VENEZUELA:
Poverty Stats Also Politicised
Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, (IPS) - The debate on poverty statistics in Venezuela has not escaped the political polarisation that continues to reign in this country. While supporters of President Hugo Chávez say the figures on education, health and poverty clearly show that progress has been made in recent years, the opposition argues that the government's statistics are not reliable.

Meanwhile, international agencies are working in conjunction with the government to develop methods for assessing the impact of the Chávez administration's broad range of social programmes.

Nearly halfway to the 2015 deadline for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has pointed to widely varying statistical gathering capacity in the region and discrepancies in indicators for measuring progress or setbacks in countries in the region.

According to ECLAC, the poverty rate in Venezuela has dropped 12 percent since Chávez first took office in 1999, when 49 percent of the population lived below the poverty line and 21 percent suffered extreme poverty.

By late 2005, 37 percent of the population of 26 million lived in poverty and 16 percent in extreme poverty, says a new ECLAC report, "Latin America: Trends in Poverty and Indigence, 1980-2006" based on household surveys, which in Venezuela are carried out by the National Institute of Statistics (INE).

For 2006, the INE projects that the extreme poverty rate may have dropped below 10 percent. If that is true, it means Venezuela will have met the first of the eight MDGs adopted by the international community in 2000, according to which the proportion of people living on less than one dollar a day is to be halved from 1990 levels.

"Venezuela will comfortably reach the MDGs; we are already doing so," Chávez said Sept. 20 in New York, shortly after addressing the United Nations General Assembly.

He pointed out, for example, that the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) had declared Venezuela a territory free of illiteracy, after authorities reported that 1.5 million adults learned how to read and write in the government's literacy drive.

According to UNESCO's Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2005, Venezuela is among the top 10 countries in the region in terms of enrolment, and if attendance is improved, it will be well on its way to living up to the Dakar goals.

The six Education for All goals adopted in 2000 in Dakar include achievement of universal free and compulsory primary education of good quality, and a 50 percent improvement in adult literacy levels by 2015.

"God speaks through mathematics," Chávez likes to say, meaning that his government's small and large goals are questions of statistics, not rhetoric. The president frequently works out math operations in public before presenting figures showing the quantitative results of his administration or presenting socioeconomic proposals.

He also defends the reach of his "missions", some 15 social programmes implemented in the past three years outside of the traditional structures of the state and financed by windfall oil profits.

But doubts have been raised about the official statistics. In March 2005, in his weekly TV and radio programme, Chávez rejected the poverty figures that the INE provided to the press, and demanded a rectification.

INE director Elías Eljuri said in an interview with the press in December 2004 that "Venezuela's poverty index stood at 53 percent in November," and extreme poverty -- classified by INE as households unable to cover the cost of the basic food basket -- at 25 percent.

At the time, Venezuela was still feeling the effects of the political crisis caused by a short-lived April 2002 coup d'etat and a December 2002-January 2003 business and oil managers strike, which caused a nearly 28 percent drop in gross domestic product (GDP).

Eljuri presented these figures to refute the claims of the opposition, "who commit a premeditated error by adding the poverty figure to the extreme poverty figure," thus presenting a falsely inflated poverty rate of 70 percent.

At the time, Eljuri suggested "designing a new model of social indicators, to build an index of social welfare based on a 'quality of life survey'."

The traditional methods of measuring poverty, whether by income or unmet basic needs, do not taken into account the impact of the "missions," said Eljuri.

The government's social programmes include literacy training, primary health care provided by Cuban doctors in the slums, food for the poor at subsidised prices, soup kitchens for low-income women and children, free eye operations, dental care, microbusiness loans, support for cooperatives, scholarships at all educational levels, and stipends for the unemployed who agree to take training courses.

As a result of Chávez's admonition, the INE stayed away from the media until October 2005, when Eljuri presented new statistics, showing that 38.5 percent of the population lived below the poverty line.

"You have to be blind to say that poverty has increased in the last few years. The proportion of households in poverty has been reduced 14.6 percent," said the official.

In the campaign that ended Dec. 3 with Chávez's landslide reelection, opposition leader Teodoro Petkoff commented to IPS that one of the merits of Venezuela's political process has been to make the need to overcome poverty the number one priority.

"Poverty that is worse than what official statistics indicate, which are handled according to the government's dictates," he clarified, without elaborating.

Eljuri said last October that "when in 2003, the INE showed that poverty amounted to 55 percent, the opposition said the figure was correct. But now that it has dropped, they say we modify the figures and claim that our measuring instruments are flawed."



Political scientist Víctor Maldonado, director of the Caracas Chamber of Commerce, told IPS that "it would be an economic and social miracle without precedents in Venezuela if the official figures cited by ECLAC were real, but they aren't."

For example, the government reports that its "Barrio Adentro" programme involving 13,000 Cuban doctors and 4,500 dentists has covered 203 million medical consultations in three years, saved more than 30,000 lives, and carried out 27.5 million home visits.

But no programmes for gauging the impact of the missions have been made public, and the statistics have not been audited.

Furthermore, it is impossible for the press to even obtain an official list of the spots where the Cuban doctors are practicing, not to mention the doctors' exact numbers, functions and identities.

Maldonado argued that the sheer number of medical consultations would indicate a level of illness among the population "that cannot be solved with primary medicine."

"The health data contrast with INE figures, according to which half of all births are not registered in the year when they occur, which means tens of thousands of children remain outside the health services," he maintained.

The INE "has modified the parameters for measuring indicators, like unemployment, because the household sample surveys count people as employed as long as they have worked at least one hour in the past week," said Maldonado.

However, this is the internationally accepted guideline, which Venezuela adopted to harmonise national statistics with global data.

U.N. agencies with representatives in Caracas are working with the government to develop mechanisms to measure and assess the impact of the "missions," although sources from these bodies declined to provide information, pointing out that the instruments are still in the preparatory phase.

That idea emerged after a clash between ECLAC and Venezuelan ministers of education and health, Aristóbulo Istúriz and Francisco Armada, over a report by the U.N. regional agency in 2005 on poverty in Venezuela, which the government complained was "biased" because it used figures from 2002 and ignored the impact of the social programmes.

"The missions must be evaluated, with the positive aspects accentuated and the flaws corrected. But to do that, the production of reliable, verifiable, public data is imperative, in order to exercise the right to participation and social oversight and accountability," Marino Alvarado, with the local human rights group PROVEA, told IPS.

The government "has stopped furnishing timely data on violent crime and other statistics that are useful for assessing respect for human rights," said the activist.

Fernando Pereira, with CECODAP, a non-governmental organisation that works on behalf of children, said progress has been made on the social front, but added that the police do not provide NGOs with information on rights related to the safety, integrity and respect for the lives of children and adolescents, which means they must rely on media reports.

In Maldonado's opinion, "The problem with the missions is that they are not measurable, there is no independent oversight of how they are managed. They are accompanied by a great deal of propaganda, and propaganda is confused with evaluation."

But for people like 37-year-old Eduardo Loaiza, whose family sells cooking utensils and hardware at stalls on three downtown Caracas streets, "there are many plans with many names which in the end basically distribute just a little more money. This government is well-intentioned, but very disorganised, although the important thing is that they help us support ourselves, to see if we can climb up from the bottom."