Poverty traps: Exploring the complexity of causation
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International Food Policy Research Institute
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Describing and explaining are two very different engagements, and yet development experts routinely write as though to describe were to explain. If this were not the case, it would be hard to understand why they have found it necessary to repeatedly describe the lives of the world’s poorest over the past 30 years. Consider the following sentence constructed from numerous writings—for example, by Banerjee and Duflo, Narayan, the United Nations Development Programme, and the World Bank (see the “For Further Reading” for details)—wherein poverty is defined as a state of affairs where someone has access to very little income:
In the world of the poor, people don’t enjoy food security, don’t own many assets, are stunted and wasted, don’t live long, can’t read or write, don’t have access to easy credit, are unable to save much, aren’t empowered, can’t insure themselves well against crop failure or household calamity, don’t have control over their own lives, don’t trade with the rest of the world, live in unhealthy surroundings, suffer from “incapabilities,” and are poorly governed.
Palabras clave
poverty, hunger, food policies, food security, capacity building, vulnerability, cash transfers, malnutrition, economic development, social safety nets, health care, property rights, climate change, gender, policies, millennium development goals