Global Poverty: Challenges and Hopes in the New Millennium, Iowa City, Iowa, March 26, 2010

- [Sharon Benzoni] It's my pleasure to welcome professor Ananya Roy today. - [Ananya Roy] Good afternoon, it's an honor to be here and I wanted to thank both Seritha and Sharon for this very kind invitation. I am gonna talk a bit today about my research on the pressing question of persistent poverty around the world. The stark fact that of a world population of about 6.7 billion people, two billion live presently under conditions of poverty. 1.4 billion of whom live under the unimaginable condition of earning less than a $1:25 a day is now common sense. So with that in mind, I've called today's talk Global Poverty Challenges and Hopes in the New Millennium. Because I am interested in the ways in which global poverty has become in the new millennium, an issue that concerns us all. The start of the new millennium has been marked by the emergence of a remarkable global conscience. An awareness of world poverty and the articulation of the will to end poverty. Them Millennium Development Goals ratified by the United Nations in 2000 serve today as a global social contract tracking progress on a whole set of ambitious indicators from the reduction of maternal mortality to universal primary school enrollment to better access to water and sanitation. Iconic figures loom large in this millennial moment leading the massive global campaigns to end poverty. From the Gates who have built the world's largest foundation to my favorite aging rockstar Bono. My students always say I give away my age when I profess my interest in Bono. Bono insists that we could be the first generation to outlaw the kind of extreme stupid poverty that sees a child die of hunger in a world of plenty. The first generation that can unknot the whole tangle of bad trade, bad debt and bad luck. But perhaps what is most striking about the millennial moment is that the global conscience about poverty is widely earned. For example the ONE Campaign prides itself on the fact that it is a campaign of everyday people. Indeed what we are witnessing is nothing less than the democratization of development. The sense that the project of international development may no longer simply be the work of powerful institutions such as the World Bank or USAID or even the United Nations. It is now the concern also of ordinary Americans. This democratization of development is evident on university campuses as well and particularly in the large numbers of students who are interested in this topic as Sharon mentioned is the case at the University of California, Berkeley. This young men and women in our classrooms can be thought of as a millennial generation and I'll talk later today about how they have made global poverty their issue. But first I wanted to share with you a brief overview of some different pathways of poverty alleviation that are evident in different parts of the world. These findings come from research that I conducted from the last five years for my recently completed book, Poverty Capital, Microfinance and The Making of Development that was just released by Routledge a few days ago which is always a wonderful feeling when that book is finally out. The book takes a close look at one of the most popular instruments of poverty alleviation, microfinance. But it is also inevitably about a much larger story of development and I'm gonna focus today on that larger story rather than on microfinance, passe. I completed the book just as the effect of the global financial crisis was becoming evident. Already a food crisis with sharp increases in food prices had swelled the ranks of the poor. The financial crisis only threatens to make things worse with the World Bank and the UN reporting that this crisis will undo all of the progress made towards the Millennium Development Goals in the last 10 years. The UN has issued the dire warning that millions will be pushed into deeper poverty and that this in turn will lead to the deaths of thousands of children. The World Bank noted that in 2008, food and fuel prices had already added about 150 million people to the ranks of the global poor. The financial crisis most likely added another 50 million to these numbers in 2009. So a decade of poverty alleviation has been reversed in just a couple of years. Of particular concern is whether or not industrialized nations will meet their aid commitments. At the moment with the exception of countries such as Norway, these countries do not live up to the mandate of the Millennium Development Goals which is to allocate 0.7% of their GDP to overseas development assistance. It's worth reflecting on that number, I'm not talking about 7%, I'm not talking about 1% of GDP, I'm talking about 0.7% and in many national polls, Americans often state that they believe that we allocate about 20 or 25% of our GDP to overseas development assistance. Well the figures for the US are about 0.1% of GDP falling far short of the 0.7% mandated by the Millennium Development Goals. Last year in an editorial, World Bank president Robert Zoellick thus called for an age of responsibility. For responsible globalization, responsible multilateralism. That choice of words was interesting. Responsibility, for of course the financial crisis itself was diagnosed as an instance of bad money and reckless greed on Wall Street. In looking