SOME officials are announcing “poverty reduction” as a goal, rather than “poverty alleviation”.
For so many years now, I have been writing about this subject, only to be frustrated about the fact that many government officials either do not know the difference between the two, or would not care to know the difference.
Simply put, “poverty reduction” means reducing the number of people who fall below the poverty line, and “poverty alleviation” means providing services to the people below the poverty line, but without the end result of reducing the poverty rate.
As I know it, the conditional cash transfer (CCT) program of the government is only supposed to be a poverty alleviation program, meaning to say that it was never meant to be a poverty reduction program. Much to my surprise, however, I heard claims that the CCT program has already helped reduce the poverty rate.
From the looks of it, there is an element of intellectual dishonesty in making that claim, in much the same way that there appears to be an element of intellectual dishonesty (poverty rate has gone down simply because they modified their formula for computing the poverty rate).
Not too many government officials may have noticed it yet, but the Philippines as a member country of the United Nations (UN) has actually committed to 100% poverty eradication by the year 2030.
Mind you, the commitment is for poverty eradication, and not just for poverty reduction.
Being an original founding member of the UN, our country has an extra moral obligation to make good on our commitments, and not just paying lip service to whatever UN agreements that we would commit to. Looking back, the Philippines has also committed to reducing the poverty rate by 50% on or before the year 2015, based on the year 2000 figures. As we all know, we did not meet that goal.
In case you are wondering why I am talking about poverty when in fact this article is about growth and development, I have done so because it appears that many government officials either do not know the difference between the two, or would not care to know the difference, in much the same way that they do not know the difference between poverty alleviation and poverty reduction.
As it is supposed to be, growth can happen without planning and conversely, there could be no development if there is no planning. To cite an example that is directly related to this subject, poverty alleviation could happen even without planning, but poverty reduction needs planning.
Not too many local government officials may have realized it yet, but the local development councils (LDCs) are actually the official planning bodies at the local level, with municipal, provincial and regional development as the end results, as the case may be. (To be continued)/PN
