HEADLINES OF THE DAY: ANOTHER 15,000 PEOPLE DIED YESTERDAY BECAUSE THEY WERE TOO POOR TO LIVE. THE RICH INCREASED THEIR WEALTH YESTERDAY BY $0.3 BILLION. THE 21st CENTURY VERSION OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IS ONE DAY NEARER.
“O Ye rich ones on earth! The poor in your midst are My trust; guard ye My trust, and be not intent only on your own ease.”
Bahá’u’lláh
A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis at willisdavid167@gmail.com. CHAPTER 1: INDIFFERENCE TO POVERTY (Part 70). This blog is a continuation of the review of FREEDOM FROM WANT: THE REMARKABLE SUCCESS STORY OF BRAC, THE GLOBAL GRASSROOTS ORGANIZATION THAT’S WINNING THE FIGHT AGAINST POVERTY by Ian Smillie published 2009.
In 1972 few experts could see how the country could survive
Multilateral and bilateral aid agencies were generous to the new Bangladesh, as were NGOs, but the country was likely to become an international basket case. In 1972 few experts could see how the country could survive. Food intake became a more common way of defining poverty with the average individual requirement estimated at 2,020 to 2,150 calories per day. A definition of absolute poverty in 1977 referred to people whose average intake was less than 90% of the minimum requirement, and the extremely poor were those consuming less than 80% of the daily requirement. By those standards, 78% of the population lived in absolute poverty in 1974, and 42% lived in extreme poverty.
94% of the children suffered some degree of malnutrition
Seasonal changes may mean inadequate food supplies during some months and starvation in others. People who do not eat properly cannot work properly, and they are more prone to illness. For the poor, clean drinking water may not be available, and health facilities may be beyond reach. Women will generally be less well fed than men, and children may suffer the most. 94% of the children in Bangladesh suffered some degree of malnutrition, with the likelihood of permanently impaired physical and cognitive development.
The poor remained poor
Solutions to these problems were initiated by the army of foreign agencies, charities, and experts who arrived in the first year after independence. However, three years after independence, Bangladesh suffered a famine that, in its human devastation, rivaled any in history. The causes were manifold, a combination of bad weather, bad harvests, aid cutbacks, government ineptitude, and corruption. Hundreds of thousands of people died of hunger in 1974. The poor remained poor, exceedingly vulnerable, seemingly ignorant, untrusting, and fatalistic. What was missing in much of the effort to deal with poverty was an understanding of how to make things different, that is, how to change patterns of distribution and power and status.
BRAC hallmarks have been the quality and depth of its research
Since the first development efforts in Sulla, BRAC hallmarks have been the quality and depth of its research, its acknowledgment of failure as part of the learning process, its ability to listen to village voices and the adaptive approach it takes to development. While planning has always been a strong suit, BRAC learned early that no large-scale plan should be initiated until there is enough solid evidence derived from research, testing, and small-scale efforts and pilots schemes. Bangladesh is littered with the ruins of a hundred or more massive rural development projects initiated by the government and donors and planned to the last detail except one, an understanding of how things really work and in the minds of those whom the projects sought to assist.
How things really work in the rural areas
Who Gets What and Why: Resource Allocation in a Bangladesh Village, a 200-page report on life, work, and poverty was one of BRAC’s first efforts to understand and write down how things really work in the rural areas. During the 1970s, all of BRAC’s senior staff and field workers came from the educated urban elite. Robert Chambers wrote in his now-famous Rural Development: Putting the Last First: “A nutritionist may see malnutrition but not the seasonal indebtedness, the high cost of medical treatment, the distress sales of land, and the local power structure which generate it. A doctor may see infant mortality but not the declining real wages which drive mothers to desperation, still less the causes of those declining real wages. Visibility and specialization combine to show simple surface symptoms rather than deeper combinations of causes. The poor are little seen, and even less is the nature of their poverty understood.”
Food shortages
Another early BRAC study, entitled Famine, examined what Chambers had called “the deeper combination of causes” in relation to food shortages. Villagers explained how, as food shortages begin to appear, landowners would inevitably begin to stockpile, awaiting a rise in prices. Because there would now be many more people than jobs, wages would fall, forcing the poor to sell what few possessions and household utensils they have.
Those without land are nothing
Land remains the most important asset for anyone living in the Bangladesh countryside. Land is a productive asset, and the life of every village revolves around agriculture. At independence, more than 90% of the population lived in rural areas, and over 80% of all employment was in agriculture. 60% of the GNP was derived from farming, and 90% of the country’s exports were agricultural or farm-related. The average landholding was about three acres, and fewer than 3% of all farms were larger than 12 acres, but more than half of all households owned no land at all – except for the land underneath the house. Those without land are nothing.