THE number of Jamaicans living below the poverty line has been sliced by more than half in the 12 years up to 2004, according to Jaslin Salmon, national co-ordinator for the government’s poverty alleviation programme.

“In 1992, the poverty level stood at 35.2 per cent and in 2004 it was at 16.9 per cent,” Salmon said Thursday at the launch of a series of panel discussions convened by the Office of the Prime Minister at Jamaica House.

The Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions (JSLC) of 2002, in which the 1992 figures were last published, actually reported poverty levels at 33.9 per cent.

“If one takes a particular year during the period, one can make the point that there was an increase in poverty but that would be inappropriate and misleading,” he said.

“These are figures from the Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions, which is not only tested but proven to be reliable.”

The JSLC poverty line in 2004 was $58,508 for an individual per year, or $160 per day, which converted to US$2.60 per day.

In fact, poverty levels dipped to their lowest, 15.9 per cent, in 1998, and have been fluctuating since.

The discussions Thursday, under the heading ‘Fighting Poverty: The past, the present, the future’ was addressed by panellists Salmon, Dr Herbert Thompson of Northern Caribbean University, Dr Wesley Hughes of the Planning Institute of Jamaica – the agency that tracks poverty and publishers of the JSLC – and Robert Buddan, lecturer in government at the University of the West Indies.

There are three key factors that have contributed to poverty reduction, Salmon explained – the phenomenal growth in the informal economy, the impact of activities under the National Poverty Eradication Programme (NPEP), and government policy.

There was no rationale offered for using 1992 as the base year for the analysis of poverty performance, given that the poverty programme actually began in 1995.

Over the past decade, the Patterson administration has invested $42 billion in poverty-alleviation projects, and in that period, has cut poverty levels by 10 percentage points.

The premise that decreasing poverty levels must always be reflected by comparable economic growth was strongly refuted by Salmon, who dismissed the argument as fallacy.

He argued that social interventions at particular points could also lead to significant reduction in poverty, but conceded that for the measures to be sustained there must be some level of economic growth.

“A study by the PIOJ shows that the informal economy is contributing significantly to economic growth, but this contribution was previously not accounted for in traditional economic growth indicators,” he said.

The School Feeding Programme, Rural Electrification Programme (REP), Programme of Advancement through Health and Education (PATH), and the National Health Fund (NHF) are all social programmes under the NPEP that have had a combined effect on the poverty level.

In its 30-year existence, the REP has raised the percentage of electrification from 50 per cent to 92 per cent in 2005.

This is a key indicator of a rise in living standards, according to Salmon.

The NHF has a current membership of over 178,000 beneficiaries while PATH, which consolidates the food stamp and poor relief, up to December 2004, had made payments to 174,000 people.

The allocation per beneficiary was increased from $300 to $400 in 2004 and another increase is expected in January 2006 to bring the benefit to $530 per month.

These measures, Salmon contends, are incrementally eradicating poverty.