poverty).

These lesser-recognized and lesser-visible dimensions of poverty are no less important for policies designed to combat poverty than a person’s income or access to employment. Escaping poverty will be far more difficult if you don’t also address the discrimination people in poverty face, the shame they experience, or the “aspirations gap” that results from being raised in a low-income household.

But until now, policy makers have lacked the practical tools they need to properly capture and combat these hidden, and thus largely ignored, dimensions of poverty.

The Inclusive and Deliberative Elaboration and Evaluation of Policies (IDEEP) tool, which was presented at the ATD Fourth World, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank conference on Addressing the Hidden Dimensions of Poverty in Knowledge and Policies, is the first of its kind to help policy makers transform the findings of this research into action.

Created in partnership between the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and ATD Fourth World, the IDEEP tool supports policy makers in designing, implementing, and evaluating anti-poverty policies in direct partnership with people in poverty, ensuring all its dimensions, including those that are “hidden,” are taken into account.

This is crucial, given that policies that do not account for the views and lived experiences of people in poverty tend to be riddled with blind spots, particularly around these hidden dimensions.

The IDEEP tool identified social isolation among disadvantaged communities as an unintended result of a housing project in Mauritius, for example, and institutional maltreatment resulting in fewer people accessing social protection benefits in France.

The right to participation is a human right. Only by upholding it will we achieve better informed, more effective, and more imaginative policy making. Yet the record of participatory processes in anti-poverty policy making is mixed, with policy makers often simply “informing” or “consulting” people in poverty, rather than recognizing them as the real experts about the obstacles they face.

To combat this, we need to go one step further in our efforts to fulfil the right to participation by introducing the idea of “deliberation,” which is defined in the IDEEP tool as bringing together different groups, including people in poverty, who meet, present arguments based on their unique insights, weigh them up, and propose actionable solutions.

The IDEEP tool offers a new, deliberative approach to anti-poverty policy making, one that recognizes the power imbalances inherent in traditional participatory processes and brings together different groups as equals to debate potential solutions before arriving at a consensus. This is a true merging of knowledge.

This approach is especially urgent as we rapidly head towards 2030, the target year for achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including the goal of eradicating extreme poverty for all people everywhere (SDG1). If we continue on a path of business as usual, we will not achieve this ambitious goal.

We need to widen our perspective and rethink how we can jumpstart a process of inclusive and sustainable growth for all; this includes engaging with those with lived experiences in poverty in the search for meaningful, holistic policy solutions. Without embracing this, efforts to combat poverty—and its hidden dimensions—will fall flat.

Olivier De Schutter is UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Human Rights Council; Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva is Global Director, Poverty and Equity Global Practice.

Source: World Bank

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World Food Programme food distribution in Sudan - Credit: UNAMID / Shangil Tobaya

By Olivier De Schutter
BRUSSELS, Belgium, Aug 7 2023 (IPS)

The fragile state of global food systems has reached a crossroads. Recent headlines underscore the profound challenges we now confront.

The United Nations released sobering statistics that 122 million more people are going hungry than in 2019, erasing years of progress. One week later, Russia announced it was ending the crucial deal that allowed Ukraine’s vast grain production to be shipped to the outside world.

This deal was an important factor in alleviating last year’s record high food prices. Russia then proceeded to bomb grain facilities in Ukraine, causing wheat and corn prices to surge. Simultaneously, soaring heat, blazing wildfires, and devastating floods are jeopardising harvests around the world. Meanwhile the food industry has recorded billions in profits.

These events tell us we are facing both acute shocks to food security, and chronic underlying food poverty. Even while the industrial globalised food system generates bountiful profits. These are all symptoms of the same disease – and highlight the urgent need for major changes in our food systems.

Two statistics from the UN’s hunger report are perhaps most concerning.

First, the projection that almost 600 million people could be chronically undernourished in 2030. This shows that the Sustainable Development Goals – in which governments committed to end hunger by that date – lie in tatters, unless urgent action is taken.

Second, the finding that a decent nutritious diet is now out of reach for nearly half the planet. The cost of a healthy diet has shot up just as people are seeing disposable incomes tumble. What an indictment of our failing food system.