at this larger picture of the financial crisis, the Wall Street bailout, and persistent even deepening global poverty, I am struck by a disjuncture. On the one hand we have what my colleague at Berkeley Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration has called socialized capitalism. A Wall Street socialism. The willingness to use taxpayer dollars to bail out some of the wealthiest corporations in the world and on the other hand, there is great reluctance to use state funds to aid the poor. Whether it be the poor in America or elsewhere. Indeed what is often advocated for the poor is self help. That the poor must help themselves. For example in a much discussed book, The White Man's Burden, William Easterly slams those such as Jeffery Sachs who make the case for a government role in the alleviation of poverty. There is a famous line in Easterly's book. The rich have markets, the poor have bureaucrats. Easterly argues that the poor can only be helped if they too are set free in free markets. Free markets, Easterly argues, can end poverty bureaucrats cannot, State aid cannot. But the financial crisis here and the Wall Street bailouts revealed something else. I would argue that we can rephrase Easterly to say, The rich have State help, the poor have self-help. I'll also argue later today that such forms of self-help are inadequate to end poverty. That we need more robust interventions whether by the State or by other types of institutions. Now, one important self-help instrument is microfinance. Microfinance is the practice of making tiny loans without collateral usually to very poor women. The origins of microfinance are usually traced to the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh founded by Muhammad Yunus in the late 1970s. In my book Poverty, Capital I examined the ways in which microfinance is now being positioned as a global sub-prime lending. As a resilient and successful financial sector that can reach the poor, through a proven formula of lending to poor women. There are pressing questions to be asked about micro-finance. Will micro-finance remake sub-prime lending, as a system based on trust and social relations, giving dignity to the poor; or will micro-finance become an industry of microsharks? A type of poverty capital with sky-high interest rates? This is currently the big battle for the soul of micro-finance, and thus the title of my book, Poverty Capital. But let me now turn to how micro-finance but also other poverty interventions are playing out in different parts of the world, and I will start with the Middle East. 9/11 launched not only a war on terror, but also a renewed war on poverty. Then world bank president James Wolfensohn, declared that there is no wall between security and poverty. In an important 2000 essay, titled Weapons of Mass Salvation, Jeffrey Sacks argued that, alongside the eradication of weapons of mass destruction, there has to be a distribution of weapons of mass salvation. Anti-AIDS drugs, anti- malarial bed nets, borewells for safe drinking water, and the like. In Egypt, which is one of the largest recipients of American aid in the Middle East, the USAID and other donors have promoted micro-finance quite aggressively, as a way to combat Egypt's most persistent development problem: which is the unemployment of its educated youth. Those with college degrees, but with no possibility of finding a job. Yet my research demonstrates the great challenges that haunt American style development in Egypt. Let me just list two. First, Western donors, particularly America, has pumped quite a bit of money into Egypt, specifically into something called the social fund, with the hope of generating jobs and micro-enterprises. A high level USAID official I interviewed put it this way. "We are under pressure to give loans to these young men. We're being told that we must train these young men to start their own businesses, to sell falafel or that otherwise they will all become suicide bombers. But it's not so easy to jumpstart an economy. Nor is it so easy to articulate a choice between suicide bombing and the selling of falafel One of the main causes of Egypt's high unemployment rate has to do with the shrinkage of public sector employment. It is the public sector in Egypt that guaranteed lifelong jobs, salary jobs, still the sort of jobs that a young educated Egyptian aspires to have. Interventions like microfinance can never generate such jobs, the only allow for the creation of informal jobs that are fraught with uncertainty. Second, Egypt is a cornerstone of US foreign policy in the Middle East. It is estimated that since 1975, Egypt has received over 50 billion dollars in US money. THat's quite a bit of money. And you would think that such money would be able to make a dent in poverty and unemployment. But let's take a closer look. Of the 50 billion dollars channeled to Egypt in the three decades between 1975 and 2005, 39 billion was military aid. Such military aid buys the US military access to Egypt's airspace, priority passage for American vessels through the Suez Canal and the utilization of Egyptian security forces for the torture programs that have become a key part of the war on terror. And the term Aid deserves closer scrutiny. The military aid from the US to Egypt, that 39 billion, is made up or has been made up exclusively of something called foreign