Tag Archives: Poverty

Some poor Venezuelan parents give away children amid deep crisis

Emmanuel Cuauro, 4, plays with a ball next to his parents Zulay Pulgar (R), 43, and Maikel Cuauro, 30, in their house in Punto Fijo, Venezuela

By Girish Gupta and Mircely Guanipa

PUNTO FIJO, Venezuela (Reuters) – Struggling to feed herself and her seven children, Venezuelan mother Zulay Pulgar asked a neighbor in October to take over care of her six-year-old daughter, a victim of a pummeling economic crisis.

The family lives on Pulgar’s father’s pension, worth $6 a month at the black market rate, in a country where prices for many basic goods are surpassing those in the United States.

“It’s better that she has another family than go into prostitution, drugs or die of hunger,” the 43-year-old unemployed mother said, sitting outside her dilapidated home with her five-year-old son, father and unemployed husband.

With average wages less than the equivalent of $50 a month at black market rates, three local councils and four national welfare groups all confirmed an increase in parents handing children over to the state, charities or friends and family.

The government does not release data on the number of parents giving away their children and welfare groups struggle to compile statistics given the ad hoc manner in which parents give away children and local councils collate figures.

Still, the trend highlights Venezuela’s fraying social fabric and the heavy toll that a deep recession and soaring inflation are taking on the country with the world’s largest oil reserves.

Showing photos of her family looking plumper just a year ago, Pulgar said just one chicken meal would now burn up half its monthly income. Breakfast is often just bread and coffee, with rice alone for both lunch and dinner.

Nancy Garcia, the 54-year-old neighbor who took in the girl, Pulgar’s second-youngest child, works in a grocery store and has five children of her own. She said she could not bear to see Pulgar’s child going without food.

“My husband, my children and I teach her to behave, how to study, to dress, to talk… She now calls me ‘mom’ and my husband ‘dad,'” said Garcia.

FOOD

Every day at the social services center in Carirubana, which oversees Pulgar’s case, more than a dozen parents plead for help taking care of their children in this isolated, arid corner of Venezuela with a shaky water supply and little food.

Last year, the rate was around one parent a day.

“The principal motive now is lack of food,” said Maria Salas, director of the small and understaffed center, echoing colleagues at two other welfare groups interviewed by Reuters elsewhere in the country.

Salas added that her organization – the Council of Protection for Children and Adolescents – lacked the resources to deal with the situation and had asked authorities for help, even just a dining room, but had no luck.

Not far from Salas’ office, long supermarket lines under a hot sun help explain why parents are finding life so tough, a scene repeated across the country of 30 million people.

Venezuelans suffer shortages of the most basic goods, from food to medicine. Millions are going hungry amid triple-digit inflation and a nearly 80 percent currency collapse in the last year.

The government blames the United States and Venezuela’s opposition, yet most economists pin the responsibility on socialist policies introduced by former president Hugo Chavez, which his successor Nicolas Maduro has doubled down on even as oil prices – the economy’s lifeblood – plunged.

Venezuela’s Information Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

The Caracas municipality of Sucre, which encompasses Petare, one of the region’s largest and poorest slums, has seen an “exponential” increase in parents needing help, say officials.

“The parents come in crying,” said Sucre welfare director Angeyeimar Gil.

“It’s very dramatic to see parents’ pain when saying they can no longer look after their child,” she said. “We’re seeing a lot of cases of malnutrition and children that come to hospital with scabies.”

Two-thirds of 1,099 households with children in Caracas, ranging across social classes, said they were not eating enough in a survey released last week by children’s’ rights group Cecodap.

ABANDONED

In some cases, parents are simply abandoning their kids.

Last month, a baby boy was found inside a bag in a relatively wealthy area of Caracas and a malnourished one-year-old boy was found abandoned in a cardboard box in the eastern city of Ciudad Guayana, local media reported.

Gil said that she had helped find places in orphanages for two newborns recently abandoned by their mothers in hospitals after birth.

There are also more cases of children begging or prostituting themselves, according to welfare workers.

Abortion is illegal in Venezuela and contraception, including condoms, is extremely hard to find.

