Gifts, “poverty” and the neo-liberal gift

ANDRES DAPUEZ

Baltimore

Workshop; Workshop on Public Numbers; 2010

Johns Hopkins University and the Wenner Gren foundation

p.sdfootnote { margin-left: 0.5cm; text-indent: -0.5cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; font-size: 10pt; }p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }a.sdfootnoteanc { font-size: 57%; } Cash transfers were first implemented through the program Procampo (Programa de Apoyos Directos al Campo or Programme of Direct Support to the Field ). In its two forms, conditional and unconditional, cash transfer implies a unilateral monetary transaction between the government, the development agency, or the NGO, and beneficiaries who meet certain criteria. Mainly addressed to reduce poverty, conditionalities appear when the giver imposes certain contraprestation for the given monies. Therefore, conditional cash transfers frequently may include enrolling children into public schools, getting regular check-ups at the doctor's office, receiving vaccinations, or the like. Unconditional cash transfers provide the transfer to everyone eligible, regardless of their behavior after receiving it. p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }However, the popularity of neo-liberal cash transfers, based on their efficiency, purity and transparency (as opposed to corrupt populist expenditures of the eighties) and the cultural change they represented against populism is today among the people who receive them very discussed. Besides the local managerial problems of these programs, national news brought impressive acts of corruption into the local opinion. On the other hand, the compelling force of poverty, as it is depicted by development specialists and economists, seems to move as a powerful magnet to channelize enormous amount of monies, services, and by now fewer material things. However, not all of them reach the “target”. There is something weird about the temporal and spatial proximity with the poors that ontologically constitute them but also keep them away from and in need of help.