‘You will hear everyone saying ‘food, can we have food?’ It’s about no food and no money to buy food. There is no work.”
That’s the message Eunice Klaasens, a 63-year-old pensioner, hears on a daily basis when she works as a volunteer at a Catholic Welfare and Development community kitchen in Manenberg, an impoverished area of Cape Town.
A wire grid covers the window of the container that houses the kitchen where she works, but there is a small opening at the bottom through which Klaasens serves a plate of food for R1 and a cup of soup for 50c.
”I have to turn a lot of people away. Sometimes I can serve only soup because there is no food,” she said, lifting the lid on a large pot which has been scraped dry.
Klaasens sees poverty in terms of people not being able to afford food, but also as a result of the lack of employment opportunities and access to education. She cites the example of her daughter, who wants to study but can’t because there is no money to pay for her tuition.
Defining poverty — and calculating how many people are poor — is the subject of robust debate over the development of a long-delayed poverty index for South Africa. A June meeting of a Nedlac task team charged with making recommendations on the issue is seen as a critical juncture in the process.
Although a signatory to the 1995 Copenhagen Declaration, which placed an obligation on signatory countries to develop a poverty measure, 13 years later South Africa has yet to develop such a measure.
But Finance Minister Trevor Manuel announced in his February 2008 budget speech that Statistics South Africa was working on an official poverty line index, referring to a 2007 discussion document on the index.
The treasury document noted that preliminary estimates put the poverty line, based on prices in 2000, at R322 per person per month for food and non-food items — the equivalent of about R430 in 2006 prices.
Based on household expenditure reported in the 2000 Income and Expenditure Survey (IES), the poverty rate was thus estimated at 53% in 2000.
The development of an index is seen as useful in measuring the extent of poverty and as a tool in measuring progress in overcoming it. Not having one has led to divergent views on the extent of poverty, with estimates on the number of people below the poverty line varying between 8,1% and 70,4%, depending on the measure used.
The proposal in the treasury document is therefore for a single poverty line based on minimum food and non-food essentials, with two additional upper and lower thresholds.
But the index is controversial because it involves decisions about what poverty is and how to measure it, with these decisions dictating who would qualify for poverty eradication programmes.
Two of the most common approaches used are either a relative approach — which would rank people according to their order in per capita income, with the bottom percentage defined by government as poor — and an absolute approach — which would set a poverty line at a basket of goods and the ability to afford this basket.
Critics argue, however, that purely monetary assessments are inadequate and fail to take account of the nuances experienced by people living in poverty.
”The thing about a poverty line is that many people are quite wary of such a measure because, inasmuch as it defines poverty, it excludes people that are just above the line and is a very blunt measure,” said Isobel Frye, director of the Studies on Poverty and Inequality Institute, a not-for-profit trust working on poverty issues.
She questions whether the food component allowed for in the treasury document would be sufficient for someone with HIV/Aids, for example, and called the non-food component ”particularly problematic” because it was based on what poor people spent on already limited items.
Frye expressed the concern that any poverty line should not be a ”minimalist figure”, but needs to have a higher ”aspirational level” that allows people to live in dignity.
This would be in keeping with definitions like the Copenhagen Declaration of 1995, which refers to poverty as ”a condition characterised by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information”.
Referring to the absolute and relative approaches, Frye advocates a third position, which would ask people what they think is the minimum amount required to live decently.
Frye argues that officially referring deliberation on the issue to Nedlac in itself constitutes consultation, but that it ”should be broader than that” and involve public forums where people are invited to contribute views on what constitutes poverty.
These findings could be distilled down to a ”core group of services and goods”.
Black Sash Advocacy Programme manager Karen Peters says the proposals, with two-thirds allocated to essential food items, are ”not much to go on in terms of graduating out of poverty”.
Peters sees it as ”essential” that society, especially the marginalised, are included in the discussion.
Meanwhile, the department of social development favours the adoption of more than one poverty line. It confirmed that the treasury, with the support of Stats SA, was concentrating its efforts on the development of an absolute poverty line based on the estimation of spending on certain food and non-food items.
While not opposing an absolute poverty line — provided it was not ”minimalist” — spokesperson Lakela Kaunda says a ”fair estimate” of poverty was the relative poverty line, stating that using 50% of the mean per capita expenditure of R615 per month, 63,6% of South Africans would be below this line.
While acknowledging the difficulty of getting ”broad consensus” on the adoption of a poverty line, Kaunda says it should not be used merely to ”count the poor and monitor their progression over time, but to ensure that their basic needs and rights are being addressed”.
What South Africa does in developing an index is likely to have important regional implications within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) where, according to SADC figures, 45% of the total population live on $1 a day.
Dr Michele Ruiters, a senior researcher at the Institute for Global Dialogue, says South Africa had a role to play in that it was a strong economy in the region and had a regional responsibility.
But she cautions that South Africa also needs to ”look inward” because many of the problems faced by the country have to do with ”not concentrating enough on what people need in South Africa”.
Ruiters says fears about a purely money-based measure were ”realistic”. While it would show that something is being done about poverty, if it is not part of an overall process in dealing with poverty ”people will be left behind again”. — West Cape News