Back in Carirubana, Pulgar was relieved that her child was being looked after properly by her neighbor.

“My girl has totally changed,” she said as another son clambered over her, adding that even her manner of speaking had improved.

She said she would love to take the child back one day but does not see her situation improving.

“This is written in the Bible. We’re living the end times.”

(Additional reporting by Liamar Ramos and Andreina Aponte in Caracas and Leonardo Gonzalez in Punto Fijo.; Editing by Alexandra Ulmer, Christian Plumb and Kieran Murray)

In Dallas, police bear the burden of stark inequities

A house in a south Dallas neighborhood sits in an economically distressed neighborhood that the Mayor’s Office looks to improve in Dallas

By Jon Herskovitz

DALLAS, August 15 (Reuters) – Antoinette Brown begged, in her final words, “somebody help me.” Then she was mauled to death by a pack of wild dogs.

The 52-year-old homeless woman perished in the impoverished Dallas neighborhood of Fair Park, not far from gleaming downtown skyscrapers and some of America’s wealthiest neighborhoods. The gruesome attack in May served as a grim reminder of stark inequities, even as the region’s economy and population booms.

The stray dog problem is just one of many facing the poorest neighborhoods of Dallas, which was labeled the “City of Hate” after the assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy here in 1963 and has since struggled through decades of urban blight.

Today, the mayor and others tout a host of police reforms and social programs, but they acknowledge the overwhelming challenge in bridging a racial and economic chasm with roots in the city’s segregated past. Economic inequality in Dallas, among the most severe in the U.S., has long underpinned friction between police and low-income residents here – tensions that have come into focus nationally in protests over excessive use of force.

At once such protest last month, the shooting of a dozen police officers, five of them fatally, brought a softer national spotlight on Dallas. The officers were killed by a deranged U.S. Army Reserve veteran, 25-year-old Micah X. Johnson, who said he aimed to avenge the shootings of black men by police nationwide.

The Dallas department won praise for its handling of the protest, before and after the bloodshed, as well as a training effort credited with a drastic reduction in officer-involved shootings – to one so far this year, down from 23 in 2012. The city’s Democratic mayor, Mike Rawlings, drew attention to reforms including a plan, dubbed GrowSouth, to expand educational, employment and social opportunities in eight communities, mostly south of downtown, but including Fair Park to the east.

The goals include building low-cost housing and pushing for hotels, shops and office buildings to move into lower-income areas. There have been successes and disappointments, Rawlings told Reuters in an interview.

“I am not going to bring world peace,” the mayor said. “I am trying to establish objectives that can be achieved in a relatively short amount of time.”

LOCKED AND LOADED

The impact can be hard to see on some streets in Fair Park. Retired nurse Jametter Daniels, 65, lives about 100 yards from the abandoned house where Antoinette Brown died. Police often see the black and Latino residents of her neighborhood more as problems than people, she said, and tensions run high.

“They are just as afraid of us as we are on them,” she said from her home, with bars on the doors. “When the sun goes down, I am locked up and armed up.”

The weight of poverty, racial strife and mental illness too often lands on the weary shoulders of rank-and-file police officers, said Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and a former police officer and prosecutor.

“What police have been forced to do in this country is perform triage,” he said.

In Dallas, that includes corralling potentially dangerous dogs, among other duties that extend well beyond routine crime, Dallas Police Chief David Brown told reporters last month.

“We have got a loose dog problem – let’s have the cops chase loose dogs,” he said. “Schools fail? Give it to the cops.”

Police Detective Chelsea Whitaker gets a close-up view of such failures daily.

“We can be glorified social workers,” she said.

She recalled interactions with two teenagers who constantly got into fights at school. One of them had not been eating. Whitaker took her to grocery store to buy food.

“I had to take another girl to get sanitary napkins because nobody ever taught her that,” Whitaker said of the 13-year-old. “She is angry and fighting all the time; of course, you would be angry.”

MEASURES OF POVERTY, PROGRESS

In his office overlooking downtown, Rawlings – a former Pizza Hut CEO who produced record sales – takes a corporate approach to documenting and fixing societal problems.

