More peo­ple are falling be­low the min­i­mum wage in the Caribbean and there is in­creased hunger among those at the low­est rung of the so­ci­ety ac­cord­ing to Caribbean Quar­ter­ly Bul­letin of the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank.

Ac­cord­ing to the IDB 36.9 per­cent of house­holds earn­ing be­low the min­i­mum wage re­port­ed ex­pe­ri­enc­ing hunger while 48.7 per­cent of them re­port­ed dele­te­ri­ous changes in their di­et with re­spect to the pre-pan­dem­ic pe­ri­od.
The bank said the glob­al pan­dem­ic is wreak­ing hav­oc in the re­gion; vul­ner­a­ble house­holds have dou­bled in the first four months of 2020, pover­ty lev­els con­tin­ue to rise, peo­ple are go­ing hun­gry and un­em­ploy­ment is ris­ing.

The re­port stat­ed that the per­cent­age of Caribbean house­holds with in­come lev­els be­low the min­i­mum wage in­creased by 20%, from 23% in Jan­u­ary 2020 to about 43% in April 2020. The bank’s find­ings show con­sis­tent re­duc­tions across all in­come lev­els.

Re­duc­tions in in­come are linked to pover­ty lev­els which, in turn, im­pact one’s abil­i­ty to feed them­selves and their fam­i­lies a re­port done by the New York-based non for prof­it or­gan­i­sa­tion, the Hunger Project has re­vealed.

The study showed that while enough food ex­ists to feed the world, a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion still lives in such ab­ject pover­ty that they can­not af­ford even the most ba­sic food items. This cre­ates an in­ces­sant pover­ty trap. The glob­al poor can’t feed them­selves or their fam­i­lies, so they be­come weak and mal­nour­ished which makes them un­able to work.

Ac­cord­ing to the Unit­ed Na­tions Food and Agri­cul­ture Or­gan­i­sa­tion, 820 mil­lion peo­ple were al­ready un­der­nour­ished be­fore to­day’s cri­sis; in­clud­ing 135 mil­lion peo­ple ex­pe­ri­enc­ing acute food in­se­cu­ri­ty.

The In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank says COVID-19 is tak­ing an un­prece­dent­ed toll on the Caribbean re­gion and tar­get­ed in­ter­ven­tions will be need­ed to pro­tect the most vul­ner­a­ble.

The bank’s bul­letin stat­ed that the de­cline in the tourism in­dus­try will par­tic­u­lar­ly af­fect the Ba­hamas, Bar­ba­dos and Ja­maica while plum­met­ing in­ter­na­tion­al com­mod­i­ty prices will con­tin­ue to pose se­vere con­se­quences in Guyana, Suri­name and T&T.

The World Bank es­ti­mates that 40 to 60 mil­lion peo­ple will be liv­ing in ex­treme pover­ty in the com­ing months, de­pend­ing on the scale of the eco­nom­ic shock as­so­ci­at­ed with COVID-19.

It is be­lieved the ma­jor­i­ty of these peo­ple are vul­ner­a­ble groups in de­vel­op­ing and less­er de­vel­oped na­tions like the Caribbean re­gion.

In the IDB re­port added that the num­ber of house­holds falling with­in the vul­ner­a­ble cat­e­go­ry al­most dou­bled in the first quar­ter of 2020.

The job loss­es in the re­gion con­tin­ue to rise, but ac­cord­ing to the re­port the im­pact on the tourism-de­pen­dent economies seem to be more se­vere as op­posed to the com­mod­i­ty-dri­ven economies such as T&T.

The re­port shows that while busi­ness­es have closed, em­ploy­ers in the com­mod­i­ty-dri­ven economies have not re­duced staff to num­bers com­par­a­tive to their tourism coun­ter­parts.

In the com­mod­i­ty-dri­ven economies the most sig­nif­i­cant rise in job loss­es oc­curred in the low-in­come sec­tors.

The IDB said both com­mod­i­ty and tourism-de­pen­dent coun­tries show a larg­er preva­lence of job loss­es in house­holds that earned be­low the min­i­mum wage in Jan­u­ary 2020. The bank states that while com­mod­i­ty-dri­ven mar­kets show a sim­i­lar pat­tern, there are few­er busi­ness clo­sures.

Tourism de­pen­dent coun­tries ap­prox­i­mate­ly dou­ble the rate of job loss­es for both the high­est and low­est brack­ets of the in­come dis­tri­b­u­tion, when com­pared to com­mod­i­ty-de­pen­dent coun­ter­parts: 77.3% vs 44.2% among low­er-in­come house­holds and 36.1% vs 14.2% among high­er-in­come house­holds.

Ef­fec­tive so­cial pro­tec­tion sys­tems are cru­cial to safe­guard­ing the poor and vul­ner­a­ble dur­ing COVID-19.

Ac­cord­ing to the re­port, so­cial as­sis­tance pro­grammes in the re­gion have in­creased their cov­er­age by 6.3 per­cent­age points among low-in­come house­holds and by about two per­cent­age points for house­holds who earned above the min­i­mum wage. The bank states that al­though so­cial safe­ty nets cov­er­age have in­creased rel­a­tive­ly more among dis­ad­van­taged house­holds, they are al­so a source of in­ef­fi­cien­cies in the pub­lic spend­ing sys­tem.

Min­is­ter of So­cial De­vel­op­ment Camille Robin­son Reg­is stat­ed that her gov­ern­ment spent over 47 mil­lion in so­cial pro­grammes try­ing to pro­tect the most af­fect­ed by the pan­dem­ic, while the coun­try’s Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert re­port­ed that the re­lief pack­age to sta­bilise and pro­tect the econ­o­my may cost the state up to $6 bil­lion.

The re­port as­sess­es gov­ern­ment in­ter­ven­tions in the re­gion through ag­gres­sive so­cial dis­tanc­ing mea­sures and the rolling out of sup­port pack­ages for in­di­vid­u­als and firms.

Four­teen ar­eas are high­light­ed un­der sev­er­al sub-cat­e­gories con­sist­ing of: health and safe­ty, fis­cal mea­sures, so­cial mea­sures, sup­port for busi­ness, mon­e­tary mea­sures and re­open­ing strate­gies.

Of all the mea­sures high­light­ed, Bar­ba­dos in­tro­duced the most with 11 pol­i­cy mat­ter in­ter­ven­tions, while T&T’s gov­ern­ment has im­ple­ment­ed 10 in­ter­ven­tion poli­cies cov­er­ing con­tain­ment to re­open­ing.

Most ex­perts be­lieve that the cri­sis will very like­ly con­tin­ue through­out 2020 and be­yond. The IADB said in the face of in­creas­ing fis­cal con­straints to meet ris­ing so­cial de­mands, bet­ter tar­get­ing mech­a­nisms will be nec­es­sary. As such, high qual­i­ty and time­ly gran­u­lar house­hold-lev­el da­ta will be need­ed.

De­spite sig­nif­i­cant re­cent ad­vances in da­ta col­lec­tion across Caribbean coun­tries, the COVID-19 cri­sis has ev­i­denced the re­main­ing gaps in this area.