Robert Buddan, Contributor
Nelson Mandela once said that poverty was a denial of human rights. Western leaders like George Bush and Nicolas Sarkozy (France) have criticised China's human rights record and a number of organisations have tried to sabotage the Olympics. This is ironic because China has eliminated more poverty than any other country in the last 30 years.
Between 1978 and 1993, poverty fell from 250 million to 80 million, and by 2005 to a further 23 million. An astonishing 220 million people and more had been taken out of poverty in 27 years. Poverty fell from 30 per cent to under 2.5 per cent. China is responsible for 75 per cent of poverty reduction in the developing world since 1980. That's a massively successful human rights story.
Even the head of the World Bank's resident mission in China says the country is a model to follow, and this organisation that promotes capitalism worldwide has made communist China its biggest loan recipient. It has lent China nearly US$35 billion in 20 years. Earlier this year, the bank appointed a Beijing professor of economics as its chief economist to teach the bank China's lessons in poverty reduction. He replaced a French economist and becomes the first appointee from the developing countries to hold this position. The main lesson the professor will take to the World Bank is that poverty reduction does not come automatically from GDP growth. Growth is essential but the state and national mobilisation are necessary to achieve the degree of rapid poverty reduction achieved in China.
Pro-poor policies
China started a massive campaign to create special institutions for poverty reduction and encouraged all social sectors to participate in pro-poor policies and projects (including those funded by the World Bank), under a seven-year poverty alleviation programme (1993-2000) that made poverty reduction a priority. The programme accelerated poverty reduction in rural China.
It was this integrated approach between the communist state and the capitalist World bank that the bank calls a model to emulate. A state organisation run at the highest level was responsible for research and drafting policies; coordination; monitoring statistics; selecting the poorest districts; organising advocacy and publicity; formulating plans; training officials; and undertaking international exchanges. Markets cannot plan. Only organisations can. And China isn't done yet. It now has another poverty reduction plan for 2001 to 2010.
In May, China and the World Bank held meetings to export the revolution to Africa - the revolution in poverty reduction. We have learned the history of how Europe underdeveloped Africa from Walter Rodney. Now we might see how Africa develops Africa with China's help and the World Bank's input. For the past few years the World Bank has been learning from China what works and what doesn't and why, in order to reduce poverty under different conditions. For example, while Bangladesh has not had the spectacular results that China has had, it is moving in the right direction based on what is being learned.
Global inequality
These efforts at exporting poverty reduction could not have come at a better time. Global inequality is growing. In 2005, the United Nations reported that global inequality had increased over the previous ten years. Ten per cent of the world's population takes 54 per cent of the world's income and 2.5 billion people subsist on five per cent of that wealth. However, the World Bank finds that poverty reduction programmes in most countries were not succeeding. It concluded that economic growth by itself is not sufficient. How the benefits of growth are distributed is just as important.
The Inter-American Development Bank has now warned Jamaica that, according to its research, poverty levels could rise from the present 14 per cent to 26 per cent. It says that Jamaica is one of those countries particularly vulnerable to the price rises in food and energy, since many families already spend 60 per cent to 70 per cent of its budget on food. Price increases could easily push them into poverty. The IDB, like the PNP, has been saying that it is important to protect the gains in poverty reduction. The previous administration had brought poverty levels down from over 30 per cent.
Jamaican strategy
Jamaica needs a new strategy to fight poverty. There are some things we can do to complement the work of the Planning Institute of Jamaica and its Poverty Monitoring and Social Policy Analysis Programme (PMSPA). In 2005, I recommended the establishment of a ministry of human development to take charge of all poverty reduction measures, many of which had been fragmented, something the NGO community complained about. It is this kind of high-level central agency leadership that China has used. It is here that the role of the state and its ability to mobilise becomes important. It is within this ministry that the PMSPA would be located.
Second, the ministry and government would have to rethink some policy strategies like the all-inclusive tourism concept. The PMSPA has found that some of the poorest parishes in Jamaica are precisely those in which the glamour of all-inclusive hotels, never popular among ordinary Jamaicans, exists. This now places an onus on the policy makers to respond to what this social policy analysis has found and create ways to link tourism with parish and community development.
The third thing to do is to join up with the IDB and World Bank to learn the lessons from China that can be applied to developing countries, and in our case, to small countries with high levels of dependency on food, energy and foreign exchange. Both the IDB and the World Bank say that poverty reduction is among their new priorities. Both are willing to invest in the Chinese model modified to make poverty reduction sustainable rather than reversible, the danger we presently face.
Finally, countries must protect their social and economic interests from unfair globalisation. The WTO's woes have caused globalisers themselves to talk about fair and better globalisation as a sense of gloom looms. China and India have blocked efforts to force their agriculture open to rich countries that continue to subsidise theirs. The board of the Jamaica Confederation of Trade Unions has asked the Government not to sign the European Partnership Agreement, which is a backdoor to this same globalisation. We need to get our agriculture right before we do this, and we must have a plan for rural development integrated with industry, not marginalised by industry, as is the case with the all-inclusives.
Poverty is indeed a denial of human rights. All Jamaicans deserve a minimum satisfaction of their basic needs - for food, shelter, work, education, and health - just like all Chinese. A western, free-market institution like the World Bank is accepting that communist countries like China can teach lessons in poverty reduction that the bank and western governments never learned.
China can now afford to spend US$40 billion to host the Olympics. It can present itself to the world without having to hide poverty. Our athletes will take gold, silver and bronze medals from China because we are not poor in spirit. But will we take the lessons of poverty reduction away as well. That is the race we need to win.
Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona. Email: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm.
