There are very capitalist discourses about poverty, where they precede poverty as a decision: you are poor because you want to, because you don't work hard enough! I think that this way of seeing poverty loses all validity if you have never been poor or managed to live and understand what poor people experience; I don't know a single person who is poor and who says they are comfortable being poor. The federal and state governments, for years and years, have invested money to create programs and strategies to combat poverty with very mediocre results and this is because poverty is not fought with money. Although poverty is measured by income, money is not the only factor to describe it. To understand poverty, we first have to understand our relationship with time; The time that we all have equally but we do not use it in the same way. There are poor people who are busy all their time, for example working 12 to 15 hours a day for a very low salary, perhaps spending 2 to 3 hours a day transporting themselves, getting up at 5 am to walk an hour to get water or a load of firewood, plowing the field that may not be favored by the rainy season, using the remaining hours of the day to half sleep with all the worries on top of not having the money to cover basic needs and having to work 6 or 7 days a week. Many others may be one of those who have no order, who get up late and get drunk every day, who work 1 or 2 days a week, who waste all day waiting in lines to obtain some federal program, or who simply They do not know how to read or write, but without a doubt, they are the least.
Without a doubt, what poverty is, is the living example of the lack of community: We are increasingly isolated as a society and we pursue personal interests over the common well-being. We have failed to understand that common well-being allows societies to develop, and poverty, without a doubt, makes it difficult for a society's economy to progress. Simply put, having high levels of poverty affects us all. It is not that today you have salaries that allow you to classify yourself as middle or upper class (although that self-classification is most likely wrong), it is about understanding that the increase in poverty levels brings with it an increase in violence, insecurity , lack of employment opportunities, weak productive ecosystems. Think about starting your business in the middle of a population with few resources. Who is going to buy your products or services? How are you going to be able to produce more if you don't look at your surroundings? Today more than ever, a sustainable approach is necessary, with a perspective towards the individual; socially responsible companies that solve society's needs before seeking to accumulate fortunes. In hard data, according to the Coneval report, 61% of the Oaxacan population does not have sufficient labor income to cover the cost of the food basket. That is, 6 out of every 10 Oaxacans do not have enough income to be able to live covering basic food needs. It is a serious historical problem and belongs to everyone. As long as we do not assume it as ours and everyone's, very little progress will be made in solving it. The following graph shows the detail.
In another indicator, the Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, Oaxaca has gone from being the 6th state with the greatest inequality to being the second. The above in the period 2016-2018. Poverty is everyone's problem. The solution is to build a community responsible for its environment. In this polarized world, the possibility of reducing wage gaps seems increasingly remote, and even more so, if we continue to believe that the job of reducing poverty is the government's. Let's make a community! See you in the next one.
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