What Is LBL?
Beginning in Australia in 2010, the Live Below the Line (LBL) campaign is one of the Global Poverty Project’s most recognisable activities. The campaign is now an annual event in countries across the world, but is biggest in the UK, the US, Holland and New Zealand. LBL aims to raise awareness of the global poverty problem by affording participants insight into what it feels like for the 1.2 billion people who currently live below the poverty line. How? By asking them to do exactly that for five days.In New Zealand terms, living below the line equates to living on less than NZ$2.25 per day. The line is an absolute measure calculated by Purchasing Power Parity and adjusted for inflation (a more detailed explanation can be found on the LBL website –livebelowtheline.com/nz).
What Is It Good For?
The P3 Foundation is a New Zealand-based, youth-led poverty-fighting charity and one of LBL’s major partners this year. Franky Maslin, P3 Foundation’s regional director for its LBL marketing campaign, says she likes it because “it has more of a sense of realism in taking part. It’s giving an open mind as to the realities that people live like this … [also] when you take part in LBL as a campaign, you have quite a lot of choices as to where your sponsorship money goes.”Indeed, the website boasts eight major partner organisations on its main page and 14 minor ones, as well as the standard endorsements from B-list celebrities and the requisite photographs of non-white people smiling appreciatively. Maslin considers the breadth and diversity of charity choice on offer to be one of the campaign’s strengths, as it allows for more widespread engagement. “I know it’s a cliché,” Maslin says, “but the more the merrier.”
LBL: Start-Up Guide
Like picking the cutest sponsor kid from the World Vision booth at the mall, with LBL you choose the cause that most appeals to you and raise money for it by getting people to sponsor you in the challenge. Apart from P3 Foundation, LBL’s partners include old favourites like TearFund and Oxfam, as well as lesser-known charities such as Engineers Without Borders and Spinning Top. Each partner has a specific country and/or area of focus, though all address extreme international poverty in some way.The organisations clearly spell out what the funds you’re raising for them will go toward, a notion that appeals to increasingly compassion-fatigued and skeptical donors. Having chosen your charity, you create an online profile (as an individual or as a group) that you can personalise by adding photos, videos, or even a blog.
You can share your profile via Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, ShareThis and email, and those wanting to donate to your cause can do so either on or offline, openly or anonymously. There are opportunities to win prizes, and LBL’s homepage displays the rankings of both individuals and groups in terms of donations gleaned, as well as the real-time donation total. You can even buy an LBL cookbook published by TearFund.
I picked The Leprosy Mission, whose focus I found refreshingly self-explanatory, and whose activities involve “physiotherapy,” “reconstructive surgery” and “prostheses.” I liked the idea that for just $432, one person suffering from this chronic disease can be given the chance to metamorphose into Being All That They Can Be, sans hideous skin affliction. I chose a profile photograph of a pensive-looking baby gorilla, sent off a few Facebook private messages and, cringeing slightly, left it at that.
Doubt: An Uncomfortable Condition
Now is probably a good time to mention that I could hardly think of a worse person than me to write about the LBL challenge, which is probably why the Critic editor let me run with the idea – this was never going to be an advertisement.The idea of doing LBL sits uneasily with me for three main reasons (and many subsidiary ones). Firstly, aid is not a viable way to solve poverty in the long term: it is at best a bandage and, at worst, an infection in the wound. Secondly, I felt weird about the LBL campaign’s stated point of difference: its assumed enabling of participants to “really understand at an emotional level the realities of extreme poverty.” And lastly, I hate asking people for money. How was I meant to ask people to donate to a campaign I wasn’t sure I believed in, and worse, risk them thinking that I was some sort of “good person” for doing it?
They Created A Monster
I blame my cynicism almost entirely on my PGDip in Peace and Conflict Studies, which, if nothing else, has ensured I will live out the rest of my days in a philosophical purgatory of juxtaposed idealism and nihilism. I truly believe the world doesn’t have to be broken and I am convinced that we have the knowledge, skills and resources to fix it. But I also think that the Westphalian legacy of state sovereignty, combined with the global capitalist financial system, means that though we could fix poverty, we won’t.And, at the end of the day, even if things do appear to be getting better, it will be in spite of the cycle of dependence created and maintained by aid, not because of it. After all, if money were going to solve the problem, surely it would have done so by now?
In Spite Of Us
A recent article in the Economist stated that the Millennium Development Goal of halving world poverty by 2015 was actually achieved five years early. In April, the president of the World Bank named 2030 as the year we will see extreme poverty consigned to the dustbin of history. The reason for this was growth, both of GDP and household consumption, and the reduction of inequality. You will notice that foreign aid is conspicuously absent from this list, and indeed, the authors of the article state that “it is hard to argue that aid had much to do with halving poverty.”In other words, the world is becoming less impoverished by the decade and it’s not because people like me gave up organic chicken for five days and asked their friends to give them $15. When I raised this with P3 Foundation’s Maslin, she felt that there was still a place for charity: “it’s not the only solution but it is a huge part of it. Charitable organisations still need to keep their side of the deal with the money. The fact that standards of living are increasing is not reason to stop but a reason to continue, so we can make it happen faster.”
But that’s simply not how it works. Indeed, far from being a “huge part” of the solution, it’s donation-happy rich people who are part of the problem in the first place. Peter Buffet, son of billionaire philanthropist Warren, recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that was (for those who haven’t studied Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory) rather groundbreaking. In it, Buffett stated, “As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to ‘give back’ … But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place.”
In this way, poverty cannot be addressed by throwing cash at the problem, but by combating structurally embedded inequalities at the systemic level – something highly unappealing to the neoliberals who currently run the world.