He has charts showing improvements in areas such as housing – where the property value of South Dallas has increased by about $1.5 billion since he took office in 2011 – and weaknesses in others, such as high unemployment rates in many neighborhoods.

Of urban areas with more than 250,000 residents, Dallas has the widest economic gap between its richest and the poorest neighborhoods, followed by Philadelphia, Baltimore, Columbus, Ohio and Houston, according to a 2015 study by the Urban Institute, a Washington D.C.-based economic social policy research organization.

South Dallas makes up about 60 percent of the city’s area and 45 percent of Dallas County’s population — yet accounts for just 15 percent of the city’s property tax base, according to the mayor’s office.

Those numbers can be read in two ways. Rawlings prefers to see the upside.

“Southern Dallas is an investment opportunity and not a charity case,” he said.

‘JOBS WITH REAL DIGNITY’

Repairing the economy of South Dallas may be beyond the ability of one well-meaning mayor, said Brianna Brown, Dallas County director for the Texas Organizing Project, a nonprofit advocating for low-income communities.

“There has been effort made that is different from other administrations,” she said. “Whether that materializes into something that is really tackling the problem – in a systemic way, with a policy solution – is a whole other question.”

Under Rawlings, the city has sought to equalize infrastructure spending – potholes, streetlights, public transportation – among rich and poor neighborhoods. The administration has also pleaded with private employers to move into poorer areas, and set up a private investment fund called Impact Dallas Capital that seeks to raise $100 million to spur investments.

Some current city efforts in low-income neighborhoods – such as regulating payday lenders and luring stores offering fresh, affordable food – are well-intentioned but difficult to execute, Brianna Brown said. The depth of the problems, she said, demand bolder reforms to the city’s education system and its economy.

“There should be jobs with real dignity,” she said.

In Fair Park, where Antoinette Brown died of dog bites, leafy parks sit next to garbage-strewn lots and unpaved roads. Keena Davis, 32, said going to an affluent neighborhood nearby, Highland Park, felt like a different world.

He wants his 12-year-old son to make the jump.

“There’s a ceiling on how high he can go, and I want him to break it,” she said. “He doesn’t deserve this neighborhood.”

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Additional reporting by Marice Richter in Dallas; Editing by Brian Thevenot)

Venezuelan schoolchildren express hunger in drawings

A drawing made during a lesson at a school shows what a student ate during the course of a day in Caracas, Venezuela July 14, 2016. The student wrote, "Ate corn cake with cheese for breakfast; had spaghetti with egg for lunch and a cookie for dinner." The student said that pizza was their favourite dish.

By Daniel Kai

CARACAS (Reuters) – When children at a Catholic-run school in a poor neighborhood of Venezuela’s Caracas capital began fainting from hunger, teachers asked them to draw or describe their most recent meals and what they expected to eat next.

The responses were shocking.

Some of the 478 kindergarten and primary students had gone without breakfast and were skipping other meals. Others expected to eat only bread, yucca or “arepa,” a form of cornmeal flatbread that is a local staple.

The drawings and texts at the Padre Jose Maria Velaz school in western Caracas are another symptom of the oil-rich South American nation’s deep economic crisis and its effects on nutrition and eating habits.

Due to the faltering socialist economy and the plunge in global oil prices, Venezuela has been in recession since early 2014. It suffers from the world’s highest inflation and is experiencing shortages of basic goods, from milk to medicines.

Huge lines at shops and pharmacies are now the norm, and hungry residents are quickly stripping the nation’s lush mango, coconut and papaya trees.

Depicting their latest meals, some students at Padre Jose Maria Velaz drew just mangoes and plantains. One said he had eaten rice and beans for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Another said he had no breakfast. “We are waiting for food.

“I have pasta and ham for lunch,” he added. “I’m hungry.”

School director Maria Hidalgo said one in four children there were eating inadequately, and some teachers had also fainted from hunger.

“It’s dramatic, what we are going through,” Hidalgo said. “What kind of Venezuela are we going to have in 10 years?”

