112 posts categorized "Inequality"

Good news for data nerds: The OECD has just released its latest disposable income, poverty and inequality numbers for all of its 34 member states. You can access the entire data set here, but don't miss the the fun interacive tools that were released along with it. OECD was kind enought to make them embeddable:

So what are the key stories in this beautifully arranged chart? You may not find them all that surprising:

• Poverty and  inequality have grown in OECD countries since the global recession of 2007-2008.
• The United States still has greater-than-average inequality and relative poverty than the typical OECD country.
• The United States has less pre-tax/transfer poverty than most other countries.
• The overall OECD unemployment rate has eased slightly to 8.0%.
• Iceland, Slovenia, Norway and Denmark shared the lowest poverty rate of member countries, while Israel bore the highest at 21%.

This data release is well timed, just before the 39^th G-8 summit to be held in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland between June 17-18. As member states gather to focus on shared global development goals like advancing trade, ensuring tax compliance, and promoting greater transparency, the OECD offers a humbling reminder that poverty, hunger, and inequality are on the rise across the developed world. A global committment to solving the poverty problem will require committment from all countries, regardless of income level. This is still everyone's problem.

Participants from across the world attend the Sunlight Foundation’s third annual Transparency Camp in Washington, DC. (Photo credit: Nicko Margolies)

Developed and developing, north and south, rich and poor—these are some of the dichotomous terms we use to categorize a country's quality of life. Does any country, or any person, fit neatly into one category or another?

Increasingly, though, people are finding that development is more a continuum than an all-or-nothing condition, an up or down vote. Every country whether it’s been labeled “developed” or not, falls somewhere along that continuum. The 2013 Hunger Report acknowledged this point in its recommendation for continued universal ownership of goals after the expiration of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015. All countries face the same threats to their development to varying degrees.

The momentum behind this more inclusive way of looking at development and quality of life has been helped along by new concepts and tools. The old standards such as gross domestic product (GDP) or income per capita offer limited insight. Indices such as the Human Development Index (HDI) and the Multi-dimensional Poverty Index (MPI) point out the need for a more diverse set of indicators to complete the development picture, expanding it to include less obvious but equally important measurements like access to education, gender equality and greenhouse gas emissions.

Transparency is one of the more recent additions to the expanding development concept. It has only been a major priority of U.S. foreign assistance for a relatively short time. The Millennium Challenge Corporation only made “fighting corruption” an absolute requirement for funding recipients in 2002. 

Short clip explains how Transparency International guages corruption and why it matters.

More recently, the push for open government has gained rapid momentum as citizens across the world discover promising new ways to track their leaders’ actions, their use of public resources, their campaign contributors, their vested interests in legislation, and more.

Organizations such as Transparency International and the Sunlight Foundation are leading a growing grassroots movement to open government data to public scrutiny. They’re ranking countries by degree of corruption, tracking political ad spending, and crowdsourcing to fill in missing information gaps. Perhaps most important, they’re collaborating internationally as they never have before. For example, Sunlight recently held its first Transparency Camp International, where members of civil society and government employees from 25 countries (of all income and “development” levels) gathered to join the global open government network and absorb the experiences and solutions of others.

The 2013 Hunger Report, Within Reach: Global Development Goals, links open government and transparency to the end goal: good governance. “Improving governance is essential to progress on development,” it explains. “The corrosive effects of government corruption are just one example of how governance problems undermine progress. Good governance, on the other hand, is an enabling condition and a prerequisite to lasting change. Good governance includes many elements, but the most relevant for reducing poverty have to do with creating space for a strong civil society that can hold governments accountable for making progress; building effective institutions to manage and deliver public services; and respecting the rule of law—for example, by protecting the rights of minorities and ensuring that people have recourse to redress for injustices.”

“Most of the work to put these elements in place must be done by national governments and by civil society in developing countries. What the United States and other countries can do as a partner is set high expectations for levels of accountability and transparency. Additionally, they can provide technical know-how, strengthen global institutions that foster good governance, and support leaders who want to govern well. The United States itself must be an example of good governance and continue to work towards becoming more transparent and accountable.”

For more on the importance of transparency in the fight to end hunger, visit hungerreport.org.