military financing grants. These are congressionally appropriated funds that have bankrolled the purchases of advanced combat hardware. By law, FMF money must be spent on American made weaponry, making such arrangements extremely profitable for US defense companies. So what seems to be aid turns out to be a purchase of American weaponry. And what about the rest of this aid? In a seminal analysis, in a book called Rule of Experts, Timothy Mitchell shows how much of USAID's economic assistance to Egypt was also allocated to American corporations. So he shows that 58% of the economic assistance was spent in the US to purchase grain, equipment and so forth. Of the remaining 42% a substantial chunk was also spent here in the US on American contractors for services ranging from construction to consulting. Now all of this may benefit the American economy but it does little for the Egyptian economy. So Timothy Mitchell talks about this as a form of State support to the American corporate sector while at the same time in Egypt, dismantling State support. And how these forms of aid, seemingly to help economies can create a crippling dependence of these countries on imports of American food, machinery and technology. It's hard to talk about this as development, this is the performance of development. And this is perhaps the rather hopeless story of American led development in the Middle East providing some clues as to why poverty alleviation remains stalled despite large flows of aid. Now in my research I have found that there is a site in the Middle East where development does work. Where poverty alleviation is second place and employment is being generated. And that site is Lebanon. But the catch is that the main development agency in Lebanon, is Hezbollah. The sheer militia and political party that is known for both it's religious orthodoxy and organized violence. I'm sure that this audience remembers the summer of 2006 when the world was transfixed by a new round of war between Israel and Lebanon. But the war in fact was between Israel and Hezbollah and the war provided an important glimpse of the ways in which Hezbollah has emerged as the defacto state in the southern suburbs of Beirut in Southern Lebanon more generally and in the Baalbek valley. Founded in 1984, Hezbollah, the party of god, is the maturation of a religious militia. High on the US list of terrorist organizations, Hezbollah is a military force but it is also a political party with representation in the Lebanese government. What is not very well known about Hezbollah is that it manages a vast social welfare and development apparatus. One part of this apparatus provides charity services to the extreme poor, to widows and the other half produces a set of development services. I got interested in Hezbollah because it is the largest provider of microfinance not just in Lebanon but in the Middle East. It's microfinance organization is called Al Quard Al Hassan or the good loan and has over 50,000 clients and is an extremely successful program when judged on the usual criteria of microfinance, I.e loan repayment, and poverty alleviation. So in a regional context where development NGOs are for the most part artifact of foreign aid, Hezbollah claims to be the genuinely native and local institution of development. Yet Hezbollah's military charity and development activities, rely on Syria and Iran for funding and Hezbollah itself demands a certain religious and political loyalty, insisting that those served by it's development apparatus have to believe in Hezbollah's resistance society. This is yet another ecology of dependence. So in Poverty Capital I outlined the development trajectories of Egypt and Lebanon but I also contrast them with a very different story of development, a more hopeful story of development, this one emerging from Bangladesh. Bangladesh is known as the home of microfinance. In 2006 Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. More recently something unusual has been afoot in Bangladesh. It is called the Bangladesh paradox. What is the paradox? That one of the world's poorest countries, plagued by natural disasters and by political instability, has made massive improvements in human development. These improvements in Bangladesh include declines in poverty, in maternal mortality and infant mortality and sharp improvements in children's education particularly primary school enrollment. Such achievements are being credited, even by the World Bank to a set of non-governmental organizations or NGOs, including the Grameen Bank. These institutions are known for their microfinance work but my research shows that they do much more than microfinance and I think it's time to pay attention to the work being done in Bangladesh. For one thing, we are talking about the most incredible scale of institutions. Not nearly as well known as Grameen, Bangladesh is the largest development organization is something called BRAC which started as a small scale relief and rehabilitation project in 1972. Today it serves millions of people through it's microfinance, health and education programs. To give you a sense of the scale, BRAC's health programs serve 100,000,000 people in rural Bangladesh. My research shows that there are three secrets to the Bangladesh paradox, to how and why poverty alleviation is working in one of the poorest countries in the world, and