Critics say Venezuela’s crisis is the fault of economic policies under President Nicolas Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez. But the government says it is the victim of an “economic war” led by opposition politicians, businessmen and the United States.

Alexis Marin, who runs the food program for state schools, said children were receiving proper supplies.

“With all the economic war, they couldn’t destroy the school food program,” he told state TV.

The children at Padre Jose Maria Velaz at least had a happy reprieve: Nearby private textile company Telares de Palo Grande and local charity Mi Convive recently organized a party around a healthy meat soup for all to mark the end of the school year.

(Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

China to relocate 2 million people this year in struggle to banish poverty

A homeless woman is seen on a cold winter night near Beijing South Railway Station in Beijing

BEIJING (Reuters) – China, fighting to stamp out poverty, will this year move more than two million of its poorest citizens from remote, inland regions to more developed areas, an official of the cabinet, or State Council, said on Tuesday.

The mass relocation of people is a strategy targeted at lifting 10 million citizens out of poverty by 2020, state news agency Xinhua has said.

Some of the villagers will move to areas with better social services, such as schools and hospitals, while others in remote areas will move to places with better roads and water supply, the official, Liu Yongfu, told a briefing.

The numbers would be stepped up gradually and may eventually hit 3 million, added Liu, who heads the cabinet’s Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development.

“We will talk it over with the localities and accumulate some experience, after that we will increase step-by-step,” he said.

Despite two decades of rapid economic growth, poverty remains a huge issue in China, mainly in rural areas, where a lack of jobs drives out adults, leaving behind children and the elderly, often with limited access to schools and healthcare.

China’s poor, who make up about 5 percent of a population of nearly 1.4 billion, live mostly in the countryside, and earn less than 2,300 yuan ($362) a year, government and state media say.

In March Premier Li Keqiang promised a boost of 43 percent in funding for poverty relief programs. Last October, the cabinet said China aimed to lift all its 70 million poor above the poverty line by 2020.

In December, Li urged local authorities to provide housing, healthcare, schooling and employment for relocated citizens.

Since kicking off market reforms in 1978, China has lifted more than 800 million people out of poverty, but it remains a developing country and the reforms are incomplete, the World Bank says.

(Reporting by Megha Rajagopalan; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

Fire destroys shelters for internally displaced Muslims in Myanmar

Boys stand among debris after fire destroyed shelters at a camp for internally displaced Rohingya Muslims in the western Rakhine State near Sittwe

YANGON (Reuters) – A fire broke out on Tuesday in a camp for internally displaced Muslims in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, destroying shelters where about 2,000 people had lived and injuring about 14 of them, the United Nations said.

Camps in the area largely house members of the marginalized Rohingya Muslim minority, who were displaced by fighting between Buddhists and Muslims in 2012.

The fire at the Baw Du Pha 2 camp near the state capital of Sittwe started in the morning. Authorities were investigating the cause but initial reports indicated it was an accident from a cooking fire, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement.

“Based on the current information available, at least 14 people were injured by the fire. There are unconfirmed reports of fatalities but this has not been verified,” it said.

The fire destroyed about 44 “long houses” and damaged up to nine, affecting 440 households, or about 2,00 people, it said.

Authorities in the area were not immediately available for comment.

Myanmar’s Rohingya population is stateless and thousands of them have fled persecution and poverty, often by boat to other parts of Southeast Asia.

Some 125,000 Rohingya remain displaced and face severe travel restrictions while living in camps.

(Reporting by Timothy Mclaughlin; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Canada sounds alarm over aboriginal teenage suicide epidemic

File photo of a tattered Canadian flag flying over a teepee in Attawapiskat Ontario

By Rod Nickel

WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) – Canada’s parliament will meet in emergency session on Tuesday night over a rash of suicide attempts by aboriginal teenagers in a remote, poverty-stricken community whose people feel isolated from the rest of the world.

Over the past weekend alone, 11 people of the Attawapiskat First Nation in Ontario tried to kill themselves, then a second group was brought to hospital Monday night after suicide attempts, prompting Chief Bruce Shisheesh to declare a state of emergency.

