Colombia plans to drastically reduce poverty by 2010

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Colombia’s government announced Wednesday a new plan to address economic suffering in a country where nearly 50 percent of the population live below the poverty line.

According to the report and statistics published by El Espectador newspaper’s Internet website, almost 15 percent of those living below the poverty line are considered living in “extreme poverty.”

Carolina Renteria, director of national planning, said a team of experts has been formed that will work with international organizations to address the challenge, and that in roughly two weeks a more specific plan will be announced. The
work that will take form in conjunction with the government’s National Administration for Statistics.

Renteria said the groundwork has already begun since December.

 The government needs to rethink its surveys of poverty and
its methodology to define it. Soon it will be known from the previously
started surveys of households in terms of of employment and conditions
of poverty.

Renteria said there is a correlation between economic growth and reduction of poverty. 

“When
you reduce the the growth you infringe certain population groups,
people lose jobs; there are many people on the borderline of poverty,”
she said. “We need to respond socially to these conditions that are given.”

 In fact, in five years between 1995 and 2000 more had been lost among the nation’s poor than had been gained in two decades.

With
economic gains in recent years,  through the application of social
policies, there has been a correlation of household income growth,
pulling nearly 2 million Colombians from the borderline of poverty.

But there is still work to be done, the government says.

The goal is to reduce those living below the poverty line from 50
to 39 percent by 2010, and those living in extreme poverty from 14.7
percent to 8 percent by that same year.