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 Editorials | June 2005 
Poverty Needs Solutions Not Numbers Game
 Kelly Arthur Garrett - The Herald Mexico
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. And then there are statistics about poverty, which make those first three categories look respectable. The latest effort in the quantification of human misery comes from a sort of blue ribbon panel assembled by the Social Development Secretariat (Sedesol) with the authoritative-sounding name of the Technical Comission for Poverty Measurement.
As might be expected from any government-mandated body that wants to stay in existence, the commission released last week a report rosy enough to give its sponsors plenty to brag about. At the same time, the numbers are sufficiently ambiguous to provide pundits with something to argue over at least until next year’s version comes out.
Bottom line, the commission found that the raw number of poor people in Mexico in 2004 was 49 million, down from 52.5 million in 2000. With 3.5 million fewer poor people than four years ago, less than half the Mexican population (47 percent) is now considered poor. This is a good thing, we’re told, a snapshot of a glass half full. “It gives new encouragement,” according to Sedesol, “for the work being carried out in this country to overcome poverty.”
Let’s resist for the moment the temptation to make sniffy comments on the use of the word “encouragement” in relation to 47 percent of the population living on less than 1,500 pesos a month. Progress is progress, after all, and no one can deny that it’s better for the numbers to move down than up.
At the same time, though, numbers are only numbers. Numbers don’t get hungry. Numbers don’t live with fear and numbness and hopelessness. Some 49 million Mexicans do, to one extent or another. That’s probably the main take-home message from the Sedesol report, though it’s nowhere to be found in the press release.
Or take a look at another set of figures, those for Mexicans living in extreme poverty, what’s called “pobreza alimentaria.” More great news here, numerically speaking. The total’s down to 18 million, a mere 17.3 percent of the population. That percentage hasn’t been under 20 percent since the De la Madrid administration.
Here’s how to get a handle on what that really means. Go to a restaurant on a Friday night — not three-star necessarily, but a fairly decent joint. Write down on your napkin the sum of 740 pesos — about 70 U.S. dollars— which is the maximum monthly income for somebody living in extreme poverty.
Then watch how long it takes a neighboring table to run up a tab for that amount. You can probably read this column quicker.
Now picture 18 million people living for a month on what that table went through for escamoles and a couple of rounds. And of course, that doesn’t count the relatively well-off blokes making 741 pesos a month.
The modest decline in poverty in the last four years might offer more “encouragement” if it indicated that some plan was achieving success. But why exactly did the numbers go down? The short answer is: Nobody knows. The long answer is: Nobody has the slightest idea.
Macroeconomic junkies would love to say the dip in poverty reflects the recent growth in the gross domestic product. That would vindicate market ideology. Problem is, growth in the four-year period of the study (coinciding with the Fox administration) has averaged a wimpy 1.6 percent, not enough to take credit for anything. Also, the poverty numbers dropped about as much during the first two years, when there was zero growth, as they did in the last two years, when there was at least some growth.
In fact, poverty rates have been slowly declining since highs in the mid-90s (which was crisis time, you remember) no matter what the annual growth rates were. This suggests the unpleasant possibility that poverty rates have been going down simply because they were so high they had nowhere else to go.
Another interesting sub-set of statistics in the Sedesol study has to do with where the poverty decline is taking place. It’s almost all in the countryside. The number of rural poor persons dropped by about 3.5 million over the study period. The urban poor actually increased a bit. We’ll let the experts analyze that curious development, but it certainly suggests that some poverty is simply packing up and moving to the big city.
What about the money flooding into the countryside from Mexicans working in the United States? Mexico’s central bank estimates that 16 billion was sent across the border by migrants last year, and that number will jump to 20 billion this year. Only Pemex brings in more cash. Couldn’t that be responsible for much of the poverty decline?
Many believe it is. But there are a few problems with this explanation. One is that it’s too depressing to accept. If the only way a country can make even a slight dent in its poverty rate is to send millions abroad to work illegally for below-standard wages just to share some of it with poor relations — with even that shared amount being more than those poor relations could ever earn here working, even if there were jobs — well, something’s wrong with this picture.
There’s also some question about just how much money is coming in and where it’s going. Sedesol itself thinks the US$16 billion figure is exaggerated by double, and that at any rate the remissions play a very small role in reducing poverty. Some independent studies even cast doubt on the long-held assumption that most of the money goes to rural families. Some even wonder how much of it is going to the poorer classes in the first place, and whether the middle class is getting a big chunk of it.
Now there’s some future analysis to watch for. How many young Mexican men are risking their lives crossing the border and working in kitchens and facatories and fields so that Condesa teenagers can have extra iPods?
There will be much crunching of the Technical Committee’s numbers in the upcoming weeks. And there will be much use of them and those from other surveys and studies to promote political campaigns as we swing into election season.
The suggestion here is that we pay less attention to downward or upward ticks in the numbers and more to specific proposals. We already know what the numbers mean; they mean there are too many poor people in Mexico. What we need to know is what program Mr. or Ms. Candidate is proposing to solve the problem.
Not how much they’re concerned about it, not how much their heart is broken by what they see in the zonas populares, not stories about their family history of poverty, and not statements of faith in the capacity of the unfettered market to solve the problem on its own.
What we need to hear is what exactly — specifically — precisely — they’re going to do about it. |
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