53
X 4
Estate closures and poverty
The livelihood security categories, though very useful for considering the socio-economic impact of the closure of sugar estates, can be related to poverty which is a more widely used, more measurable and commensurable, and more analytically developed notion. While it is recognized that well-being goes beyond income, a great deal of information can be summarized by measures such as the amount a person earns per day, average consumption, the nutritional value of food, and so on. The first order effect of the closure of sugar estates was the loss of income of the affected workers. At the individual and the household levels, consumption, nutritional value of meals, and indeed the range of capabilities that give a person agency would have been affected. So too would have been community-level opportunities. It is useful to note that even while they were employed at sugar estates, workers invariably had a portfolio of other economic activities such as cultivating kitchen gardens, fishing, rearing livestock, and so forth, to supplement their incomes and more particularly to reduce the risks associated with working on sugar estates. With the closures however, the affected sugar workers lost their primary source of income. Figure 4.1 shows the likely effect of this first order effect of the closures on the potential poverty of sugar workers.
X Figure 4.1. The logic of poverty traps Treshold level
Q
Poverty trap zone
P
N
Source: (Banarjee and Duflo 2011)
Outside the poverty zone
