KUALA LUMPUR: A former United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights has commended the Malaysian government for being courageous in bringing its poverty line nearer to reality.
Philip Alston said the line announced was more than double the previous one and resulted in an official poverty rate 14 times higher than previously acknowledged.
"Malaysia's government has taken a courageous step towards bringing its poverty line closer to reality," said Alston, a law professor and chair of the Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law in a statement on Saturday (July 11).
He was the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights between 2014 and 2020.
On Monday, Alston expressed concern that Malaysia appeared to have backtracked on its previous commitment to revise the national poverty line.
However, on Friday, the government announced its revised absolute income poverty line from RM980 to RM2,208, raising the country's poverty rate from 0.4% to 5.6%.
While lauding the bold move, Alston also pointed out that the 5.6% new poverty rate was only one-third of that estimated by most independent analyses.
"Adjusting the line is a vital first step. The challenge now is to systematically address poverty by instituting a comprehensive social protection scheme and to provide greater data transparency, in line with almost all democratic countries," he said.
Alston said the government also needed to take seriously the plight of indigenous people who faced severe discrimination and rights violations, women who still had exceptionally low rates of workforce participation, and millions of non-citizens who were disproportionately affected by poverty and excluded from official figures.
Meanwhile, Malaysian Trades Union Congress (MTUC) welcomed the government's decision to revise the national PLI substantially. It urged the government to revise the country's minimum wage.
Its secretary-general J. Solomon said MTUC welcomed the government's acknowledgement that the RM980 poverty line has been grossly low, and has revised it to RM2,208, based on optimum food requirements and healthy eating, as well as 146 non-food items from the B20 households' spending pattern in the 2019 household expenditure survey.
"MTUC congratulates the Prime Minister and the Minister Datuk Seri Mustapa Mohamad for their firm political will in taking the bold step to recalibrate the poverty index of the country to a much more realistic one that will help the government address the problem of poverty more effectively, both in urban and rural Malaysia," he said in a statement on Saturday (July 11).
With the new PLI set at RM2,208, Solomon said the government must now acknowledge that the minimum wage of RM1,100-RM1,200, especially for urban areas, was not realistic nor in tandem with the cost of living.
"As the poverty index is now set at more than RM2,000, surely the minimum wage must also be adjusted accordingly.
"This is very important as poverty has increasingly impacted Malaysia's 15 million work force over the years and more so now due to the economic fallout as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic," he said.
On Friday, the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) had also updated its methodology and announced that the number of households now categorised as poor has increased from 24,700 in 2016 to 405,441 last year.
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