Poverty in the Developing World

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 28th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

My Lords, I am more than grateful for the fact that this matter has been brought before us for debate. Sometimes, as I sit on these Benches listening to the discussion of various pieces of legislation, I feel that I would like all of them checked out for how they impact on poor people, a kind of conditioning criteria by which we may judge the humaneness of the legislation produced by these Houses of Parliament. I am also delighted that a debate on extreme poverty comes before us like this, but I would want to check the abstract Latinate noun “poverty” against the poor people who constitute, as a phenomenon, the noun in question. I come from a crucible of abject poverty and have spent quite a lot of my adult life living among the poorest people in the world, so I cannot come to a debate like this without some kind of imagination filled with real examples on the issue.

I start by saying how personal the subject is to me just now. Our only daughter married a lovely Cambodian boy whose father, on the way home from school at the age of 15, was forcibly recruited into Pol Pot’s army in Cambodia. He spent the next three and a half years indoctrinated and drugged and was part of that army about whose devastating outcomes we know only too well. My daughter’s father-in-law has been traumatised by that and is a wreck of a man now. When we visit Cambodia, we are able, because of our son-in-law, to go well beyond where tourists go, into the villages and out into the countryside, and we experience a country that has known more than its share of trauma over the years. Therefore, for me, poverty is not just the absence of physical benefits and material things, but it is a state of mind that oppression, of one kind or another, has reduced one to over many years. Cambodia has become very dear to me and it is clawing its way very slowly out of the desperate situation of 20, 30 and 40 years ago.

I could add much to illustrate my concern and underline it by my experience over a number of years as chairman of Christian Aid’s Africa committee. I saw the effects of civil war in Mozambique, in Sudan and in Eritrea—Eritrea is slightly different—and all the devastating effects of war over many years. I shall never forget going to Mozambique and seeing no animals in the countryside because, over the duration of the war, they had been killed to feed people. I saw a young man who had been trained to fly MiG fighters for the Soviet air force by one side in that dispute, and once the Cold War was over, or at least the Warsaw Pact countries were loosening their hold on certain countries in Africa, he was retraining as a people’s lawyer to help ordinary people to identify their land holdings, the papers having been lost and the lands expropriated over many years.

It is stories like that that remind me of the small initiatives that happen in desperately poor countries to help people to take a step at a time out of poverty. Of course, the real matrix of my own understanding about extreme poverty comes from the 10 years that I lived in Haiti, the poorest country in the western world. I was there just three months ago and I saw the people living in tented villages and suffering from an outbreak of cholera. There are also those for whom floods, earthquakes, droughts and the terrible ravages of nature impose a kind of poverty on them that is wilful and hazardous and that comes at a moment’s notice. One can distinguish between that understanding of poverty and the chronic and endemic poverty that lasts generations and flows from the history of Haiti. It saw the first black republic in the world emerge from the shackles of colonialism in 1804, when 500,000 people, who had been plantation labourers, fled to the hills and went into subsistence farming. Two hundred years later, they have denuded the countryside of all its trees; they have completely impoverished the land; and 80 per cent of them are illiterate. While I was living there, AIDS reared its ugly head as early as the 1970s and 1980s—I remember it was such a new phenomenon in those days.

Therefore, the poor are very real in my mind. All the time, I want to try to imagine ourselves into the mindset of poor people as they look around them and wonder what options are available to them. I mentioned earlier—although will not dwell upon it—the poverty into which I was born, to a single mother with two boys living in one room for many, many years. Luckily, I passed the 11-plus and went to a grammar school—and was there with Members of this House in fact—but, for all that, I know that I have had a gilded life subsequent to those beginnings. What were the indicators that suggested to me that there was a way out of the poverty my mother and her family had known in the 1930s—soup kitchens and all that kind of stuff? During my childhood in the 1940s, our local Member of Parliament—to whose memory I pay immense tribute—was James Griffiths, who at that time was the deputy leader of the Labour Party. He turned down a job in Mr Attlee’s Cabinet in the Foreign Office in order to be Minister for Work and Pensions, in those days when our parliamentary leaders had lived a proper life somewhere else before they came into politics. Through his ministrations in the other place, he brought onto the statue book the Family Allowances Act—although that was Eleanor Rathbone’s creation—the National Assistance Act, the National Insurance Act, pensions legislation and so on. These, along with the Butler Education Act and the National Health Service, gave people trapped in poverty, as we were, a new horizon.

I ask myself where in the world that we live in, with this extreme poverty so endemic, similar indicators are to be found. We have the Bretton Woods arrangements, the World Bank, the World Health Organisation and the Food and Agriculture Organisation. They are all there, but how does that translate down into the mentality of people, who are trapped in poverty, who say, “This gives me my chance”? Until those great things that are thought up on high are appropriated by people below, they do not amount to much more than a bar of soap. That is the trick.

I will draw my remarks to a close as I see the time is up. I was present in Haiti just recently and remembered the work that we did planting trees. There are forests there that we planted 30 years ago. Building roads, forming co-operatives, organising little primary healthcare systems, education, literacy and desalinating seawater in order to give drinking water to people—these things can happen and can be done; but only by engaging with real people who are poor, not by talking about poverty until the cows come home.

I welcome the opportunity to play some part in this debate and urge your Lordships to look at this issue as something that should preoccupy us seriously and constantly through all our deliberations.