Rural poverty: The opportunity to work for sustenance

Poverty is a condition in which a person or community is deprived of, or lacks the essentials for a minimum standard of well-being and living. Since poverty is understood in many senses, its essentials may be lack of material resources such as food, safe drinking water, and shelter, or social resources such as access to information, education, health-care, social status, political power, or the opportunity to develop meaningful connections with other people in the society.
Bangladesh is one of the world's poorest countries. The population is predominantly rural, with about 80 per cent of its more than 160 million people living in rural areas. For their livelihoods rural people depend mainly on land, which is both fertile and extremely vulnerable. Most of the country is made up of flood plain, and while the alluvial soil provides good arable land, large areas are at risk because of frequent floods and cyclones, which take lives and destroy crops, livestock and property.
Many people live in remote areas that lack services such as education, health clinics, and adequate roads, particularly road links to market places. An estimated 36 per cent of the population in rural areas lives below the poverty line. They suffer from persistent food insecurity, own no land and assets, are often uneducated, and may also suffer serious illnesses or disabilities. Another 29 per cent of the rural population is considered moderately poor. Though they may own a small plot of land and some livestock and generally have enough to eat, their diets lack nutritional value. As a result of health problems or natural disasters, they are at the risk of sliding deeper into poverty. Women are among the poorest of the rural poor, especially when they are the sole heads of their households. They suffer from discrimination and have few earning opportunities, and their nutritional intake is often inadequate.
One of the main causes of rural poverty is the country's geographic and demographic characteristics. A large area of the country is low-lying, and thus is at a high risk to flooding. Many of the rural poor live in areas that are prone to extreme annual flooding which causes huge damage to their crops, homes and livelihoods. In order to rebuild their homes, they often have to resort to moneylenders, and that causes them to fall deeper into poverty. In addition, these natural disasters also cause outbreaks of cholera and other waterborne and diarrhoeal diseases such as dengue and malaria which affect them physically and lower their productivity levels. Another cause of rural poverty is the fast-growing population. It places huge pressure on the environment, causing problems such as erosion and flooding, which in turn leads to low agricultural productivity and thus poverty.   
A close relationship exists between flood risks and poverty as measured by household incomes, with people living under the poverty threshold facing a higher risk of flooding due to their proximity to rivers and flood-prone areas. Property prices also tend to be lower because of the risk of flooding, making it more likely that someone who lives in a flood-prone area is poor.
Farmers hit by floods are often forced to sell lands and in doing so, they risk being pushed into or deeper into poverty. In areas hard hit by floods, especially in affected areas at the time of 1988 flood, several researchers have found that many of the affected households have resorted to selling off assets such as land and livestock to mitigate losses. Also, in an area hard-hit by poverty and prone to floods, it was found that many of the poor were unwilling to pay for flood protection. The main reason cited had been the lack of financial resources although it was found that many of these people are willing to substitute non-financial means of payment.
Poverty is considered as one of the biggest challenges for Bangladesh. In five-year plans, poverty alleviation has been considered with a very high priority. Despite considerable thrust on poverty alleviation in all plan documents since the independence of Bangladesh, a significant number of people are still living below the poverty line. The rate of unemployment    in    the    country,    particularly youth unemployment, is rising. Moreover, national rate of wage is still below the poverty bar of US$ 2.00 per day. Low wage, lack of employment opportunities together with slowed down of poverty would cumulatively reign in the rate of growth in the country.
Employment and poverty are critically interlinked. The rural poor people can be divided into two groups: the unemployed poor and the working poor. The critical issue regarding the working poor is: why they are poor in spite of their employment. Two broad categories of proximate causes can be stated: underemployment and low returns to labour. In other words, the quality of employment determines whether employment would lead to poverty reduction or not.
There are types of underemployment in rural Bangladesh: 'open underemployment' and 'disguised underemployment'. People who suffer from low returns to their labour, people who work less than full time and cannot earn enough to rise above the poverty line are 'open-underemployed'. People who - the Nurkse-Lewis type surplus labour - work full time at low intensity, within an institutional framework that permits both work-sharing and income-sharing are 'disguised underemployed'.
Labour, despite working full-time and at high intensity are divided into three categories. First, people who work for very low wages to compete with potential entrants - the surplus labour syndrome. Secondly, people who work with less skill/ poor technology/ insufficient complementary factors - the low productivity syndrome. Third, people who suffer from adverse terms of trade, either because of low product prices, or high input cost, or both - the adverse terms of trade syndrome. Thus rural working people are poor. Wage income is the major source of income for about one fifth of rural households.
As we all know, poverty is a curse. There is no place in this world for lazy people but it is also necessary for people to get the opportunity to work for sustenance.

The writer is a retired Professor of Economics, BCS General Education Cadre.
 [email protected]