Dambisa Moyo is perhaps the most radical critic of the aid and development sector as we know it. In her bestseller Dead Aid, she asks why the majority of sub-Saharan African countries are trapped in a cycle of corruption, disease and poverty despite having received over US $300 billion in aid since 1970. The belief that the rich should help the poor and should do so with aid is what campaigns like LBL are founded upon. Indeed, it’s a familiar sentiment, echoed by Maslin when she asked me, “Why should we live ten times better when other people are living sub-standardly? I don’t see how that’s justified, so why shouldn’t we want to or feel obliged to help?”
But Moyo, a Zambian economist, says that aid has actually made countries poorer and hindered their growth. According to Moyo, the most aid-dependent countries have shown an annual growth rate of minus 0.2 per cent. Having worked at both the World Bank and Goldman Sachs, and been educated at Harvard then Oxford, it is with some gravitas that Moyo unequivocally claims that for most parts of the developing world, “aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster.”
You’ve Got To Know To Understand
So my uneasiness lies not with LBL in particular but with what Oxford-based economist Paul Collier refers to as “headless hearts” in general, who are good at raising awareness but bad at doing much else. But awareness of what, exactly? Far from being invisible, the new celebrity craze – endorsing every charity under the sun – has made “fighting poverty” downright fashionable in the twenty-first century. Why do we need yet another awareness-raising campaign when Brangelina’s latest cause, let alone adoptee, is advertised at every news stand?Why? Because LBL offers participants a chance to understand what life might be like for the 1.2 billion living below the poverty line, which is an intuitively appealing concept even if a slightly presumptuous one. When I asked Maslin about this, she was quick to point out that in reality, the $2.25 had to cover a lot more than just food. For most of us, living on less than $2.25 would be difficult purely in terms of sustenance – imagine how hard it would be if that money had to stretch to utilities as well.
Fair enough, but that wasn’t really my point. I get that living below the line offers insight into the physical hardship of being poor. And maybe that is enough. But it seems that the true hardship of destitution comes not from a poverty of wealth but the corresponding poverty of spirit engendered by what British writer Caitlin Moran refers to as “the sclerosis of being broke.” Moran explains that, “when you're poor, nothing ever changes … this has the effect of making your limbs feel heavy; like you’re perpetually slightly drowning … You look around and start to suspect you might not exist. After all,” she continues, “you appear not to be able to make an impression on the world.”
I could give up food ad infinitum and never understand what poverty feels like, because it would have been my choice to do so; and choice, even when choosing nothing, is always empowering. Thus, the experience of hunger can be manufactured, but the experience of poverty cannot. To claim otherwise seems, frankly, rather patronising.
I Get It
However, I do understand what it is to be (comparatively) rich and desirous of helping people less fortunate myself. To this end, I have done the 40-Hour Famine a handful of times and I used to have a Burmese sponsor child I nicknamed Minty Yinty. I once shared my Fanta with a Rwandan baby, gave all my spare change to a blind old man outside a genocide memorial and emptied my purse for a Burundian mother holding a crying baby. Last year, I saved $1,000 for an overseas trip and then gave it all to an Australian couple helping to settle refugees. And last month, I sent two weeks’ worth of full-time pay to a friend who lost his job and is unlucky enough to live in a country where it’s unlikely he’ll be able to get another one.What I’m trying to say is: I get it. My sickeningly token, even toxically naïve, gestures of Western Guilt show that I am intimately acquainted with wanting to alleviate both others’ poverty and my own discomfort at being better off than someone else purely by accident of birth and geography. I have given money not because money per se is what the situation really needed, but because that was something I had that the recipient did not. In this way I have come to realise that money, despite the best of intentions, is often just a proxy for empathy, and giving it lets us off some sort of hook.
It’s No Fun Feeling Like A Clichéd Cynic
But I also wanted to be proven wrong. After all, we are constantly bombarded with messages via both news and social media about how one’s money will “make a difference” to this or that cause. The realisation that this might not actually be true is a pretty bitter pill to swallow. I wanted, therefore, to be convinced that a brief foray into asceticism could indeed make a difference to someone, somewhere, and that the experience would somehow make me think differently about the global poverty problem (as if I hadn’t done enough thinking about it already.)And that’s why, despite all my doubts and uncertainties, I ended up eating nothing but plain, unadulterated rice for five days (three kilos in total) coming in well under budget at $5.97. I felt a bit light-headed and lost a bit of weight (on an all-carb diet! Take that, Dr. Atkins). I joked that I could feel the scurvy welling up in my gums, and I worried about the post-constipative onslaught that awaited me at the end of the challenge (which may have been why I never felt that hungry, or thought much about food at all, to be honest).
I also had the rather obvious epiphany that “living below the line” requires sacrificing some of food’s benefits for others – in my case diversity and nutrition for not feeling hungry and not having to worry about what I was going to eat. As far as revelations go, it’s probably not going to make it into the Bible, and would likely annoy Jamie Oliver, but I suppose it wasn’t bad for only $6.
I did raise a bit of money – it would have felt rude not to – and maybe some of it will even make it to some leper somewhere. And, though my doubts remain real, unoriginal and, in my opinion, worthy of addressing, you will not see me raining on anyone’s LBL parade but my own.
My Facebook newsfeed is presently a veritable traffic jam of friends requesting sponsorship for their various LBL causes. As the “likes” roll in, I do not begrudge my friends their intentions, which I am convinced are genuine, sincere and above all, well meaning. As a generation that is so often accused of being passionate about nothing but ourselves, LBL offers an extremely attractive, apparently coherent, and highly visible platform from which to inform our accusers that they are wrong. And there is a growing part of me that thinks that this, in and of itself, makes it worth it.
