Poverty In Baghdad

BAGHDAD: Faleha Hassan lives in a tiny house in central Baghdad with 11 other family members and, like thousands of protesters across Iraq , does not believe her leaders have done anything to make her life better.

“The politicians and the officials and the leadership, they don’t care about us – they have a lot of money but they don’t think about others,” laments the 67-year-old, surrounded by her grandchildren, sitting on the floor of the home in which she has lived for decades. “No one thinks about us. Not the officials.”

Hassan, her children and her grandchildren suffer from what has proved a persistent problem in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein: poverty.  The elderly woman’s only surviving son, Wissam, sells food to visitors entering the nearby Abdul Qader al-Gailani shrine in the center of the capital, but usually earns a meager 5,000 Iraqi dinars a day, or about $4. An Iraqi MP, by contrast, makes more than 80 times as much. Her husband has become too frail to continue helping Wissam, and another son, Mohammad, was killed in a suicide bombing at the shrine in January 2007. A ration program, which during the Saddam-era included so many goods that Hassan said the family would sell the excess, has since been dramatically reduced. That puts the family firmly below the government-defined poverty line of $2.2 per person per day, along with more than a fifth of all Iraqis, an estimated seven million people, a number that would rise were it not for the ration program received by about six million families.

And while ministers have ambitious plans to slash that figure in the coming years, experts and, crucially, the people affected, are unconvinced.

“Poverty in Iraq is shallow,” Deputy Planning Minister Mehdi al-Alak says during an interview in his office on the banks of the Tigris river. “Most people are close to the poverty line … so if policies and procedures are followed, the rate will decline.It is not very difficult [to reduce poverty] in Iraq .”

On paper, he would seem to be correct: the country’s vast energy stores – Iraq has the fourth-highest level of proven oil reserves in the world – all but guarantee it will have a steady and increasing source of income for decades to come. The country was not always grappling with such a problem. A U.N. report released at the beginning of the year notes that, “In the past, Iraq was regarded as one of the most developed countries in the Middle East,” but the organization’s Arab Human Development Report rated Iraq 17th out of 21 regional countries in terms of human development in 2005.

“Wars and sanctions have contributed to a marked deterioration in Iraqis’ standard of living in recent years,” this year’s U.N. report noted.

But experts lament that Iraq still has glaring problems that make it difficult to envision poverty levels declining at the rate the government hopes, from 22 percent now to 16 percent by 2015. Unless there are sustainable measures, they will easily fall back,” says Khalid Mohammad Khalid, an Amman-based Iraq programme analyst with the United Nations Development Program.

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