whether we like it or not that secret is not microfinance. First the Bangladesh institutions focus on asset building and service delivery for the poor. The formal term for this is social protection. It is thus that Grameen bank for example makes it possible for some of the poorest women in the world to own their own homes and to own the little plot of homestead land on which that home is built. Second these institutions create a development infrastructure that spans much of rural Bangladesh. I've already noted BRAC's incredible reach of health clinics and primary schools. BRAC also runs value chain projects in sectors such as dairy and poultry connecting the micro enterprises of the poor to the national and even global economy. Such infrastructures do not replace the role of the State but rather put pressure on the state to provide similar services, what BRAC calls proof of concept. And without such infrastructure the micro enterprises of the poor are just that, micro enterprises, informal, vulnerable and with meager remuneration. Third, and this may come as a surprise, it did to me. The key to these anti-poverty programs is not credit. Despite all of the Grameen Bank's talk about credit being a human right, the key is savings. Compulsory savings. These institutions encourage and indeed force the poor to save. These savings in turn allow the poor to manage risk. If we think of poverty, as one anthropologist has put it, as a Tyranny of emergency, then the value of such a savings focused approach is evident. The institutions in Bangladesh embody a rather unique history of development, one where in the context of the struggle for independence in the early 1970s, there was the emergence of an educated nationalist class, men such as Muhammad Yunus and Fazle Abed and Shafiq Chaudhry, who actively engaged in the creation of massive service delivery organizations. Pro-poor service delivery organizations. They created a space of relative autonomy, autonomy from both the state and foreign donors and in the process created institutions that have changed the ways in which poverty alleviation takes place. The Bangladesh paradox is especially striking as a contrast to it's economic super power neighbor, India, my home which has enjoyed brisk economic growth. While the government of India claims sharp drops in poverty rates in India especially as India last year hit the 8% growth rate, it turns out that India's poverty line is at best a starvation line. The poverty line in India is about 40 cents a day. And one can argue that a person can survive in India on 40 cents a day and one can argue that a person in India can barely survive on 40cents a day. When we apply international poverty lines to India, say the $2:00 a day line which is a humane measure, it turns out that about 70% of the Indian population or about 800,000,000 people are poor. Leading some scholars to talk about the world's largest democracy as a republic of hunger. In that sense, what Bangladesh has achieved is quite phenomenal. Now, Bangladesh is not unique in it's experiments with social protection, in Latin America for example in Mexico and Brazil, social protection programs are very much on the agenda and are garnering international attention. The most well known are programs called Conditional Cash Transfers. These are small payments made to poor households but with conditions that mandate various social development outcomes such as sending children to school, visits to health clinics and so forth. One such program is Mexico's Oportunidades Program what was earlier known as Progresso aimed primarily at women. The program is credited with substantial decreases in poverty again through the allocation of cash transfers directly to poor women but with the mandates that in order to get these benefits, they have to make sure that their children are enrolled in school, they have to make regular visits to health clinics and so forth. In the Brazilian context, a similar program is Bolsa Familia which is also quite well known. Conditional cash transfer programs have their own share of critics but as my Berkeley colleagues Alan Deshomvry and Bety Sagelet put it, they are an experiment with social democracy. They must be understood as social contracts with recipients for the delivery of a service. Anthropologist James Ferguson who teaches at Stanford, sees such social protection programs as a citizen's income. That acknowledges a nationwide membership and solidarity that goes beyond the rituals of voting to include basic democratic rights to subsistence and consumption. Now, a flat citizen's income earned as a right is perhaps a radical concept. It's a radical departure from the American welfare state where support for the poor is seen not as a matter of right but rather as political dependent of the poor on welfare. But it is also a departure from other Latin American context where poverty alleviation programs have historically been examples of populist patronage. But the poor have only been able to get services by pledging loyalty to particular political parties. Take for example Venezuela. Here, Chavez has very famously pledged to use Venezuela's oil revenues to mitigate poverty. A project that he calls oil socialism. But oil socialism is perhaps better understood as oil populism, a petro populism. His administration has established anti poverty initiatives in