Deceased calypsonian Winston “Mighty Shadow” Bailey’s 1994 hit calypso Poverty is Hell still stands as a piece dealing with a phenomenon that is proving to be one of the most challenging and seemingly insoluble problems of the contemporary world.
As a means of addressing this aspect of society, which contains widespread negative consequences for humanity, underdevelopment and the adoption and practice of unwanted and disastrous patterns of criminal lifestyles, the Organisation of American States last month was moved, through its Permanent Council, to consider the consequences of widespread and deepening poverty in the Western Hemisphere, as listed in the “Manifesto Against Poverty.”
The issues and the decisions taken by the OAS were brought to the attention of readers of the Business Guardian this week in a column by the Antigua-Barbuda Permanent Representative to the organisation, long-time Caribbean diplomat Sir Ron Sanders.
That decision was appropriately taken as poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean increased from 28.3 to 30.3 per cent between 2019 and 2021. Moreover, it noted that Caribbean and Central American countries are amongst the poorest in the Hemisphere, yet their citizens “do not identify with the condition of poverty.” Contradictorily though, as pointed out in the Manifesto Against Poverty, “we do, however, identify with a region of increasing prosperity and with a framework of rights for more people in our Hemisphere.”
The message simply put, while the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and that is notwithstanding the plethora of rights which govern our world. For us in Trinidad and Tobago, the streets and public squares of our cities and towns are crowded with human beings reduced to lives of not knowing where their next meals may come. These are people who once lived amongst us and were socialised in the community.
Large numbers of people in T&T remain on welfare of one form or another, with a range of social needs programmes developed by Government to meet the basic living demands of different categories of individuals of poor and indigent persons living on the margins of the society.
The question to be answered is whether we consider seriously the state of inequality and inequity of our economy and society, which are major contributory factors to poverty.
While the sociologists and criminologists attribute crime to a number of causes and consequences, poverty remains one of the major factors listed to explain the link between poverty and crime.
Inequality in educational opportunities, inadequate public healthcare facilities, proper and liveable accommodation for all and access to a range of health services, are identified in the Manifesto Against Poverty as the causes of poverty and increasing crime.
“A universal basket of services that address the different dimensions of the problem,” is needed, states the report.
Massive quantities of US dollars have passed through this country’s economy and society over the decades since the 1970s - even in the post-boom era. The problems lie in large groups of citizens being left behind, with a sub-culture of young people taking revenge for being left out of the distribution of the economic pie.