As the U.S. legislative and national debate on immigration gets fully under way, President Obama paid a state visit to the largest source of modern immigration to the United States – Mexico.

In recent years Mexico has been the source of about 60 percent of all unauthorized immigration to the United States. As such, immigration is consistently one of the highest-priority bilateral topics, along with narcotics trafficking and trade.

During the president’s visit, he acknowledged the changing Mexican economy. Mexico’s economy is the second largest in Latin America, but the country has also long suffered from significant income inequality and widespread poverty. 

But poverty is slowly being reduced, even as Mexico continues a bloody battle with narcotic trafficking organizations that claimed an estimated 60,000 lives between 2006 and 2012.

In 2010 for the first time in years, less than half of Mexico’s population was living in poverty. That year, 46 percent of Mexicans lived below the national poverty line. About 10 percent of the population lived in extreme poverty – on less than about $2 a day.

Although this represents progress, about half the population is still living in poverty—thus, many Mexicans continue to look north for economic opportunity and an escape from dire living conditions.

As Congress begins to debate immigration reform in a serious way, President Obama highlighted during his visit to Mexico the importance of maintaining an international perspective on immigration. He pointed out that what happens in Mexico is crucial to a durable immigration policy fix in the United States.

“I … believe that the long-term solution to the challenge of illegal immigration—so we’re not dealing with this, decade after decade—is a growing, prosperous Mexico that creates more jobs and opportunity right here,” the president said last week in Mexico City.

In the midst of an immigration debate that is decidedly focused on domestic concerns and driven by domestic political constituencies, President Obama’s assertion was a refreshing acknowledgement of the international dimensions of immigration, the “push” factors behind it —something Bread for the World Institute has been researching and writing about for several years now.

As the Senate Judiciary Committee finalizes its version of the bill, it would be wise to heed the president’s message on immigration. This way, reform can be truly comprehensive and lasting.

Eugene, Oregon, takes a different approach to providing food to hungry people. Photo: Nicole Lee.

Hunger Report Senior Editor Todd Post is currently researching the 2014 Hunger Report, whose focus is “A Plan to End Hunger in America.” Here’s a story from his visit earlier this month to Eugene, OR:

In another city, this diner might be called a soup kitchen, a place where people who are homeless or living on very low income can go for a free or low-cost meal. But unlike most soup kitchens, the Family Dining Room in Eugene treats the people who come as though they are customers in a more conventional diner.

Diners are seated at tables by a hostess. There are flowers in vases on the tables and menus. A server comes by to take people’s orders. The meals are prepared in the kitchen by volunteer cooks. In fact, everyone who works at the diner is a volunteer. The effort is coordinated by Food for Lane County, the regional food bank located in Eugene.

The diner is open three or four nights each week and serves approximately 300 customers per night. When it first opened, it was serving as many as 475 people. The volunteers were exhausted, so they had to cut back on the number of meals served.

“The diner is the busiest restaurant in town,” Dawn Woodward tells me, which tells you a lot about Eugene, OR. Dawn works at Food for Lane County. More than 1 in 3 county residents is eligible for federal nutrition assistance. According to the 2012 Lane County Hunger Factors Assessment, at least 70 percent of all households worry at some point during the month about how they will get their next meal.

Another thing the diner tells us is how Eugene sees itself as a community. The diner’s slogan is “Brewing dignity with respect.” That’s the message Eugene wants to give to people who are poor, pushed to the margins of the community, and/or isolated by their shame over being poor.

We all know that being hungry or poor is heavily stigmatized in the United States – whether we have lived in poverty ourselves, seen others living this way, or simply heard the way people talk. Everyone wants to feed children since they are seen (correctly) as innocent. But our society seems to believe that on a person’s 18^th birthday, hunger and poverty become his or her own fault. Their country and community no longer feel any responsibility -- to them or to any other hungry adult.

As you get closer to the households where hunger lurks, the role of communities becomes much more pronounced. I’ve been studying community responses to hunger, trying to understand why hunger is more contained in some communities than in others whose economic situation is similar or even better. I’ve come to realize that what communities do to reduce the stigma associated with asking for help is a big, big part of it.