many poor neighborhoods in cities like Caracas so medical clinics staffed by Cuban doctors, schools, grocery stores with subsidized food, public spending on these key social development sectors has increased but such projects only serve favored segments of the poor, those that are willing to align with the Chavez regime and they exclude those who oppose the regime. So one of my doctoral students doing work on this context of petro populism outlines the various exclusions of this otherwise ambitious poverty alleviation project. This is a diminished citizenship, one where the poor are included but only as paupers who must rely on patrons. The social protection programs are more broadly the idea of a flat citizen's income earned as a right is quite different and I would argue much more hopeful. I've given you a broad outline of some interesting global trends, stories of failed development as well as those that surprise and perhaps inspire. But as I mentioned at the start of today's presentation, there is another story that attends this millennial moment. And this is the democratization of development. A sense of it's widespread ownership by a millennial generation. At UC Berkeley, such energy is palpable. I am affiliated with the Blum Center for Developing Economies which is committed to funding real world solutions for poverty. Notable about the center is the hundreds of undergraduate students who've signed up for it's curriculum including a new undergraduate minor in Global Poverty in Practice that I have the privilege to chair. These students are crafting their own forms of global engagement. Last year vice president Al Gore celebrated the work of the minor and talked about these young men and women. Not only at UC Berkeley but across our nation as weavers. He said that when the fabric of a society and world is frayed, the role of the university is to weave it back together. This weaving, he argued, will have to be done by the next generation as they take on the millennial task of combating climate change and global poverty. And just a few weeks ago, president Clinton spoke to the students in our global poverty in practice minor asking them to think about themselves as global communitarians. I want to note then that this work of tackling poverty is not just elsewhere, not just in the global south, not just in the developing world, it is also here in America. And what has inspired me about the commitments of the students in my classroom about this millennial generation is how they are able to think across borders and boundaries to take up both poverty far away and poverty in their backyard. So let me end with a brief word about one of our students. Last year, one of the students in the Global Poverty in Practice minor, Emma Shaw Crane, received our university medal which is our highest academic honor. In her convocation speech, Emma drew attention to issues of poverty not elsewhere in the third world but in Berkeley. She said in her speech, the week I received this award two young men I knew were shot and killed, a few miles from the Berkeley campus where because they were black and poor, they lived a world apart. Their names were Larry and Maurice. Their murders hardly made the news because in this country there is nothing uncommon about the unnecessary death of young African American men. She said I celebrated this honor knowing their families were drowning in grief. Emma's work in the Global Poverty and Practice minor was with young, poor, at risk black men such as Larry and Maurice. In a continuation program called the B-tech Academy, Which is just a mile from the UC Berkeley campus, and yet a world apart, it serves students who've dropped out of high school and who will never have the opportunity to be at a two year college, let alone a four year university. Emma asked us not to look away, to jump into that gap to occupy that impossible space, that distance between our lives and the lives lived just a mile away. Emma embodies what I believe is key to the millennial generation, and ethics of global citizenship. And that has been the idea animating quite a bit of the research and teaching we do at UC Berkeley. The ethics of global citizenship is about imagining relations of reciprocity with those who are a continent or just a mile away. It is about weaving a new fabric of habitation, solidarity and responsibility. This is a matter of great hope and I look forward to many years of supporting the work of this millennial generation. Thank you. - [Sharon Benzoni] Would it be possible to pay everyone everyone who is poor, is there enough for them to no longer be poor? - [Ananya Roy] This is a great question and I have two responses to it. One, as with so many other policy issues, the question is also always that not of resource shortages but of the allocation of resources. The food crisis in the world continues, it's not a shortage of food, it is about the distribution of food so in many ways, the decision to house one's people, the decision to educate one's young generation the decision to make sure that the extreme poor are able to meet minimum standards of living are political decisions. They are matters of political will. But I also want to point out that the work being done in Bangladesh for example is not about ending poverty as we know it, it is about making the lives of the poor slightly more humane and we may