Against all odds, this statistic fell 5 points last year. However, the decline largely depended on monetary transfers whose future is uncertain.
Two weeks ago, DANE reported that in 2020, a year marked by the pandemic, 3.5 million people in Colombia fell into poverty. The discouraging figure of 21.2 million inhabitants in total in that condition put another statistical result in the background, which especially surprised those who study the issues of poverty and inequality: rural poverty not only did not increase as feared, but also it fell by around five points: it went from 47.5% in 2019 to 42.9% in 2020.
As Blanca Cecilia Zuluaga, director of the doctorate in Business Economics at Icesi University says, “in 2020, the dream of closing the rural-urban gap was fulfilled in a very unfortunate way: it did not happen because rural poverty fell to the levels of the urban, but because the urban increased 10.1 percentage points, reaching the same historically high levels of rural poverty “.
Indeed, the figures presented by DANE showed that the rise in monetary poverty was a mainly urban phenomenon: COVID was especially devastating for cities. Of course, the question that arises from these figures is how it is possible that rural poverty, historically higher than urban poverty, has fallen and to the extent that it did. Where are the urban-rural links? Didn’t the crisis in the cities affect the countryside?
Among economists there seems to be a kind of consensus that monetary transfers (such as Ingreso Solidario, Familias en Acción, etc.) made to households in the context of the COVID emergency had everything to do with it, as did the fact that agricultural activities (which provide more than 60% of rural employment) will not stop at any time during the pandemic. However, there could be other reasons, as well as questions about the sustainability of this behavior.
It should be remembered that in 2020 the gross domestic product plummeted 6.8%; However, agriculture was among the few activities that had a positive variation: it grew 2.8%. Agricultural activities were always among the exceptions to confinements, while a product such as coffee (a crop to which some 550,000 families are dedicated in Colombia) registered its best internal prices in history, around $ 1,400,000 per load.
On the other hand, the director of DANE, Juan Daniel Oviedo, explained that without the monetary support of the Government, rural poverty would have risen to 50%. In other words, Roberto Angulo, founding partner of the Inclusión SAS firm, explains that the monetary transfers alleviated 7.1 points of rural poverty and almost 10 of extreme poverty. It is worth mentioning that around 30% of Solidarity Income, for example, has been directed to rural households.
Follow the news of El Espectador on Google NewsAngulo summarizes the result of the incidence of rural monetary poverty as a combination of an agricultural GDP that never stopped growing and the receipt of monetary support. With a particularity: aid such as Ingreso Solidario have a “flat amount for the whole country”. In other words, an urban and a rural household receive the same $ 160,000 per month.
However, urban and rural poverty lines (value to meet minimum caloric needs and other goods and services) are different. In the headwaters it is $ 369,688 on average and in rural areas it is almost half, $ 199,828. In other words, a shift from Ingreso Solidario almost equals the rural poverty line, but exceeds the extreme rural poverty line ($ 112,000). That would be enough to “get out” of extreme poverty in the countryside.
Ángela María Penagos, director of the Initiative on Agri-Food Systems at the Universidad de los Andes, points out that “in effect, institutional aid, both ordinary and extraordinary, had an impact on this significant drop in poverty. But even without the aid, rural poverty would have increased much less than urban poverty ”. Among his hypotheses, he mentions the new commercialization circuits, in small or intermediate cities, which could have been found before the closure of urban markets. This, however, would require further study, clarifies Penagos.
In any case, it indicates the income that the good performance of products such as coffee could have left, “even more so considering that the poverty line is so low.” And this is where he calls for reflection: “Why is the poverty line so low in rural areas? That puts us before the situation that the rural problem is much bigger than we imagine. I agree that the poverty lines have to be differentiated territorially, but it is very strong that it is half. I don’t think the cost of living in the country is exactly half; should be seen. And, furthermore, (the lines) are not differentiated regionally: it is not the same to be poor in the Bogotá savanna as in the south of Bolívar ”.
On the other hand, statistics undoubtedly “collide” with reality. This is what Luis Alejandro Jiménez, president of the National Association of Peasant Users (ANUC), mentions, for whom it does not make much sense to say that poverty fell while the prices of products such as potatoes, a source of income for some, have plummeted. 100,000 families, and other food, added to the fact that not in all cases the relief from financial obligations has been met. Regarding monetary support, he insists on what he told El Espectador about six months ago: “We have seen that some part of this support has reached the producers, but one does not stop listening to ‘it did not reach me’”.
Angulo and Penagos, on the other hand, agree that the fall in poverty seen last year is not sustainable, since if transfers are “cut”, the statistics would skyrocket. Zuluaga points out that “for the impact of transfers on rural poverty to be long-lasting, monetary transfers must be maintained and their coverage expanded. Sustainability depends on the new tax reform proposal presented by the Government, in which the increase in collection for the richest population and a serious commitment by the Government to reduce unnecessary expenses, a frank fight against corruption – which is carried out $ 50 billion a year according to data from the Comptroller’s Office–, elimination of exemptions that make the tax system regressive and control of evasion ”.
Looking forward, Angulo points out that if urban markets do not recover, rural households may be affected. He gives as an example those who sustain themselves with a mixture of income between rural production and the money that their children or some member of the household send from the city. For that, he adds, it is important to talk about productive inclusion. “It is not with aid that we are going to reduce urban poverty, because aid cannot replace the productive apparatus.” And it places special emphasis on youth, the population most affected by unemployment. For him, it is key to generate a great platform that unites the “detached pieces”, referring to programs such as Generación E, Jóvenes en Acción, among others.
According to Zuluaga, on the other hand, for the fight against poverty in the countryside, “the most important thing is to implement the commitments that were set out in the Peace Agreement for the rural area. What is consigned in the chapter on the rural sector largely reflects the suggestions made by many researchers in the country who are experts on the subject of land, as well as the international missions that were formed in the middle of the last century ”. In a similar sense, Angulo points out the importance of following a rural development strategy that does not depend only on agriculture and that takes into account the most “disconnected” areas, for which, he says, the PDETs have the task well advanced.