So it is not just about offering help. It’s about changing the way help is offered. Communities may always have people living on the margins, but do they feel welcome in the center of town? People in Eugene and many other Oregon communities are taking seriously the idea of community food security – welcoming those who struggle to put food on the table back into the heart of the community. Of course, communities must have hearts for this to happen.

Food for Lane County also operates a summer feeding program. Dawn Woodward shared a story about a little girl at one of the schools that offers summer feeding. When Dawn mentioned the Family Dining Room in a passing comment during a visit to the school, the little girl’s eyes lit up and she said proudly that she loved going to the Family Dining Room; it was her favorite place to eat. It’s likely that her parents, and others in similar situations, can rarely if ever afford to take their child to any other restaurant. Giving parents the opportunity to provide that meal to their daughter is so much more meaningful than if the family had simply been given an equivalent amount of food.

It’s easy to forget that hunger and malnutrition are still big problems here in the Western Hemisphere. The focus tends to be on countries in Africa and South Asia, where malnourished women and children are more visible and international organizations more active. In previous posts on Institute Notes, I’ve written about traveling to Guatemala and described efforts now under way to reduce the country’s stubbornly high rates of maternal/child malnutrition.

Today 1,000 children will be born in Guatemala. If the past predicts the future, half of these babies will grow up stunted (far too short for their age). Stunting causes children to be more susceptible to illness and less likely to do well in school. People who are stunted have lower lifetime earnings than their peers, and they are more likely to raise stunted children themselves. Does this make you a little angry?  When a national survey in Guatemala revealed that less than 1 percent of the respondents thought malnutrition was a problem in the country, it angered President Perez Molina more than a little. He ordered every member of his cabinet to spend time living with a family facing chronic food shortages and malnutrition. Many such families are indigenous Guatemalans in difficult to reach mountainous regions.

It didn’t stop with the cabinet. In the end, 6,212 middle- and high-income Guatemalans -- officials, families, members of church and civil society groups -- connected with some of the poorest people in their country. The result was a nationwide commitment to break the cycle of malnutrition and stunting. It’s an ambitious goal in the sense that malnutrition is an entrenched problem that has persisted for decades despite earlier attempts to solve it. In a country whose president is limited to one term (four years), it has proven difficult to muster the political will to initiate actions that might not be sustained. But the Perez Molina administration reconvened after the rural visits to launch a concerted nationwide effort to scale up nutrition in Guatemala. The Zero Hunger Pact was born.

“Zero Hunger” has two main goals:  to reduce chronic malnutrition among children by 10 percent and to prevent deaths caused by acute malnutrition by focusing on seasonal hunger (the spike in hunger that generally comes just prior to harvest time). A series of specific actions to combat malnutrition and to encourage people to participate have been developed. The pact’s other areas of focus are to include promoting development and fighting poverty, especially among indigenous rural women. Activities have now begun in various parts of the country, and plans call for expansion in 2014 and 2015.

Last week, I attended a meeting about the Zero Hunger Pact at the State Department, along with Guatemalan government leaders; the State Department’s Acting Special Representative for Global Food Security, Jonathan Shrier; and USAID’s Assistant to the Administrator for the Bureau of Food Security, Paul Weisenfeld. With the strong backing of Guatemala’s president, leaders from government, the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, and civil society are working together on a plan to make sustainable improvements in nutrition.

Guatemala has been active in the global Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement, which now brings together 34 countries committed to improving maternal and child nutrition. The world now knows what to do and how to do it. What Guatemala has added is political will at its highest level, a national budget allocation, and public commitment.

The Zero Hunger Pact says it best:

“Today we dare dream about a different Guatemala, in which children with smiles are free from hunger and reach their full potential. We have launched the process of change and as a society we are ready to pay the cost for reaching our collective success. What used to divide us, brings us together now in the fight for one single cause:  to eradicate malnutrition.”

So with this blog we can salute Guatemala for its efforts, along with other SUN Movement countries who are making political decisions and changing government policies to reduce malnutrition.

  Scott Bleggi is Senior International Policy Analyst in Bread for the World Institute

Immigration is perhaps the only policy issue in the nation that currently has both bipartisan support and political momentum. Immigration reform is a popular issue in Congress these days, with the real possibility of bipartisan action. This week the New York Times published an op-ed entitled “Immigration Spring” on the series of breakthroughs occurring that have added momentum toward a historic overhaul of the nation’s immigration system this year.  