disagree with that sentiment but Mohammad Yunus and others talk very eloquently about how with a programs they may not have moved large numbers of people across the threshold of the poverty line but what they've made sure is that people are no longer living under conditions of extreme poverty, that that catastrophe of extreme poverty is no longer taking place and that the poor are able to meet certain basic human standards of living. - [Sharon Benzoni] Alright, this first one I'm not sure if I have it all exactly right so if it's your question and I get it wrong just shout out at me. Walt Whitman Rostow, I don't know who Walt Whitma possibly with a Rastow wrote on the subject of poverty of nations 50 years ago and stated that the first step a nation must take to be successful as a nation must be self sufficiency in food production. So why isn't one of your important measures to alleviate poverty for the US and Western Europe to reduce or eliminate farm subsidies so nations in poverty can produce their own profitable food? Does that make sense? - [Ananya Roy] Yes, very much so, see this is why I was so happy about being invited to come speak at Iowa. Why, because this is a wonderful Iowan sentiment, it's about Iowa getting it right. In my classes, when students ask, what is the one thing Americans can do to alleviate global poverty? I talk about how eliminating farm subsidies here and Europe in Europe, in North America and in Japan would be a key step towards ending poverty elsewhere in the world and that's partly the topic in the first chapter of my new book. That elimination of farm subsidies is something that we as US citizens and tax payers have to take up. This is a matter of our political will and it is quite important. What I wanted to do was of course talk about the work that is happening in places like Bangladesh where those who work in those institutions would say that there is very little that they can do to change the ways in which we make policy here in the US. What they can do is build robust institutions that serve the poor in Bangladesh but there is very important work for us to do here around these sorts of policy issues and I'm very grateful for this intervention. - [Sharon Benzoni] Alright, has the "neo-liberalism"/ "Washington consensus"/"structural adjustment" answer at the IMF and World Bank reduced poverty significantly in any country? - [Ananya Roy] In the 1980s, something called the Washington Consensus became a dominant paradigm of international development first adopted by the IMF, it was also taken up by the World Bank, that Washington Consensus argued that Free markets were the solution to the lack of development and were also the solution to the persistence of poverty. The Washington Consensus was implemented in a set of austerity policies and also known as structural adjustment. But by the early 1990s, the World Bank and IMF were admitting the great failures of Structural Adjustment and of the Washington Consensus. So that when Jim Wolfensohn became president of the World Bank in the mid 1990s, he called for an end to the Washington Consensus. Washington insiders like Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs broke with the Washington Consensus. In fact Joseph Stiglitz who went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics talked about the Washington Consensus as one prone to market fundamentalism and he called for a new development approach, one that focused on the role of the State. Which is of course the argument of Jeffrey Sachs in his very famous text, The End of Poverty. So starting in the Mid 1990s, we see what many have called a post Washington Consensus. Now whether the post Washington Consensus is also a consensus remains to be seen but we are clearly in now in a kinder and gentler moment of development. One where there is a recognition of how markets fail and how development must address market failure rather than rely solely on unregulated markets. So Jeff Sachs work is about how poverty, persistent poverty is one of the most visible manifestations of market failure. - [Sharon Benzoni] What changes in US foreign aid programs do you recommend and what's best and what's politically possible? - [Ananya Roy] So since I am an academic I think I can talk about what's best and less about what's politically possible. I think the two are very, inevitably have to be linked. I wanted to start with the Egypt example. Because I've been very struck by the allocations of overseas development assistance. I think there is an overall point to be made. About how stingy our overseas development assistance allocations have been and what it would mean to achieve the simple goals outlined in the Millennium Development Contract. That surely we can work our way up to the 0.7% goal as Norway has done. But the second part of this has to do with the fact that this is not just about allocating more money, more resources to overseas development assistance, this is very much about how those resources are allocated. And clearly in the Middle East where development programs are so tied up with America's geo-political interests, there has to be a re-examination of what has been supported as a set of development programs, there's quite a bit of money being spent very little of that money actually hits the ground. And the money that hits the ground often comes right back to the US to