How we define poverty.

• Author: Blanco, Ramon Osiris
• Position: Eradicating Extreme Poverty and Hunger

To talk about poverty and define it empirically seem like an easy task from the privileged point of view of the cultured and educated, or by means of moderate or highly acquired capacity that makes it possible to distinguish the parameters that identify it.

By 2003, there will be over two billion poor people in the world fighting for survival. My colleagues and Dominican acquaintances, through their own experiences, agree on the definition of poverty as the total absence of opportunities, accompanied by high levels of undernourishment, hunger, illiteracy, lack of education, physical and mental ailments, emotional and social instability, unhappiness, sorrow and hopelessness for the future. Poverty is also characterized by a chronic shortage of economic, social and political participation, relegating individuals to exclusion as social beings, preventing access to the benefits of economic and social development and thereby limiting their cultural development.

The United Nations has established that poverty and excluded people exist in all regions of the world; therefore, there is a diversity of reasons why people cannot satisfy their basic needs. It also concluded that two conditions--social and individual--limit the possibility of access to resources, knowledge and benefits, to fulfil human needs.

The social condition is tied intrinsically to the political and economic realm, as it is the administrators of power who regulate the distribution of resources and services, establishing parameters that generate inequalities that are sometimes manifested in land distribution, infrastructure, capital, markets, credit, education and information, or consulting services or other fields that might establish differences in human development.

In the individual condition, inequality translates to limitations in access to services such as education, health, recreation, potable water and public hygiene. Rural areas where 77 per cent of poor people in developing countries live are the most adversely affected. The United Nations has established that the region of Latin America and the Caribbean is the most urbanized of the developing world, a result of the great migration that occurred in the last twenty years. Three fourths of the population live in cities, where 40 per cent of the total population is poor, with limited access to potable water, polluted air, bad sanitation and serious health problems.

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