The lean sixties for Mauritians was followed by unprecedented growth and increased wealth but with numerous pockets of poverty, where people who had been left out of the gravy train suffered in silence!

Today, for a complex variety of causes, the opportunity of great wealth has opened for some, while, for many, the spectre of poverty is reappearing again.

● DEFINING POVERTY: Poverty is hunger and not knowing where your next meal is coming from, having already eaten the seeds stored for next year's planting. Poverty is not having a roof over your head and having nowhere to sleep in security. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor or having a hospital to go to. It is the death of a child from a preventable illness because you are unable to pay for medicine or clean water. Poverty is being unemployed and having little chance of getting a job even if there are any because you have no training. Poverty is living one day at a time. Poverty is not being able to bury or cremate your dead.

In different circumstances, poverty revisited is being told by the ATM machine ?request refused-insufficient funds?.

As educators we strongly identify with this aspect of poverty: being unable to read and write and seeing your children not able to go to school to escape from the infernal cycle of illiteracy!

● THE POVERTY LINE: This is the level of income below which one cannot afford to purchase all the resources one requires to live.. The official parameters for determining the ?poverty line? vary from country to country, being much higher in the industrialised nations such as the United States, Japan and the EU countries.Yet, the requirements for any human being to live decently(i.e. food, water, shelter, security, health services,education, transport and communication, a meaningful occupation, community relations, recreation) are necessarily the same the world over!

What is the «minimum vital» (or poverty line) for an individual or for a family of 4 in Mauritius? Those senior citizens with no other revenue are expected to survive on Rs 2400 per month (equivalent to about US$ 1,000 per annum. or 3$ per day) and of course cannot do so! Is a monthly income of Rs 16,500(below which one does not pay income-tax as per 2006 Finance Bill) an official recognition as to where the poverty line is drawn? At whatever point the poverty line figure is established, its validity quickly disappears due to rampant inflation. In the USA, poverty is officially defined (for a family of 4) as having to live on an income equal to or less than US$ 19,350 per year (24,000 in Alaska and 22,000 on the islands of Hawaii). That?s Rs.600, 000 per year or Rs 50,000 monthly! We can immediately understand why so many people from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean wish to become the ?poor? in the States or in Canada. Similar story for the West Africans who constitute today?s ?sans papiers? of Europe, having to face a determined Nicolas Sarkosy! Lets not forget the thousands of Mauritian ?sans papiers? of the seventies, whom Debré ?regularised?, seemingly prompted by Gaetan Duval! With the recent ill thought-out financial measures that are pauperising some section of the Mauritian population, it would not be surprising if this flow of ?sans papiers? starts again (under much more stringent condition than in the seventies).

● ANOTHER PERCEPTION OF POVERTY: over a billion people (one person in 6 on Planet Earth) have each to live on $1(33 Rupees) a day or even on less.

Families in such extreme poverty must very often go without the food they need; in such cases, one decent meal a day is a luxury. A billion malnourished people (mostly women, children and the elderly, displaced people, those in war zones or in arid areas affected by drought) are losing their chances for normal prosperity and happiness, often dying prematurely.

More than 800 million people a day know what it's like to go to bed hungry; hunger and poverty claim 25,000 lives every day; poor families spend over 70% of their income on food. (An average American or EU family spends only 10% to 16% of income on food, with many being in fact overweight). The % of income spent to satisfy basic food requirements (rice, bread, grains, vegetable, condiments, some fruit and fish or meat), in the Mauritian countryside, has been steadily rising these last months (while incomes remain fixed), leaving the low-income earners poorer. The size of the caddy of the middle-income shoppers at supermarkets has also seen a reduction. The 8.5% inflation rate forecast for this year may be way below reality. Unbiased, independent measurement of inflation rates is called for, here.

Learned discussions about defining and eradicating poverty are rather like the negotiations regarding the war in Lebanon: while meetings follow meetings, arguments follow counter-arguments, people are dying, homes are being destroyed and suffering is spreading!

Dr Michael ATCHIA [email protected]