hire American consultants, contractors and so forth. So the actual resources that are needed to implement development programs on the ground are not happening. In my book I also talk a great deal about how a place like Egypt is saturated not just with the sort of aid approach but also with a set of ideas about what can alleviate poverty such that there is very little opportunity for the types of homegrown ideas that we see in a place like Bangladesh. So we clearly in terms of a development approach within a broader foreign policy approach, we clearly need to think about how resources are being allocated and whether or not those allocations target the alleviation of poverty. Clearly now we have a new Secretary of State who has a commitment to these issues and we possibly at a moment where it will be politically possible to forge a new development approach. This is something that the Obama administration has yet to take up. Our hope is that with the passing of healthcare reform President Obama will now be able to turn his attention to other issues as well including this one. - [Sharon Benzoni] This question is about US foreign military sales. When USAID is used to participate in or propagate human rights violations, how effective is US oversight? - [Ananya Roy] One of the challenges of large amounts of overseas development assistance being used for foreign military financing is precisely this issue of the perceived legitimacy of American Power. And this is particularly an issue in the Middle East. So in fact the great discontent on the ground in Egypt has to do partly with the perception that the US is propping up an authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regime I.e that of Mubarak and that 80% of Egypt's military budget comes form the military aid that it gets from the US. So this is then not passe opposition to American military interests which it may also be but it is also the sense that the civil right and human right of Egyptian citizens on the ground are being violated through these sorts of alliances. That these are unholy alliances and this remains a big challenge for American foreign policy but it also affects American development policy in quite specific ways. - [Sharon Benzoni] Well this might be a little politically incorrect but I think it's an interesting question. You made reference to Mexico's opportunities program, there was recently a student trip that took some several students to Mexico over Spring Break and this person observes that during their trip in Mexico over Spring Break they saw that this program is making women dependent and lazy and they have more children to get more money. It also says men are also getting lazy because their wives are getting free money or free income so the question is, do social programs help women become innovative or/and self sufficient? - [Ananya Roy] I think the language of this question is interesting about dependent and lazy. I have to say in the 15 years or so of doing research on issues of poverty and inequality both here in the US and elsewhere, I haven't met a poor woman who is lazy. And in fact much of the development programs that proliferate around the world, including microfinance programs rely on the incredible energy, altruism and hard work of poor women. In fact the critiques that academics often have of these programs, particularly feminist academics like myself is that these programs use poor women. That poor women become the instruments of these programs that these women are working, they are then doing the second shift of raising their kids and managing the home then they are doing the third shift of volunteering and community service programs and now they are doing a fourth shift of managing these cash transfers or managing microfinance loans. So the concern in fact has been quite the reverse. That all such programs, even if they are well meaning, create a great burden of work, an increased burden of work on poor women. Now it's worth noting that Mexico's Oportunidad's program does not penalize the poor for working. In fact you don't lose your benefits if you take up a job so there are no incentives built in to stop working to get these benefits. Most of these benefits are quite tiny. They are not sufficient to fully support a family. But again what they do is take that edge off poverty. They make it possible to survive the tyranny of emergency. So I don't see this as free money. There are a lot of things I would perhaps see as free money but that's not my concern. My concern is is this sufficient to allow these families to find a way out of poverty? And I go back again to this question of investment. Because I don't think one can think about poverty alleviation without thinking about whether or not we are willing to invest in human capital, whether we are willing to invest in social infrastructure because if we are not, it's going to be quite difficult to imagine pathways out of poverty. In many of these programs, including the ones in Bangladesh, the criteria the good institutions use for whether or not the programs are successful is what happens to the next generation. Are the children of the beneficiaries going to have a life outside of poverty? Are they going to go to school? Are they going to get an education? Will that education help them find jobs? To me those are the questions worth asking. And so I worry much less