Immigration has stymied policymakers for decades but the coalition of communities and organizations supporting reform this year is unprecedented. A comprehensive Senate bill is expected within weeks, followed by a framework and legislation from the House. This week Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy said that taking up the immigration bill is “urgent.”

There will also be a series of grassroots actions around immigration in April. On April 10 a group of labor and faith-based groups will hold a Rally for Citizenship on the West Lawn of the Capitol Building beginning at 3:30 p.m.

On April 17, hundreds of evangelicals will gather in Washington for the Evangelical Day of Prayer and Action on Immigration Reform to raise an evangelical voice proclaiming a biblical vision for immigration reform.

Bread for the World is also increasing its work on immigration issues this year with a focus on inclusion of policies in immigration reform that reduce hunger and poverty at home and overseas. This includes raising-up the importance of generating good jobs abroad that can reduce the need for people to leave their homes in search of a better life and immigrating to the United States without authorization.

In the United States, immigrant legalization will allow more unauthorized immigrants to pursue their educational and career aspirations, thereby contributing more to the U.S. economy and allowing them and their families to move out of poverty. Resources on Bread’s unique immigration perspective can now be found online in English and in Spanish.

Each year, the U.S. government spends $18 billion on improving its workforce, and most policy makers agree that it’s one of the best investments our country can make. Any job in this modern economy requires a unique set of skills commensurate with essential training or education. And of course, a more highly skilled workforce is a key prerequisite to economic growth. But those who have tried to evaluate the effectiveness of current federal workforce development programs — including the Government Accountability Office(GAO) — report that it is not easily measured. There are at least 47 such programs, many of which serve overlapping purposes and offer inconclusive, poorly documented results.

The U.S. Dept. of Labor manages 21 of the 47 federally funded workforce training programs identified by the GAO. (doleta.gov)

The House took its first stab at sweeping workforce program reform last month with the passage of the SKILLS Act. This measure, passed largely against the will of House Democrats and President Obama, would consolidate scattered funding pools into a single “Workforce Investment Fund” from which block grants would be issued directly to states to be dispersed and managed in accordance with their plans. A Democratic  alternative was also proposed, prioritizing funding for community colleges, training for high-growth industries, and programs targeted at low-income people. Both plans promise to reduce administrative overhead, build in more rigorous evaluation, and bridge the gap between the unemployed and the 3.6 million unfilled job openings in the United States.  

A better educated and skilled workforce is always a good idea, not just for broad-based economic growth, but because a better trained worker is an empowered worker—more capable of finding and keeping a job that pays enough to keep a family out of poverty.

Chapter  4 of the 2013 Hunger Report, With Reach: Global Development Goals, explores the role of the labor market in fighting poverty:

Most of the changes needed to reduce the poverty that now exists in the United States, as opposed to preventing poverty for the next generation, must take place in the labor market. Clearly, there’s a lot of scope for government to make mistakes while trying to correct problems in the labor market, and in the end, government power in this sphere is limited. However, there are also improvements that could be made now. These include raising the minimum wage, indexing the minimum wage to inflation, and ensuring labor rights such as the right to organize and join a union. (Congress and the president have already taken some encouraging actions toward making the minimum wage a living wage.)  

Government has failed workers—both low-wage workers and those who were once relatively insulated from eroding purchasing power. The GDP of the country continues to rise, yet real wages are now stagnant even for people with bachelor’s degrees. The most severe effects of the increasingly skewed labor market fall on low-wage workers. The work low-wage workers do is needed, and always will be: janitors, food-service workers, landscapers, farm workers, and others. And the people who have these jobs will, of course, always need to earn a living.

Thus, one essential response is to ensure that all jobs pay enough to keep employees above the poverty line. Government must do more to counter the downward pressure on wages. Human-capital development must be strengthened so that even if some jobs are dead-end jobs, no one is trapped in them for lack of alternatives. 

See the rest of Chapter 4 for more on U.S. workforce development and education.

