BELIZE – Poorer under Barrow!

“Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not having access to school and not knowing how to read. Poverty is not having a job, is fear for the future, living one day at a time. Poverty is losing a child to illness brought about by unclean water. Poverty is powerlessness, lack of representation and freedom”. [World Bank 2008]

One year, eleven months and twenty two days of a Barrow UDP administration, the report card is in. Their crowning moment is here. It is simply spectacular. In fact, it is remarkable, as they have done what no other government was able to do. Make Belize the country with the highest poverty rate in the Caribbean. One hundred and forty three thousand, two hundred and seventy six [143,276] persons in Belize are now poor. This represents 43% of the population of Belize, estimated at 333,200 at 2009. Imagine, almost one half the population of Belize is poor, and this is under the management of Barrow and the UDP, who has the audacity to utter the words good governance whenever they grandstand and pontificate. How can good governance translate into snatching 32,000 Belizeans more people, without their knowledge, from the confines of the world they know, and transport them into poverty to join those who were already poor? How can good governance mean making the people of a country poorer, and moving the poverty rate from an already troubling 33% in 2002, to what can only be considered stratospheric levels in 2010, 43%.

It is a crying shame, that in a country that is so rich, that in a country whose gross domestic product [GDP] is 2.8 billion dollars, that 143,276 or almost 5 out of every 10 persons cannot find $5.50 a day to survive, to exist, not even to live, as $5.50 only provides for the bare minimum. And to make matters worse, of that 143,276, 16% of the population or 55,512 persons are indigent. That means they are destitute. They are not eating as they should. They are living with rats and roaches. However, it does not end there. An additional 14% or 46, 648 persons are vulnerable to becoming poor. This is saying that a total of 189,924 persons in Belize or an astronomical 53% of the population in Belize is at risk. This is more than half, more than 1 in every 2 persons. This is unbelievable. This is Belize.
But perhaps, what can be considered nothing less than apocalyptic, is that 58,909 or 52% of all children in Belize below the age of 15 are living in poverty, and of that, 23,790 or 21% are indigent, living in abject poverty. Only in Toledo has poverty not increased. Corozal, Orange Walk and Cayo have been the hardest hit, with increases from 19.9% to 46%, 23.3% to 36% and 20.5 to 31.4% respectively, with Belize and Stann Creek not too far behind. To exacerbate this situation, employment has also risen from 8% in 2008 to 14% in 2009, and it is women and young people who are bearing the brunt of the UDP administration brutal policies, particularly our young women and men [43% and 26% respectively], and we wonder why crime and violence is now a way of life.
The statistics revealed by the Country Poverty Assessment is frightening. It is alarming. It is unprecedented, and it is happening under Barrow and the UDP, and they seem to have neither the political will nor the capacity to do anything to change the circumstances of the poor. These are the same people who claimed they were there for the poor. I am convinced that they are nothing less than political manipulators, who have shamelessly abandoned the poor, and placated them with crumbs from the table, as they pander to family and close friends. They now find the poor politically useless.
I hope that the 143276 poor persons appreciate how Barrow and the UDP government have deprived them, ignored them and denied them the basic right to live, not exist, in a country, with so much wealth. I have no doubt that come the next election they will send them en masse to political oblivion. For I know, that little did they know, that with Barrow and the UDP, POVERTY WAS THEIR DESTINY….….

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