about whether or not the poor are lazy or dependent, dependent and laziness runs across all social groups. And, you know, I think that good policy interventions then are those that set aside some of those concerns and focus on whether or not socio-economic mobility is possible. - [Sharon Benzoni] We have a couple more questions, I think we'll end after these two. What is your opinion of the Peace Corps? - [Ananya Roy] One of the interesting little factoids about UC Berkeley is that we send more of our graduates into the Peace Corps than any other university in the US. So Berkeley has a long standing relationship with the Peace Corps. I did not participate in the Peace Corps. I think the Peace Corps is a very important institution. Now our students who do go on to join the Peace Corps have critiques of the Peace Corps but they also are often inspired by the work they do in the Peace Corps and then they return to long term careers, including some in international development. The Peace Corps is important I think because it allows young Americans an opportunity to be present in a place for a long period of time so it's not a two or three month stint and it is a paradigm of service. Of being on the ground working in solidarity with local communities and serving. And that to me is a very important ideal. When we started our Global Poverty in Practice minor at UC Berkeley, it was partly keeping in mind the Peace Corps and recognizing that we were hearing from our young students, from our undergraduates. That they felt that the Peace Corps came a little too late in a young person's life. They wanted something early. And they themselves were therefore participating in service learning programs, in various volunteer opportunities but they wanted something more structured. Now of course our program which requires them to do a global practice experience has a much shorter duration than the Peace Corps so it's not two years, it's usually, most of our students do work in the fields for three to six months, but it's nevertheless a taste of what that sort of international service looks like. - [Sharon Benzoni] So this is more of a comment but I'd like your reaction to it and I actually have a question to follow it up. This person says, I was heartened with the fact that our government has completely paid our debt to the United Nations. It is in the United Nations that many of these questions of poverty, food distribution and others are discussed among the representatives of the different countries, so that's the comment. And then my question would be, What is the role of the UN in the changing landscape of NGOs, governments and individuals? Is this likely to be more of a co-ordination role in the future or how do you think it will change? - [Ananya Roy] I think the UN is one of the most important global institutions we have and there is a lot more work necessary to strengthen and consolidate the role of the UN. The UN is perhaps the only, truly multi-lateral organization we have, there are other multi-lateral organizations like the World Bank or the IMF but they remain quite controlled by specific interests, the structure of voting within those institutions remains skewed so wealthy countries have a much larger share of votes, some countries like the US have veto power in those institutions. So in both the World Band and IMF, the countries of the global south ie the countries where most of these development projects are being implemented, have not had an effective voice. The United Nations is different. And it bears the possibility of a truly multi-lateral coordinated system of international governance that spans everything from poverty alleviation to climate change. So in fact one of the tasks for the new millennium is to think about strengthening the role of the UN and we encourage our students, particularly those doing work on global poverty to be quite actively involved with the UN and to think about it's role. I think the question you asked is an important one, what is that role, is it coordination, is it something more? I think what the UN has done say in the field of poverty alleviation has been setting an agenda. The UN has been a moral voice. The Millennium Development Goals are not binding in any way, but their establishment, their ratification and the metrics that now measures progress towards the goals, has become a new implicit global social contract. That moral role of the UN, that setting of an agenda is important but many would argue that we also need something more, something more substantial. - [Sharon Benzoni] On behalf of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, I want to thank Ananya Roy for sharing with us a presentation on Global Poverty Challenges and Hopes in the New Millennium. I also wish to thank our sponsors, International Programs at the University of Iowa and University Lecture Committee, especially Seri. As a modest token of our appreciation I wish to present you with the coveted Iowa City Foreign Relations Council mug, suitable for coffee, tea or any other beverage of your choice. If you have any questions about joining ICFRC please call the office 335-0351. If you enjoy listening to this program on the radio or TV, please consider supporting the council's work by sending a contribution to ICFRC 1111 University Capitol Center, Iowa City, Iowa 52242. Thank you all, we are adjourned.