Olivier De Schutter

Rather, the industrial food system is simply not delivering. It prioritises market demand and profit, over meeting human needs. It is more profitable to produce mass commodities for animal feed, biofuels and processed foods, ultimately serving rich consumers with an ability to pay, rather than the needs of poor communities and hungry populations. The industrial food system is not built to ensure access to food and healthy diets for all.

Hence only about 55% of people around the globe live in countries with enough fresh fruits and vegetables available to meet the World Health Organization’s minimum recommended daily consumption target.

Our food system has had some unlucky shocks these last three years – from Covid-19, climate impacts and conflict. But it was also disastrously vulnerable. The industrial food system is built upon layers of concentration which are liable to disruption.

Half the calories consumed around the world come from just three staple crops (wheat, maize and rice), grown from a narrow range of seed varieties, exported from a small number of countries, shipped around the world by a handful of powerful trading firms. This is profitable, but it is not robust.

Record high debts in many Global South countries are also preventing them from investing to combat hunger, trapping them in a vicious cycle. Global South countries have been forced to specialise in growing and exporting cash crops like cocoa, coffee and cotton in order to pay down debts – at the expense of growing food for their own populations.

They are thus required to import food – food which is now much more expensive – and unable to invest in resilient local food production. Africa is today a net importer of food – with net food imports of $35 billion in 2015, expected to triple by 2025.

Governments will no doubt agree on the need to raise ambitions. But when we are so far off course, the time is up for small adjustments. We need a completely new recipe to address hunger and build resilience. Based on breaking dependence on the global market to provide adequate nutrition and feed the hungry, and rebuilding countries’ capacity to produce the food they require.

Social protection schemes must guarantee food access for the world’s poorest – with proven policies like the successful ‘Fome Zero’ programme deployed by Brazil in the 2000s that took the country off the hunger map. Urgent debt relief for heavily indebted low-income countries is also crucial to allow them to invest in anti-hunger schemes and domestic food production.

In a world of climate crisis in which more shocks are to come, resilience throughout the system must be the goal. More diverse agroecological food production, shorter food chains, and countries producing more nutritious food for their own people can unlock the food security that too many are denied. It’s time we admit the industrial food system is starving people.

Let these alarming headlines be a turning point to a different road, a route towards resilience.

Olivier De Schutter is co-chair of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights

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Street Library in Mayotte, July 2016. Credit: François Phliponeau/ATD Fourth World - Centre Joseph Wresinski

By Olivier De Schutter and Donald Lee
NEW YORK, Oct 15 2021 (IPS)

In September 2021, children in the northern hemisphere returned to school after the summer break. For some, the end of the holidays signaled a return to normalcy and to the joys of learning after facing months of school closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic. For the majority of children in the Global South, however, the return to reality looked grimmer.

Digital divide leaving billions behind

Many children have been unable to pursue their education due to school closures reported in over 188 countries. While governments have sought to implement solutions for children to continue learning from home using broadcast and Internet-based remote learning policies, nearly one third of children worldwide could not make use of these solutions. UNICEF notes that three quarters of these students either come from rural areas, belong to the poorest households, or both: these children have been left behind due to the digital divide. As a result, the organization estimates that more than one billion children are at risk of falling behind on education.

Furthermore, many parents who had lost their source of income due to the pandemic had no choice but to remove their children from school so that they could help their families. Sadly, child labor has risen for the first time in two decades: 160 million children are now estimated to be working, about 8 million more than in 2017, mainly in the agricultural sector; 9 million more at risk of doing so due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Inequality and the pandemic

While the pandemic has exacerbated the inequalities children suffer in schooling, such inequalities are not new. The World Bank estimates that while 96 percent of children complete their secondary education in OECD countries, that rate is only 35 percent in low-income countries. In 2018, an estimated 258 million children and youth – mainly from poor households – were out of school.

Whereas the number of children, adolescents and youth excluded from education fell steadily in the decade following 2000, progress has stalled since, especially for poor children in low-income countries: in 2014, only one quarter of the poorest children in these countries completed primary school. Indeed, in low and lower-middle income countries, the likelihood of enrollment in primary and secondary schools still depends on parental income and education levels to a significant extent.