An 11-year-old child was in each of the groups treated over the past few days and the attempts follow a total of 28 attempted suicides in the month of March, some of them adults, health officials said.

The reasons for people trying to end their lives are varied but Attawapiskat leaders point to an underlying despondency and pessimism among their people as well as an increasing number of prescription drug overdoses since December.

Living in isolated communities with chronic unemployment and crowded housing, some young aboriginals lack clean water but have easy Internet access, giving them a glimpse of affluence in the rest of Canada.

“We feel isolated – we don’t feel part of the rest of the world,” said Grand Chief Sheila North Wilson of Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak, who represents 30 aboriginal communities. “The basic needs are astronomical.”

Canada’s 1.4 million aboriginals, who make up about four percent of the population, have a lower life expectancy than other Canadians and are more often victims of violent crime. The problems plaguing aboriginals gained prominence in January when a gunman killed four people in La Loche, Saskatchewan.

Since December, Attawapiskat has seen a rash of prescription drug overdoses sending youth to hospital in “a fairly new phenomenon,” said Deborah Hill, vice-president of patient care at Weeneebayko Area Health Authority, whose region includes the community. Seven youth overdosed together on Saturday.

“An individual attempt at suicide is bad enough itself, but if there seems to be a group thing, it’s even more cause for alarm,” said National Chief Perry Bellegarde of the Assembly of First Nations, Canada’s main aboriginal political group.

In Attawapiskat, a community of 2,000 people located near a diamond mine, this weekend’s state of emergency was the fifth since 2006. The community has previously sounded the alarm over flooding and raw sewage issues, poor drinking water and a housing crisis.

Resident Jackie Hookimaw-Witt, whose teenage niece committed suicide last autumn, said it was the third attempt for one 13-year-old girl who survived on Saturday. She said the girl had been challenged to kill herself on social media.

The emergency parliamentary session was requested by New Democrat legislator Charlie Angus whose constituency includes Attawapiskat. Angus is demanding Ottawa do more “to end this cycle of crisis and death among young people”.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who called this weekend’s suicide attempts “heartbreaking”, took power last year promising to tackle high levels of poverty, bad housing and poor health among aboriginal residents and promised a new “nation-to-nation relationship”.

Last month, Canada said it would spend an extra C$8.37 billion over five years to help the aboriginal population deal with dire living conditions.

(Additional reporting by Alastair Sharp and Ethan Lou in Toronto and David Ljunggren in Ottawa; editing by Amran Abocar and Grant McCool)

World Bank says Russia crisis to send poverty to highest in decade

Russian Money in Register

By Alexander Winning

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian poverty rates will return to 2007 levels this year as the economy continues to contract and inflation reduces people’s purchasing power, the World Bank said on Wednesday.

The international lender’s comments add to the view that it is ordinary Russians who have borne the brunt of the country’s economic crisis, as the blow for many firms has been cushioned by the weaker rouble and state aid.

The number of poor people in Russia will rise to more than 20 million out of a population of over 140 million, the World Bank said, the largest increase in poverty since the 1998-99 crisis that included a sovereign debt default.

Birgit Hansl, lead Russia economist for the World Bank, said the government would find it difficult to combat rising poverty because of a sharp fall in budget revenues stemming from the oil price collapse. Global prices for oil, Russia’s main export, have fallen to under $40 per barrel from over $115 in June 2014, while the economy has also been hit by Western sanctions imposed over Moscow’s role in the Ukraine crisis.

“It’s clear the fiscal space is very small to continue with social expenditure increases,” Hansl told a news conference.

Among ways to help ease poverty, she said social expenditure could be better targeted, including by means testing.

Mikhail Matytsin, a World Bank poverty economist, said the crisis had also driven a dramatic shift in consumption patterns.

The World Bank sees private consumption falling by 3 percent in 2016 in Russia after a decline of over 9 percent in 2015, a far sharper slump than during the 2008-09 global financial crisis.

“This is a new adjustment to the (economic) shock,” Matytsin said, saying households had cut back most on durable goods such as cars and domestic appliances.

