PRIME Minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s Perikatan Nasional (PN) government is backtracking on its predecessor’s commitment to revise the national poverty line, says former UN special rapporteur Philip Alston.
“Malaysia’s new government has performed a backflip on its predecessors’ commitment to take poverty seriously,” he said in a July 5 statement.
Alston, who made an official visit in August last year, previously made headlines for suggesting that actual poverty is much higher than the national 0.4% rate.
Then prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad said his Pakatan Harapan national government would study the claims.
Alston has made his findings last year public.
But he said his current view is based on PN’s response to the final report of findings from his trip to Malaysia.
Muhyiddin’s government, according to Alston, “stands by [the] absolute poverty rate.”
“The government’s reversal is deeply concerning because the current line is inadequate and almost universally considered to be misleadingly low,” Alston said.
“The insistence that the line is ‘derived from internationally accepted standards’ is a smokescreen and ignores the blatant mismatch between reality and statistics. Pretending that almost no one in the entire country lives in poverty doesn’t change the reality that millions are poor. Saving face is one thing, but distorting the facts is quite another.”
“Malaysia has made impressive progress against poverty in the past 40 years, but its continued use of an outdated and unrealistic poverty line obscures the troubling reality that millions scrape by on very low incomes, a situation only made worse by Covid-19.”
In its response as included in the report, the government said the Poverty Line Income (PLI) of RM980 is calculated based on basic requirements for a household to live healthily and actively, which is more than the PLI targeted in the Sustainable Development Goal 1 at US$1.25 per day (RM5.25).
The PLI is also higher for Sabah at RM1,180 and Sarawak RM1,020 to take into account additional costs, such as transportation.
“If the government wants to eradicate poverty, revising the poverty line is just step one,” Alston said.
“Progress will require a better understanding of the nature of poverty, especially in urban areas, improved social policies, and a new approach towards long-neglected populations that face higher rates of poverty,” he added. – July 6, 2020
