Poverty: Epistemology & Politics

During the two months I spent in Savanakhet studying Lao Leum-the national language of Lao PDR-I had the opportunity to visit and spend some time in a village in order to practise my fledgling language skills. While there, and walking around the village with my fellow volunteers and the village chief, I witnessed a rather disturbing sight: we noticed an elderly man, dishevelled in appearance, who was chained up and sitting on a covered platform near the edge of the village. We asked the village chief what the story was, and thankfully we had our Lao Leum instructor along to translate the more difficult aspects for us. As it turned out the old man was mentally unstable, and as there are relatively few resources in Lao for communities to deal with mental illnesses, the villagers had decided to secure the man to keep him from hurting himself or others after he had become physically violent. It was a depressing site: the old guy sitting on the platform, arms and legs chained together and to a large beam at the centre of the platform. He looked as if he had been there for some time, a dish of food and a jug of water sitting next to him in the otherwise empty shelter.

For myself, the issues of mental illness has always been someone else’s problem, something that thankfully, fortunately, has never touched the lives of anyone I knew directly, and as such has always remained an academic question. I’ve always wondered how it was that people became to be defined as sane or insane. Who was the first person to make this decision? Who was it, and what motives did they have in deciding that someone was mentally incapacitated and in need of protection against themselves. I realized that day in the village, that for the residents and the gentleman in question, it was a direct issue with which they had to deal with on their own. They didn’t have the option of proselytizing, but had to take the only measures they could, which now sat on the edge of their village day in and day out as a constant reminder of what can happen to the fragile human mind and their inability to fully deal with it; chained, out of sight for the moment, but impossible to forget or just brush away.

I didn’t realize it then, but that old man has become for me a metaphor for the issues of poverty in Lao. Like mental illness, for myself poverty has always been largely been an academic exercise. Coming from a fairly affluent family in one of the wealthiest and most prosperous countries in the history of the world, poverty was always something that happened to other people, with little real connection to my own life. Travelling throughout the developing world, and having come to Lao with the intention of “alleviating” poverty has forced me to question precisely what it means to be “impoverished”. With what I have learned from spending time with the Khmu people, I have begun to believe that, like the man in the shelter, poverty is something that has been forced onto them, but with the chains being clasped onto the legs and arms of each and every person in the community in slightly different ways, and the people feeling helpless to do much about it. Most significantly, once someone’s is defined as being poor, it is exceptionally difficult to convince anyone you're not and “assistance” is showered down on you whether you want it or not, and quite often the treatment can be worse than the disease.

Who was it that first decided what poverty was and who was impoverished? I have learned that very often, the people who are designated as poor are rarely the ones who decide what the criterion is or what steps will be taken to address it. Also, the definitions of poverty and the application of poverty indicators are driven by epistemological and political factors rather than real human conditions or needs. One criterion that is often applied for deciding a community in Lao is poor is the question of rice self-sufficiency. Development professionals will visit a community for what is called a Rapid Rural Assessment, a practise whereby residents are visited on one or several occasions and asked a series of questions, which will usually include “Are you rice-self sufficient?” Meaning: is the village, or individuals within the community, capable of producing enough rice to meet their daily intake and nutritional needs over a 12-month period, or do they have to supplement any shortages through other means. If the person or community is unable to meet these criteria they are thereby deemed to be impoverished. You can imagine the dialogue going something like this:

Development professional to Khmu villager: "Are you rice self-sufficient?" (With accompanying explanation of definition)

Khmu Villager: "No."

Development professional: "Well then, you are poor."

Khmu Villager: "Oh my Buddha! I never realized."

Development professional: "Of course not. Poverty is relative after all. No one really knows they’re poor until someone, an expert, shows them that they are. But don’t worry, we have a comprehensive plan that will lift you out of poverty and show you the light of development and progress."

Khmu Villager: "I don’t feel so good."

Development professional: "Of course not. You’re poor."

Hence a flurry of activity and development programs and policies ensue, including the arrival of crazy Canadian kids with a penchant for BioSand Water Filters and drinking Lao Hai.

One minor problem: the Khmu people have rarely ever been rice self-sufficient. Their sustenance and livelihood strategies have always included options for making up for shortages of rice through the harvesting of wildlife, aquatic resources, and non-timber forest products. The irony is that the very programs that have been instituted to deal with the perceived status of impoverishment have resulted in reductions in the ability of the Khmu to make up for rice shortages or grow sufficient rice due to restrictions in access to land (Please see Resettlement essays for more details). In fact, when speaking with Khmu villagers I have found that many of them refer to their poverty as being a new phenomenon, which is understandable considering that before many of the development initiatives, when the Khmu were living more or less as they had been for the last 600 years, their access to a wide variety of food options and sustenance strategies were much greater than they are now. This is the perfect example of a self-fulfilling prophecy: the Khmu were defined as poor and the policies intended to address this ended up causing the very poverty they were meant to address. How’s that for a development kick in the head?

In my opinion, the central issue here is that when people are treated as victims of poverty and are targeted for development. The development processes and definitions are driven by external factors: the perceptions and beliefs of poverty from the international community, and political agendas both domestic and international. The results will inevitably produce the opposite effect of those intended. The defining of Khmu people as poor as a result of being rice insufficient, which has always been a part of life in upland areas, makes it that much easier to justify moving them or forcing them to adapt to new livelihood strategies.

Sitting in Ban Tangnguey, speaking with the villagers, and thinking of these issues, always causes me to think back to that poor man in the village in Savanakhet: a problem caused by factors outside the control of the village residents, sitting, chained up, always staring out at them, and the villagers with out the means or resources to do anything about it.