The World Bank now sees private consumption recovering only very modestly and stabilizing at growth levels of around 2 percent from 2018. Before the latest economic downturn, private consumption in Russia had been rising at around 6 percent each year, Hansl said.

In its latest Russia economic report, the World Bank downgraded its growth forecasts to a contraction in gross domestic product of 1.9 percent this year and tepid growth of 1.1 percent in 2017.

It previously saw a contraction of 0.7 percent in 2016 and growth of 1.3 percent in 2017. It said its weaker forecasts reflected its new assumption that the oil price would average $37 a barrel in 2016, rather than the $49 forecast previously.

The World Bank said serious structural reforms, which it has long said are needed to ensure sustainable economic growth in Russia, were not likely before the 2018 presidential election.

(Editing by Jason Bush and Catherine Evans)

Threat Posed to Food Supplies in Future According to World Bank

As many as 100 million people could slide into extreme poverty because of rising temperatures, which are caused by greenhouse gas emissions, the World Bank report said. The bank’s most recent estimate puts the number of people living in extreme poverty this year at 702 million, or 9.6% of the world’s population.

The report “Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty”  shows that climate change is an acute threat to poorer people across the world, with the power to push more than 100 million people back into poverty over the next fifteen years.   It also reports that the poorest regions of the world such as the Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia will be hardest hit and could push more than 100 million people into extreme poverty by 2030 by disrupting agriculture and fueling the spread of malaria and other diseases.

Despite pledges to rein in emissions of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases, climate change isn’t likely to stop anytime soon. Carbon emissions are expected to rise for many years as China, India and other developing countries expand the use of fossil fuels to power their economies.

The report points a way out by stressing that the world needs to take targeting action to help people cope with climate shocks, issue warning systems and flood protection and introduce heat-resistant crops.  

This year, a series of high-profile meetings took place, creating a sense of gathering cooperation around the battle against global warming. A vital step was the adoption of the global goals, which set a 2030 deadline for the eradication of poverty in all its forms and sought to galvanise action to combat climate change and its impacts at the UN general assembly in September.

More Children in Poverty Now Than During Recession

A new report shows that more than one in five American children were living in poverty in 2013, the last year that complete data is available.

The number of children in poverty, 22%, is higher than in September 2010 when the New York Times said the Great Recession had brought poverty rates in the U.S. to their highest level in 15 years and greater than the 18% child poverty rate recorded in 2008.

The report also says that almost one-third of American children in 2013 lived in a home where no parent held a steady, full-time job.

The report says with only a “few exceptions”,  “nearly all of the measures that [it] track[s], African-American, American Indian and Latino children continued to experience negative outcomes at rates that were higher than the national average. Overall unemployment rates have fallen, but the unemployment rate for African-Americans is currently 11 percent — 2.4 percentage points higher than where it was prior to the economic crisis. Nearly 40 percent of African-American children live in poverty, compared to 14 percent of white children.”

“The fact that it’s happening is disturbing on lots of levels,” said Laura Speer, the associate director for policy reform and advocacy at the Casey Foundation, told USA Today. “Those kids often don’t have the access to the things they need to thrive.” The foundation says its mission is to help low-income children in the U.S. by providing grants and advocating for policies that promote economic opportunity.”

Speer added their is hope for 2014 because the decline in the unemployment rate means more children in a home with at least one adult having stable employment.

300 Million Barefoot Children To Benefit From Latest Invention

The latest in footwear isn’t about style, but about longevity.

Inventor, Kenton Lee, has created a new shoe called Shoe That Grows, a shoe that can adjust its size as the wearer grows. The shoe can adjust both it’s length and width, giving it a size range from 5-12. It also lasts for at least five years.

The idea for the Shoe That Grows came to Lee when he noticed a small Kenyan girl with shoes that were too small.

According to the Shoe That Grows website, approximately 300 million children around the world are without shoes. They also state that 2 million people suffer from soil transmitted diseases.

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that the most common infections are caused by different species of parasitic worms that live in the soil and affect the most deprived communities.

Because International, the company behind Shoe That Grows, is currently distributing the adjustable shoes around the world with the help of partner organizations.