MALAYSIA has vastly undercounted its poor, with the poverty level declared more relevant for the 1970s, said a top United Nations official.

UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Professor Philip Alston said local and foreign scholars who have studied the country’s poor believe that a realistic poverty rate is between 16% and 20%.

“The government’s claim that the poverty rate is 0.4% bears no relationship to the reality on the ground,” he told reporters at a forum on the UN’s findings on poverty in Malaysia, in Kuala Lumpur today.

“The insistence that the rate is 0.4%, or about 25,000 Malaysian households, hampers the creation of effective policies targeting deprivation and poverty.

“This is a tragically low line for a country on the cusp of attaining high-income status, especially since a range of independent analyses have suggested a more realistic poverty rate of 16% to 20%, and about 9% of households survive on less than RM2,000 per month.

“When we asked government officials what they are doing about poverty, they said there is no poverty. But throughout our visit here, meeting people… that is not the case.”

It is not the first time the officially declared rate of 0.4% has been criticised by experts both local and foreign. The figure is based on having the poverty line set at RM980 per household per month, or RM8 per person per day.

Alston said it is next to impossible for a family of four to survive on such a meagre amount.

He said experts like Khazanah Research Institute (KRI) and economist Martin Ravallion have advocated their own metrics to better reflect the reality of the situation.

Using KRI’s relative poverty measure of 60% of the national median income would show 22.2% poor households, he said in a statement released during the press briefing.

In Ravallion’s study, titled “Has Malaysia virtually eliminated poverty?”, he said the country’s poverty rate is about 20% when compared with nations with a similar average income.

The UN Children’s Fund this year said 16% of the country’s population is considered poor according to a measure similar to that used by Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development nations.

Alston spoke to the media after completing an 11-day working visit to Malaysia that took him to Sabah, Sarawak, Kelantan, Selangor and Kuala Lumpur.

The tour saw him meeting government officials, academics, civil society groups and poverty-stricken folk.

Among the places he visited were soup kitchens, a women’s shelter, a children’s crisis centre, low-cost flats, a facility for the disabled, and schools. – August 23, 2019.