Suburban Montgomery County, Maryland is not the kind of place you’d expect to find hunger. It is the 10 ^th richest county in America with a median income of almost $93,000 in 2011, and it also happens to be where I live.

Last week, I participated in a symposium on hunger in the county, sponsored by the Manna Food Center, the county's main food bank.

Hunger exists in Montgomery County as it does in the 9 counties where the median income is even higher. I haven’t witnessed it everywhere myself, but working for Bread for the World Institute, I have access to this information and I talk to enough people who are working to reduce hunger in such places.

Rural and urban areas of the US have a higher share of people who experience hunger, but the suburbs are home to more of them in absolute numbers. Manna Food Center has been operating for 30 years, so hunger in the county is not a new phenomenon.

Hunger in suburban areas is largely hidden. Because it’s not supposed to happen here, the victims suffer more shame for their condition, which drives them out of plain view. At the symposium I was talking to a man who had recently lost his job and was getting food from Manna and using the SNAP program to feed his wife, himself and their three children.  He was telling me that while at the bus stop in the morning, he saw two adults come walking out of a wooded area. Before he became impoverished, the sight of these people would not have registered with him. He now knows people who are living in those woods, homeless.  

Since 1983, Manna has distributed 43 million pounds of food to 2.7 million residents of the county. Last year, Manna gave food to 41,000 households and worked with 50 partner agencies. You don’t have that kind of reach without the infrastructure to make it possible, and this includes a warehouse where food donations arrive daily, trucks dropping off food packages at delivery points around the county, and an army of staff and volunteers to make sure the system operates officially. Manna’s volunteers put in 52,000 hours of service last year.

Minnerva Delgado, Manna’s executive director, asked if I would speak at the symposium. When she called to offer a spot at the end to talk about advocacy, I had just finished reading an article called “The Problem with Food Banks” in the online journal Salon, and it seemed too weird a coincidence to resist, so I said sure. The article is about food banks in Canada, written by Nick Saul, a Canadian, and it reminded me of a book published in the US back in the early 90s. Sweet Charity, by Janet Poppendieck, is essential reading for anyone who is helping to feed the hungry in the US.

In the article, Saul expresses the same conflict Poppendieck described in Sweet Charity:

“Yet each time I visit such warehouses, I find myself alternating between hope and despair. Hope born of the understanding that all of this is motivated by the human urge to help others with that most basic of needs: food. Despair because this effort, and that of food banks all over Canada, has not solved the problem of hunger. On the contrary, I believe food banking makes it worse.

Worse—but how can that be? As he says,

“It is time to have a frank conversation about the limitations of this approach and start harnessing that caring and the engagement with food issues into a new political force. We need to ask ourselves and our elected representatives how we can make real, lasting change, and ensure that everyone finds health and dignity at our nation’s table.”

Sweet Charity came to much the same conclusion. I have written about Sweet Charity at different times for Bread for the World Institute. I decided to go back not only to what I’d written but to my notes about the book and I came across this passage in a review of the book by Larry Brown, the former director of the National Center on Hunger and Poverty at the Harvard School of Public Health.

“While charity feeds the poor, it also has become the basis for complacency. If the poor have food, they are no threat to the status quo. If volunteers feel they have done "something to help," they have little need to probe into the causes of hunger and the impact of charitable programs. And political leaders point to the "limits of government" and the effectiveness of "public-private partnerships" as the excuse for not using the apparatus of public policy to protect people from hunger as is done in other wealthy industrialized nations.”

The emphasis is mine.  I thought what Brown had to say in the last sentence adds an important point to the statement above.  Bread for the World has engaged with policymakers since the 1970s. Here we are in 2013, engaged again – fighting the same battles we fought before.  It takes more than engagement.

It used to be that we could tell policymakers in the US, you know, other rich countries don’t have hunger like we have here. I’m not sure it had any effect, but was a reminder to ourselves at least that the US is an anomaly, and that any one of these days our policymakers could easily snap out of their indifference. Based on the news from up north, we probably underestimated the export potential of our indifference.

At the symposium, I congratulated my hosts on their 30 years of service. I exhorted them to keep up the good work, and like my predecessors in this endeavor, I urged them to take up advocacy regardless of how frustrating it seems.