Festival of Learning in Guatemala, November 2015. Credit: Sulma Flores/ATD Fourth World – Centre Joseph Wresinski

Financial barriers to opportunities

Several important mechanisms are at work. While nearly 90 percent of low-income countries officially provide free primary education, the hidden costs remain high: transportation costs, learning materials and school supplies may be prohibitive, preventing parents from sending their children to school. Moreover, more than 40 percent of low-income countries charge fees for lower-secondary education. This may discourage parents who live on low incomes to send their children to school, especially given the high opportunity costs involved where the alternative to high school education is to contribute to the family income by working. Lowering these financial barriers can significantly improve enrollment and attendance rates.

Even when children are enrolled in formal education, other obstacles prevent them from effectively learning. Children from poor households routinely face exclusion and discrimination. A participatory action research project led by ATD Fourth World in Belgium found that the shame experienced by children in poverty was one of the key obstacles to successful schooling. Shame, as well as fear of abuse, also prevents students from poor families and their parents from engaging with teachers.

Children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds also tend to be better prepared for formal education. As a result, across nearly all countries, the family background of a student (parental education, socioeconomic status, conditions at home) remains the single most important predictor of learning outcomes.

In France for example, the difference in outcomes on the tests of the Programme for International Student Assessment between the richest and poorest students amounted to 115 points in the science performance, the equivalent of about three years of schooling. A vicious cycle emerges: parents and children from low-income households may lose their motivation to prioritize schooling because they perceive their chances of performing well as low.

Children in Kenya who dropped out of school cited the difficulty of performing well, rather than costs, parental pressure, or other factors, as a major reason for leaving. This leads low-income households to underinvest in education, thus perpetuating poverty from one generation to the next and relegating equality of opportunities to a distant dream.

Public action is urgently needed

Increasing public budgets going to education is essential to break the cycles of poverty.

Educational systems must avoid, at all costs, reproducing inequalities that are inherited from childhood, especially for children from families living in poverty. There is a strong relationship between public investment in education and social mobility, especially for developing economies and in relation to primary education.

The Education 2030 Framework for Action provides that States should allocate at least 4 to 6 percent of their GDP, and/or at least 15 to 20 per cent of public expenditure, to education. Indeed, recent research, examining case studies from seven countries — from Brazil to Vietnam and from India to Namibia — demonstrates the benefits of public education and its potential for social transformation.

Fostering inclusive education

We need well-trained (and well-paid) teachers who are present and engage with children. We need schools that reduce the role of selection and assessment based on academic performance alone and instead that value each child for what they contribute to the classroom. We need schools that are fully accessible to everyone – regardless of age, gender, class or disability. And, we need more extracurricular opportunities after school hours that are open to all children at no additional charge, since children from poor households are far less likely to partake in afterschool activities, particularly in music and sports, than their peers from wealthier families.

A recent report presented to the United Nations General Assembly, underscores the urgent need for inclusive education. Schools must not be spaces of failure, but rather places where children can discover their talents and abilities, where they earn qualifications that enable them to keep learning or to find a job in which they can continue to develop. They must be places where collaboration – rather than competition – is nurtured and valued, and where otherness is accepted and cherished.

Inclusive education can also challenge stereotypes about the poor, and the associated discrimination they often suffer: in New Delhi, India, when elite schools catering to students from wealthy households were required to set aside 20 per cent of places to children from poorer families, pro-social behaviour among students increased, and prejudice against children from poor backgrounds diminished.

Schools have too often been seen as institutions that select, rank and exclude. They should instead empower, value and include. This will allow them to fully contribute to breaking the vicious cycles that perpetuate poverty, condemning children from low-income households to a life-long sentence for a crime they have not committed.

Olivier De Schutter is the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and Professor at UCLouvain and Sciences Po (Paris). On 20 October, he will present a report on the persistence of poverty to the UN General Assembly. Donald Lee is President of the International Movement ATD Fourth World and a former senior economist at the United Nations in New York.

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Children in drought-struck Camotán, in Chiquimula province, Guatemala, in 2010. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Olivier De Schutter, Jochen Flasbarth, and Dr. Hans R. Herren
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 25 2013 (IPS)

Reducing the proportion of undernourished people by half until 2015 was one of the Millennium Development Goals that the international community set in 2000. It will not be reached: At least 870 million people worldwide – and one child in five – still go hungry; this in a world where we already produce enough food today to feed nine billion people in 2050.

Further progress towards reaching this goal can be made in the remaining months, but we must ask ourselves what comes afterwards. The debate on the so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to be reached by 2030, has already begun. On Wednesday, Sep. 25, heads of states and governments will meet in New York."The aim here is not the maximum conceivable yield but a sustainable and environmentally supportable yield."

