Link Banana

An interesting measure of poverty: the percentage of total household spending that goes to food, drink, and and fuel.

I was just thinking that the oft-mentioned dollar-a-day poverty line seems rather arbitrary. The Economist reports that it’s being reconsidered:

They gather 75 national poverty lines, ranging from Senegal’s severe $0.63 a day to Uruguay’s more generous measure of just over $9. From this collection, they pick the 15 lowest (Nepal, Tajikistan and 13 sub-Saharan countries) and split the difference between them. The result is a new international poverty line of $1.25 a day.

The Economist takes an expansive and sobering look at the world food shortage. At times it’s a little wonky, but absolutely the best look at the topic I’ve seen. A snippet:

In the short run, humanitarian aid, social-protection programmes and trade policies will determine how well the world copes with these problems. But in the medium term the question is different: where does the world get more food from? If the extra supplies come mainly from large farmers in America, Europe and other big producers, then the new equilibrium may end up looking much like the old one, with world food depending on a small number of suppliers and—possibly—trade distortions and food dumping. So far, farmers in rich countries have indeed responded. America’s winter wheat plantings are up 4% and the spring-sown area is likely to rise more. The Food and Agriculture Organisation forecasts that the wheat harvest in the European Union will rise 13%.

Ideally, a big part of the supply response would come from the world’s 450m smallholders in developing countries, people who farm just a few acres. There are three reasons why this would be desirable. First, it would reduce poverty: three-quarters of those making do on $1 a day live in the countryside and depend on the health of smallholder farming. Next, it might help the environment: those smallholders manage a disproportionate share of the world’s water and vegetation cover, so raising their productivity on existing land would be environmentally friendlier than cutting down the rainforest. And it should be efficient: in terms of returns on investment, it would be easier to boost grain yields in Africa from two tonnes per hectare to four than it would be to raise yields in Europe from eight tonnes to ten. The opportunities are greater and the law of diminishing returns has not set in.

I’ve been a little behind, but this week-old report on Burma from The Economist deserved sharing. A telling anecdote about the country’s problems:

Alarmingly, despite agricultural plenty, Myanmar has the classic conditions for a famine: acute poverty, poor or non-existent flows of information and crazy policies. In one cackhanded intervention in agriculture, the junta in 2006 ordered every farmer with an acre (0.4 hectares) of land to plant “physic nuts” (jatropha) around the edge of his plot. It was so keen on the crop that it also set up special plantations. The idea was to make biofuels to meet Myanmar’s energy shortage—even much of Yangon spends most evenings in darkness. But Myanmar lacks the refineries to turn the plants into fuel. The policy has been cited by many refugees pitching up at the Thai border as one reason for their flight: typically, the junta has been dragooning farmers into working for no pay in its jatropha plantations, so it becomes even harder to make a living.

Calvin Trillian does some reporting on Kolkata’s (Calcutta’s) person-powered rickshaws, and the government’s never-ceasing efforts to abolish them.

While I was in Kolkata, a magazine called India Today published its annual ranking of Indian states, according to such measurements as prosperity and infrastructure. Among India’s 20 largest states, Bihar finished dead last, as it has for four of the past five years. Bihar, a couple hundred miles north of Kolkata, is where the vast majority of rickshaw wallahs come from. Once in Kolkata, they sleep on the street or in their rickshaws or in a dera—a combination garage and repair shop and dormitory managed by someone called a sardar. For sleeping privileges in a dera, pullers pay 100 rupees (about $2.50) a month, which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera.

(via Passport)

It’s also probably worth noting that Robert Kaplan takes a similar (but slightly bleaker and more coherent) tour through Kolkatta in The Atlantic.

New York has an interesting — if not exceptionally deep — photo essay about homelessness in the city. From Nancy’s story (the only one longer than a paragraph):

It’s a cold night—we can see our breath—but under the overpass, Nancy’s warm. “I got, like, six blankets here,” she says, laughing and coughing at the same time. The river bubbles. The glow of a streetlamp shines on the water like moonlight. “The river’s peaceful to me,” she says. She’s been homeless now for almost four years, moving from place to place. She says she likes this spot the best, but as the night goes on, she talks about the sacrifices she’s made, the three children she rarely, if ever, sees—a teenager, a 4-year-old, and a 2-year-old. Talking about the children makes Nancy cry—long, low sobs.

Soon enough, though, she’s better. “I love to cry,” she says. It’s one of the reasons she won’t take Prozac. “When I’m on the mental meds, I don’t like the way I feel,” she says. “I’m not Nancy.”

Making a case similar to Mr. Brilliant’s, The Economist argues that the situation in the world’s better than most think, and still improving.

Indeed, for a great many people the way things are is pretty rotten: Burmese monks, for instance, or the Luo in Kenya. Life is not too bright for investors at the moment, either. But is the broader proposition true? Is the world really becoming worse for the majority of mankind? We argue that it is not.

To some extent, our qualified optimism is borne out by impartial data. In this article we look at three pieces of evidence: the underlying social conditions in poor countries; poverty alleviation over the past decade; and the incidence of wars and political violence. By those measures the world seems to be in rather better shape than most people realise.