Exploiting poverty

(Last Thursday’s column. Blog Action Day calls it a “must read article on the complexities of poverty.” Thank you. Two more articles on poverty will be published next week — I’ve already submitted them.)

On Oct. 15, Blog Action Day hopes to repeat the success of last year’s initiative to get people and media talking about the environment. This year, thousands of independent Web publishers will write about an even more controversial subject–poverty.

To be frank, I am already anticipating a barrage of essays condemning poverty as the most violent of murderers, subjecting millions to slow and painful death. But I have mixed feelings about anti-poverty campaigns. Most times, the people who are noisiest about helping the poor are the very people who seek to exploit poverty for their own personal agenda.

In 2004, the PhilHealth card was the medium to exploit the poor to win an election. In 1998, the simple thinking of poor folk was exploited to also win an election. The Catholic Church has been exploiting the ignorance of the poor for centuries to perpetuate its power. It’s even true of the common man who assuages his “guilt” by donating to this and that charitable organization regularly as if the act eradicates any possibility that he could be an indirect cause of other people’s poverty.

Poverty is not only a state of deprivation. It isn’t just about people who have less material comfort. It is also a battlecry and a political issue. Politicians and activists oversimplify things when they make a sweeping definition of poverty based on family income. Consider this. Juan and Juana are poor because they are uneducated and unable to get decent paying jobs. They are uneducated because they grew in a remote rural area where the nearest school was a two-hour trek each way and there were no high schools and colleges. Pedro and Petra are poor because Pedro spends a huge chunk of his income drinking with his buddies after work while Petra plays tong-its with her neighbors while her husband is at work.

When politicians and activists start citing statistics and mouthing rhetoric condemning poverty, whose poverty are they referring to? Is it fair that they do not make a distinction between the conditions of the two couples in the given examples and simply claim that both are victims of an exploitative society backed by a corrupt government? Do both deserve equal attention? Obviously, the answer is no. But the lack of distinction works for vested interests because the players create a bigger market for themselves. In other words, it has become fashionable for politicians and wannabe politicians (a lot of activists are wannabe politicians–just take note of how many of the media-visible “human rights” fighters end up running for seats in Congress) to use the issue of poverty without fully explaining what it is because it works to their advantage.

But these highly emotional public campaigns do not always work for the intended beneficiaries. Few realize how the politicization of poverty has hurt, rather than helped, a lot of truly poor people–and I am not just talking about the Philippines. Take Africa, for instance. World leaders and philanthropists visited and saw emaciated people suffering from various illnesses. They registered their shock and called on good-hearted souls to help. What happened? Pharmaceutical companies heeded their calls and, together, they embarked on a seemingly noble mission to rid Africa of disease.

But was that all that really happened? If you think that all those claims made in Le Carre’s “The Constant Gardener” are nothing but figments of the author’s fertile imagination, think again. In 2004, South African President Thabo Mbeki’s African National Congress struck at the US government for withholding criticisms against nevirapine which was distributed and used on South African babies to allegedly protect them from AIDS that might have been passed on by their mothers. The drug was previously tested in Uganda and a doctor from the National Institutes of Health (an agency under the US Department of Health and Human Services) altered his report to omit negative effects of the drug.

Isolated case? Heck, it’s not even the first. In 1996 when meningitis broke out in Nigeria, the first good soul to extend a helping hand was Pfizer. In what appeared to be a “humanitarian gesture,” Pfizer’s people administered Trovan to some 200 sick children without letting their parents know that Trovan was an unapproved drug and Pfizer was actually conducting tests. Some of these children did not survive the tests; others suffered from long-term side effects including paralysis.

And these are only some of the things that happen when poverty becomes a political issue. Politicians, businesses and even so-called humanitarian organizations start their posturing, exploiting the sordid condition of poor people so that they can turn a profit. Yes, money. Even winning an election or getting another five-year grant from funders translates to money.