Defeating hunger remains a priority. This is not simply a matter of providing everyone with enough food; crucial for the future of all human beings is how this should happen.

“Food security and nutrition for all through sustainable agriculture and food systems” must be set as one of the fundamental goals of global development. It is therefore imperative for agricultural policy to change course, as requested in 2008 by IAASTD, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development. The same message was reiterated in the Rio+20 Declaration “The Future We Want”.

What constitutes sustainable agriculture?

Widely spread forms of industrial, conventional agriculture are not sustainable. With high-yielding varieties and a heavy reliance on fertilisers, water, pesticides, and energy, it has delivered impressive yield increases, but only by exhausting its own production base in the long run.

It not only depends on high levels of inputs, but also leaves behind degraded soils, polluted water, and depleted biodiversity. According to the often-cited IAASTD report, 1.9 billion hectares of land are already affected by degradation due to unsustainable use. This comes at an annual cost of around 40 billion dollars and negatively affects the livelihood of 1.5 billion people worldwide.

Industrial, conventional and certain forms of traditional agriculture are also major contributors to climate change. Meanwhile, the rural populations in developing countries remain mired in poverty.

This form of food production must be replaced by sustainable forms of agriculture, which maintain and restore natural soil fertility, protect water sources and promote biodiversity. Sustainable agriculture has economic and social benefits while remaining within the natural boundaries of our planet.

The aim here is not the maximum conceivable yield but a sustainable and environmentally supportable yield. This is certainly enough to nourish the nine billion people who will inhabit the earth by mid-century.

According to the “Green Economy Report” published in 2012 by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), food availability per capita could be increased through sustainable production methods by 14 percent, creating millions of new jobs in rural regions in the process, and thus alleviating poverty. At the same time, agriculture could reduce its ecological footprint.

The main players here are small-scale farmers. Worldwide, 70 percent of food production comes from small farms, which collectively use 40 percent of the world’s arable land. They would be able to nourish people in developing countries, but will have to be supported in this endeavour.

They need guarantees regarding the ownership and rights of use for their land, better access to education, information and markets, as well as fair prices for their products. Rural infrastructure and services are a key factor in this and must be promoted much more intensively by state and international authorities.

Above all, the position of women must be improved. Women play a key role in food production, but earn less and have fewer rights. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), equal access to education and agricultural resources in Africa would boost harvests by 20 to 30 percent.

A significant challenge that needs to be urgently addressed is food waste. Worldwide, a third of what is produced goes to waste. Developed countries have a particular responsibility to act: they throw away 222 million tonnes of food every year, which is approximately the annual harvest of sub-Saharan Africa.

Finally, a fairer trading environment is critical. The rules of agricultural trade will have to be adapted to take into account the needs of small-scale farmers. At present, this is not the case.

Developed countries need to reform their agricultural subsidies and trade policies. Government payments coupled to production, in addition to export subsidies, expose farmers in developing countries to unfair competition and can therefore impede their production. These subsidies must be converted to payments for ecosystem services and public goods.

Land grabbing, the acquisition of fertile land by financially strong investors over the interest of the local land users, must be stopped. Activities that exacerbate food price volatility, such as financial speculation on food commodity futures markets, must be reined in.

Food security and nutrition for all through sustainable agriculture and food systems

According to these models, a sustainable development goal should comprise the following elements:

1. End malnutrition and hunger in all of their forms, so that all people enjoy the right to adequate food at all times.

2. Ensure that all smallholders and rural communities, in particular women and disadvantaged groups, enjoy a decent livelihood and income, and secure their right to access productive resources, such as land and water, everywhere.

3. Achieve the transformation to sustainable, diverse and resilient agriculture and food systems that conserve natural resources and ecosystems. The loss of fertile land is not acceptable. Instead, land degradation must be minimised and inevitable degradation compensated through regeneration and restoration measures.

4. Minimise post-harvest food losses and food waste.

5. Establish inclusive, transparent, and equitable legislative and other decision-making processes on food, nutrition, and agriculture at all levels.

Olivier De Schutter is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food. Jochen Flasbarth is President of the Federal Environment Agency in Germany. Dr. Hans R. Herren is President of the Biovision Foundation in Zurich and the Millennium Institute in Washington.