By Keith B. Richburg, The Washington Post, USA
06/06/2008 ::
Introduction:
A little over a year ago, in my capacity as Foreign Editor, I made a trip to East Africa and traveled for a week to Ethiopia. It was a country I had covered fairly extensively years before, as African Bureau Chief for The Washington Post based in Nairobi, Kenya. I reported about Ethiopia in the early 1990s, just after the fall of the Dergue regime and the takeover by the EPRDF, led by Meles Zenawi. The country then seemed to be on a democratic path and the international aid community stood ready to come in and help.
Now, more than 14 years since my last visit, I was stunned by how little seemed to have changed. Aside from a spanking new hotel and disco in the capital, Addis Ababa, and a few new restaurants, Ethiopia was still a desperately poor place. The capital was still clogged with beggars – mostly migrants from the countryside. There was little infrastructure improvement.
I asked myself, what had happened in those ensuing years?
I called a friend of mine, a former journalist with long experience in Ethiopia who is now the Washington communications director for the World Food Program. She informed me that Ethiopia remained one of the world’s poorest countries, with one of the world’s highest birthrates, highest HIV-AIDS rates. One half of the population lives below the poverty line, according to most statistics. A quarter of the population today lives on less than one U.S. dollar a day; Some 80 percent lives on less than $2 a day. Ethiopia was still considered by the world as a food emergency country.
How can a country be in an emergency for 14 years? Why had Ethiopia not moved from the emergency stage to the development stage of international assistance? What had gone wrong? And, equally important, why had I not heard or read any of this before, including in my own newspaper? Ethiopia was once the center of the world’s attention due to the famine and Live Aid concert of the 1980s. Now Ethiopia had become invisible, its poverty an untold story.
That could be said of any one of a large number of countries that are not currently on the media radar screen or the public consciousness. They are the places where poverty is endemic, where natural disasters are recurring, and where structural problems are chronic. The poor are migrants who have left rural areas to converge in urban areas; they are rural, where agriculture on small plots is not self-sustaining. They exist amid rapid economic growth in China, amid the gleaming skyscrapers of Jakarta and the shopping malls of Manila. They are in the slums like Payatas in the Quezon City and Kabera in Nairobi.
Some figures. The World Bank estimates that some 1 billion people live on a dollar a day or less, the absolute benchmark of poverty. Another 1.5 billion live on $1 to $2 a day. Now we see that even the gains in global affluence made over the last decade are in peril due to rising food prices. The Bank president, Bob Zoellick, has estimated that rising food costs could push another 100 million people back into poverty.
I don’t exempt the United States when speaking about the poor. One only need recall New Orleans and the lower Ninth Ward, where poverty was only revealed after the destruction of Hurricane Katrina and the slow U.S. government response. In his presidential campaign, Sen. John McCain recently conducted what he called a tour of the “forgotten places” in America, including Appalachia and the Lower Ninth Ward. The aptly-named trip posed an ironic question McCain left unanswered: Forgotten by Who?
Forgotten in one sense by us, the media.
WHY:
There are several reasons why poverty is rarely on the media agenda:
Poverty Fatigue. We often focus only when a crisis forces us to. (Ninth Ward of New Orleans is one example). The CNN effect exists. NGOs often must rely on celebrities to bring attention to their causes.
Journalists, including – or especially foreign correspondents – tend to focus on politics, crises, conflicts, and business stories.
In reporting on poverty, there is a tendency to rely on official sources of information – U.N. reports, World Bank statements, or government statistics. That gives much of what appears a static quality.
A tendency to look for the “good news,” which often means indications of growth. In CHINA, it’s sexier to write about the growing affluence of urban Chinese and their new consumerism. In Africa, the “good news” story is Chinese investment, growing local stock markets, or the African middle class. In India, we read more about young professionals in Mumbai. This is true everywhere, but is a particular problem in country’s with government-controlled media; how often do we see newspapers or TV news filled with pictures of ministers cutting ribbons?
Finally, there is no consensus about why poverty remains persistent in some places, and the best solutions for poverty alleviation – and that debate extends into the media and often paralyzes us.
The Debate:
The debate about the best ways to help the poor doesn’t neatly divide. It might be called left v. right in the traditional political sense, but that oversimplifies it.
Are the World Bank and the IMF the agencies best-positioned to help alleviate poverty, as is their mission, or are they part of the problem by empowering often undemocratic elite regimes?
Which is more important – debt relief, or good governance? (That becomes a very immediate issue in places like the Philippines in 1986 or Indonesia in 1998 when they make the transition to democracy from dictatorship).
Are subsidies on core items like food and fuel essential to give the poor a lifeline, or are they economically inefficient?
Globalization: Is it good or bad for local economies?
What is more important – democracy or economic development? It is a question that might seem rhetorical – why not both? But many authoritarian, undemocratic governments say that freedom from poverty is the most important “human right,” and that multiparty politics only distracts from that development. Also the case in China and Vietnam, among others.
Finally, there are some known solutions to endemic poverty, or at least proven effective means to alleviate poverty. But they tend to be controversial as they often clash with local custom and tradition, or go against the policies of certain governments.
Educate girls – it is known that the longer girls remain in school, the more affluent they become.
Reduce birth rates. It is difficult for country’s to get out of the poverty cycle when birthrates outstrip economic growth. But birth control policy is controversial in countries, like the Philippines. (Even in the U.S. under the GOP administration.
Allowing the private ownership of property and business will unleash entrepreneurship; Vietnam in 1989 institutes a new policy called “doi moi” or renovation, and within a few years, new shops and restaurants were opening.
Allow the free flow of information and allow new technologies. The cell phone and the Internet are two classic examples. But again, there might be some resistance in authoritarian countries.
END