Primary Poverty

PRIMARY POVERTY REFERS to a condition of absolute poverty in which the individual or household concerned cannot afford the basic necessities of life. The definition of absolute poverty of this sort varies from country to country and according to time. Most common definitions of poverty consider an income of less than $2 per day to indicate poverty, and less than $1 per day to indicate primary poverty. This level of poverty is endemic in a number of sub-Saharan African countries, in individual less developed countries such as Laos in southeast Asia, and among specific regional or ethnic groups in many different countries.

Primary poverty is generally a bigger problem in rural areas rather than urban areas, because of the greater difficulty in obtaining government welfare and other service, and the likely reliance on low-income subsistence agriculture or the production of agricultural commodities. In areas of vulnerability, where people rely upon nature for their income, sudden external shocks can lead to an immediate outbreak of primary poverty.

For example, flooding; drought; the December 26, 2004, tsunami; and environmental change have all resulted in poverty of this kind. Illness in the family, requiring comparatively expensive medical treatment, can also lead to poverty.

[Page 869]The term is generally considered to be interchangeable with the word indigence. Literature on poverty tends to divide into two distinct strands. One strand concerns the belief that poverty affects primarily the morally bankrupt, the lazy, or those who are incapable of understanding what it is necessary to do in order to achieve. People subscribing to this belief tend to consider religious charity appropriate to assist the poor but that no other provision should be made and, indeed, that it would be wrong to burden the nonpoor with the support necessary.

The other strand tends toward the belief that the great majority of people who are suffering from poverty do so for underlying, structural reasons for which moral concerns are completely irrelevant. Research shows in very many cases that, when people in poverty are provided with well-targeted and administered schemes of assistance, they nearly always manage to escape poverty successfully.

The Poverty, Research and Inequality Program, for example, showed that moving African Americans away from ghettoized low-cost housing schemes into mixed residential areas overwhelmingly enabled them to achieve a higher standard of living as a result. The Grameen Bank microcredit scheme that emerged first in Bangladesh demonstrated the same phenomenon among the rural poor. Many other examples exist. People subscribing to this belief, therefore, favor government intervention to enable the poor to escape their situation not just for its own sake, although that would be sufficient, but also because enabling the poor to contribute to society and the economy would benefit all members.

There is some evidence to suggest that the prevalence of primary poverty is related to governmental type. The Nobel Prize-winning Indian economist Amartya Sen has argued that no famine has ever occurred in a functioning democracy. In other words, when governments are accountable to the people, they are unable to carry out the kinds of policies that can lead to widespread hunger. Consequently, it is necessary for people to encourage democratization around the world. Again, this is important not just for its own sake but also to increase security, since famines customarily lead to large-scale movement of refugees.

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