Poverty still rampant: 11.9 million living below poverty line

The data, released yesterday, note that the percentage of people living below the poverty line -- TL 767 per month for a four-person household -- decreased from 17.79 percent in 2007 to 17.11 percent in 2008. In 2002, the percentage of people living below the poverty line was 26.96 percent, signaling that the poverty situation in Turkey has improved over the last six years. In urban areas, the percentage of the population below the poverty line decreased from 10.36 percent to 9.38 percent from 2007 to 2008, dropping from 22 percent in 2002. The situation in rural areas is strikingly different, with 34.6 percent living below the poverty line in 2008, a level which has not changed significantly from its 2002 level of 34.5 percent.

According to TurkStat, none of Turkey’s population lives on under $1 a day, the extreme poverty line. The number of individuals living below Turkstat’s other established poverty lines of $2.15 and $4.3 was 0.47 percent and 6.83 percent, respectively. The percentage of people living below the hunger line, which takes into account only food expenditures, set at TL 275 per month for a four-person household, increased from 0.48 percent in 2007 to 0.54 percent in 2008.

The report revealed that as the number of people in a household increased, the probability of living under the poverty line also increased. In 2008, individuals living below the poverty line in three or four-person households made up 8.48 percent of the population, with this figure increasing to 38.20 percent for households made up of seven or more persons. A full 26.95 percent of individuals living in urban households consisting of more than seven individuals lived under the poverty line, whereas this figure increased to a staggering 54.03 percent in rural areas.

The agricultural sector has the highest poverty rate among all sectors, according to the data, with 37.97 percent of those working in the agricultural sector below the poverty line in 2008, an increase of 5.92 percentage points compared to 2007. In regards to the service sector, 6.82 percent lived below the poverty line, and 9.71 percent of those in the industrial sector lived below the poverty line.