Minister asks: “why are we poor?”
Now that the results of the survey have been made public, the next step in the process is for the Ministry of National Development to formulate a strategy and action plan to reduce the level of poverty in the country. To achieve that goal, a series of consultations will be held to get feedback from a cross section of the population on how to proceed. During the first of these consultations this morning at the Radisson, Minister of National Development Assad Shoman, in an informal address, challenged participants to take a hard look at the root causes of poverty.
Assad Shoman, Minister of National Development
“Something to do with the economic system, maybe something to do with the distribution of wealth system, maybe something to do with the fact that in Belize for example, two percent of the land owners own eighty percent of the land. That makes sense or it doesn’t make sense, you see. And if they start question that, then certain people are in trouble. So that’s why it’s bad to ask why we are poor, but we have to ask that.”
“So really the truth is we cannot eliminate poverty if we don’t look at the underlying policies that have created poverty. The gap between the rich and poor is bigger today than it was ten years ago when the SIF [Social Investment Fund] was created.”
“So what you have here then is a problem that isn’t just like say… you have poor people and what we could do to help them. We have a bigger problem which has to do with the structure of the economy, and which of course has to do with distribution. Now what is the way if we have to have this free market economy–which apparently we do, and which apparently, most of you agree with anyhow, so we’re not going to go about changing it. But under this kind of economy, the only real way in which you redistribute wealth is through taxation. And the idea there is that the people that have the most money pay taxes, government takes that money and then use it for the betterment of people who don’t have so much money: in education, in health, in social services, in infrastructure, in the development of small industries, whatever. But we have a tax system which does not work toward that objective.”
The National Poverty Elimination Strategy and Action Plan 2005-2010 will be implemented based on the Millennium Development Goals, particularly the one that seeks to reduce extreme poverty by one half by the year 2015.
